c24

"You're up early," my mother says matter-of-factly. Her tone is casual, as if the fact that she's in this room, waiting for me in total darkness, is totally normal. She's bright, alert, relaxed—as though she's been up for hours, not even a little bit hungover or tired.

"Why are you in my bedroom?" I ask, backing away, closer to the door. I expect her to get up, but instead she leans back against the cane headboard, crossing her legs in front of her. She smooths the blankets over her lap, and it's only then that I realize she's under the covers.

She laughs. "Your bedroom, huh?"

My cheeks flush in embarrassment at the idea that I'd feel ownership over a space here, in this home that was clearly not made for me at all.

"This room. The guest room. Whatever," I deflect. "Why are you waiting for me?"

"Why were you rummaging through your sister's room?" she replies. "Sleeping in her bed?"

"I fell asleep," I say, and it comes out quietly.

How long has she been awake? Listening?

She smiles, then tilts her head like a dog who's heard a word they recognize. "But not for long, right?"

What did she hear? What does she know?

"I was just washing my face," I mumble.

"Right," she says, the smiling stretching wider.

We stare at each other then. She doesn't blink.

Finally, she sighs and gets off the bed, walking straight toward me. I back up a step but as I do I realize I'm in the corner of the room, with no space to sidestep to the door and out to the hallway. There's nowhere to go. But it's not like I'm scared of her. Right?

She's narcissistic and manipulative, but she's not dangerous, not physically.

Right?

She's inches from me now, and my palms are flat against the wall behind me, clawing for more space, for room to breathe. Finally, she stops and stares at me, lifting her hand. I flinch, but she strokes the side of my face.

She shakes her head, like I'm a stubborn child who's being difficult. I expect her to say something but instead she moves past me, walking down the hall to the spare room—the former workout room, the one I haven't been in in years.

"Come on, then," she says, gesturing that I follow her. "If you insist on knowing everything."

I walk a few steps down the hallway, cautious, as she pulls a key out of her robe and puts it in the lock.

Since when does this room have a lock? Or stay locked?

When she opens the door, it feels like relief. Because for once in my life, in this home, I feel validated. I have spent so long believing that all of it—my sister's career, this family, my place in it—is so much more fucked-up than the world realizes, than even I could understand. And now, looking at this room, I finally know I was right. I was always right.

The room looks almost normal at first glance: a part-time home office collecting things waiting to be sold at a yard sale or moved elsewhere or thrown away. There's a desk, a few framed photos on the wall, grade-school art projects from Evie, her ten-year-old handwriting scribbled in the bottom right corner. But as my mom clicks on a desk lamp, more of the room is illuminated—forgotten childhood toys piled in corners on top of dated furniture. And there are boxes. So many boxes. Stacks of them. I take a step inside the room and look quickly behind me, just a glance, all too aware that my mom is watching me now, hands on her hips. This wall is all boxes, floor to ceiling. All of them labeled.

I face my mom again, and she's sitting in the desk chair now, her legs crossed. I take a step toward one box and move closer to the tiny label, reading what it says.

Evie. May 2012.

My eyes travel toward the stack next to it.

Evie. February 2013.

Evie. March 2013.

I spin toward a different tower of boxes.

Evie. October 2017.

Evie. December 2018.

"What is all of this?" I manage, unsettled by the sheer amount of stuff, the organization. The locked door.

"It's nearly two decades of doing my job," she says coolly.

I study her face, and there's a strange sense of calm in her expression. Like something about entering this room made her feel that much more at home, that much more relaxed.

"It was a little pathetic, baby," she adds. "Watching you crawl around the floor like that. Stand on chairs. Dig through drawers. I figured this was just easier."

"You were watching me…"

She sighs. "I mean, I would have preferred to be sleeping, but once I saw what you were doing…well, we're both awake now, aren't we?"

"You were watching her…"

The texts Ashlyn showed me flash through my mind, the words my sister had written. I think someone's following me. Listening to me. What if the whole time it was Mom?

"I was managing her," my mother corrects me. "Protecting her."

Is that what she thinks this is? All of this? Cataloging my sister's life like it's a collector's item?

"By invading her most personal, private spaces…" I say. "The bathroom? How is that necessary for what you were doing?"

She waves off my disgust. "Please, Hazel. This is just like when people your age get outraged over photos of naked babies splashing in a tub. Not everything is as dark and twisted and perverse as people your age like to think. I'm her mother."

Yes, I think. That's just it.

You're her mother.

Rage is building in my core, dampened only by a low-grade nausea. "Filming your daughter in her bathroom is not practical. It's fucking…horrible. It's sick. And…illegal. It must be."

"It's my home," she says. "My security system. That footage was auto-deleted every week. On a secure server in the meantime. And if she hadn't started getting paranoid last year and taking calls in there, then this wouldn't even be an issue."

Paranoid. Another bell rings in my head.

"I wonder why she could have possibly been paranoid, Mom," I say, my chest aching at how scared my sister must have felt, and from knowing how much worse it would have been if she knew the truth.

"Why would you do this to her…" I say, staring at all the boxes. "I don't get it."

She stands up, grabbing one of the older-looking boxes from a shelf. The date says 2011. The peak of the mommy-and-me content that took over our lives then. Evie would have been seven.

"You, of all people, should get it," she starts, placing the box's lid on the bed and carefully removing a thin layer of tissue paper that covers the top of its contents, like whatever is underneath is fragile, precious. Sacred. "You, so determined to shape her life one way or another…"

Before I can protest, she's taking items out of the box—thick piles of papers stuffed into manilla folders. Dozens of DVDs in plastic cases. All of it meticulously labeled with dates and other descriptive information. I see names of brands, but also milestones. There's one DVD that just says: EVIE, LAST BABY TOOTH.

"What is this?" I ask. "Her entire life? Boxed up and categorized like she's…"

I trail off, stunned by the sheer amount of information that must be contained in this room if every box is like this, stuffed with data.

"Like she's famous?" My mom snorts. "Like she's worth something? Like she's worth protecting? Imagine that."

"That's what all of this is? That's what the cameras are? Security?" I ask. "You can't be serious."

"At first they were about security, yes. Keeping her safe. Watching out for her when I knew she wouldn't do it for herself. You know as well as I do she was never as scared of the internet as she should have been."

I blink at her, willing her to go on, knowing that this can't be the whole story.

"When she was younger, it was easy. The filming. The content. All of it. But as she got older, she naturally pushed me out more…even if I was her manager, I couldn't be with her all the time. She didn't always tell me when she was sad or angry or feeling creative. What she was reading or watching. Who she was talking to. The cameras made it easier to…to push her in the right direction. To guide her. To understand. Find angles for brand deals. Narratives for friendships, relationships. I mean, it's not like I saw her crying in front of the mirror and said, ‘Hey, hun, I know you hate your body today, want to go post about it right now?' But if a brand deal came along the next week that was about body positivity, about loving the skin you're in or some bullshit, then…well, I knew the connection. I knew how to spin it in a way that made sense for Ev. I was already inside her head."

I picture my sister standing in her room, examining her body for changes. Marking her success or failure by the size of her waist, a thigh. I remember those moments, my own versions of them. The idea that anyone but me would be privy to them makes me ill. That it was my mother who saw them makes me want to break something.

"I saw the big picture when she couldn't," she adds. "And honestly, Hazel, you're old enough to know that you can't see any of it when you're a kid, a teenager—not even the tiniest sliver of it, really."

This is exactly like my mom, to weave some piece of truth into a darker, more destructive narrative. It's what makes her effective, why all the campaigns work. Why brands want to work with her, and Evie. It's how she can market anything, anyone. She can find the tiny, jagged piece of universal truth amidst even the ugliest thing.

I'm silent now, taking it all in in waves.

"How else do you think I was going to make us money, baby?" she whispers. "This was my job. She was my job."

"What money?" I hiss. "Last I heard, most of it was gone. Used up. This isn't proof of some partnership, some beautiful working relationship…it's an obsession. You wanted total control of her."

My mom chuckles. "Last you heard…you mean last year? When you were so quick to take my help, my money?"

I flash to that day and tell myself the same lie that I have repeated for the last twelve months: That she caught me on a weak day, a weak moment. That I should have been better, but I wasn't.

"Is it really so hard to believe that maybe the reason your sister was so good at all of this isn't because of her, but because of me? That it was always, really, because of me? Ever consider that that's the reason she was so eager to stay, Hazel? That that's why she didn't want to leave home, go to college? Deep down, she knew, too. She needed me. For the deals. For all of it."

I let the unspoken thing hang between us, the past tense of it all. The way my sister isn't here to clarify, to push back.

My hands are on my hips now, and I'm scanning the room, desperately looking for something. That's when I spot six boxes with no labels. I pull one out from the top of the stack.

"Hazel, stop this. You're making a mess, and for no reason. Stop."

She tries to pull the box away from me, but I'm already opening it. It contains stacks and stacks of paper. I pull one sheet out and it's a photocopy of something, lined paper. Evie's handwriting.

In the left-hand corner, there's a date from earlier this year. Underneath, there's a handwritten note—an entry. Evie's handwriting. The date, the note…

"Is this her journal?" I whisper, horrified.

"Well, no, obviously not, Hazel. This"—my mom taps on the paper with her pointer finger—"is just a copy. She has…or had, I don't know…the original. It's hers, after all."

This shouldn't horrify me more than the cameras, maybe. But it does. It feels more like a violation than anything else, confirmation that there was nowhere my sister could bring her own thoughts without the judgment or weight of anyone else. Even this, something as simple and pure as this, had been taken from her. Used. Monetized.

"Why the fuck do you have this?"

My mother stares back at me like I've just asked the world's stupidest question, like shouldn't it be obvious to me? Shouldn't it make sense?

"How else do you expect her to be able to have her memoir properly ghostwritten one day, Hazel?" she says. "Honestly, you can be so dense sometimes. It's not like I cared about her love life or something. About how depressed she was about her lack of abs. About her secret tattoo. Whatever. I could care less. This is for posterity."

She shakes the paper in the air like it's nothing, just business.

"This is for you," I snap. "For the money it would make you. And the control. That's what this whole room is. All of it. And it's disgusting."

"I told you it would only be a couple years," she says. "A book deal would have paid for your college loans and then some." She shakes her head. "If everything didn't go to utter shit, we would all be happy."

For a second, I wonder if that's true.

"I would never have taken that money from you," I say. "From a book. Not a chance."

She laughs. "Oh? No? Just, what, the money from other stuff? Partnerships? Affiliate links? That money is better? Come on, Hazel."

I stand up from the box of papers now, make my way toward the door. But my mom continues talking.

"Acting so high and mighty about money is pretty funny coming from someone who can barely afford their rent. Even funnier coming from someone who was so quick to take my help a year ago. To take the money you seem to think is your sister's alone. But, you know, whatever you need to tell yourself, baby. What I'm telling you is that yes, I was thinking about money. I always am. It's my job to be thinking about money. To be thinking about long-term wealth and stability. A career with staying power," she explains. "Your sister lived minute-to-minute. It was the fact that I zoomed out and saw the wider, longer game plan that meant she could become what she is."

I'm about to walk out when my eye catches on a crumpled piece of fabric stuffed in a Ziploc bag, just visible at the bottom of one of the open boxes sitting near the door. I reach for it and my mom lunges, grabbing my hand, her nails digging into my arm.

"Leave that," she says. "It's disgusting."

I find it hard to imagine that anything could be more disgusting than what I've seen in the last few minutes.

"I kept the gifts," she explains. "The things people would send her. The…intimate things."

I look at the fabric again and now I see it, the tiniest band of elastic that I recognize immediately as underwear.

"I don't know why now, really. Or maybe I do, given…everything. I think at the time I just needed to remind myself that she needed me…that she needed protecting. Someone who saw everything, who monitored it all."

And then I remember.

"What about the doll?"

I am pacing the room now, wracking my brain for the year, the date. It was 2015, right? The summer, maybe? Or was it a particularly hot fall…

"What are you talking about, Hazel?" my mom asks.

"Evianna. That doll she thought was so funny," I say. "The one that the person tried to make look like her. With the face. The painted-on face."

I'm crouching down, moving from box to box, my eyes dancing over the labels, looking for the right one. I choose one at random and rummage through it, tearing out DVDs, framed photos, loose sheets of paper and tossing them aside.

"You're going to mess up my system…" my mom groans, picking up the pages from behind me.

"You don't know where it is? Really?" I ask. "It was in her closet a few years ago. I swear it was."

"Oh, that thing?" she says, recognition coloring her expression now. "God, that was horrible looking. I hated it. She insisted on keeping it for the longest time. I sold it last year."

My skin prickles. "You sold it?"

"Easy money," she says. "And I—well, we, after our little deal—needed it. Someone paid $175 for it. Can you believe that?"

"Do you know who?"

"I guess I could look up the transaction…" she says, spinning in the office chair toward the laptop. "On eBay."

She clicks around for a minute, types a few things in.

"Here it is…" she says, clicking her tongue as she scrolls down.

"Charlie. Charlie Buchanan."

Adrenaline rushes to my brain, lighting me up.

"Is there an address?"

"Sure is," she says. "It's 12023 Palma Ceia Court. Los Angeles, California."

And then I'm out the door and running down the stairs before I even hear her call after me. Before I can spend one more second in that terrible room.