c30

Evie's bedroom is arguably more boring than the front room. It's a box with beige walls, a beige carpet, and a small air mattress resting in the center.

"You can sleep on the mattress," Evie says, and I can tell she's a bit embarrassed by the room, the plainness of it, maybe. The way I know it looks nothing like her. "I'll take the floor."

"No way," I say. "Floor is fine for me."

"Suit yourself," she says, but she's smiling. She heads to another room and comes back with an armful of blankets and pillows, so many that there are throw pillows falling out of her arms when she enters the room.

"Sleepover it is," she says, tossing it all on the floor, pulling the comforter off the air mattress so we can lie there together, just like we did for so many years when she was little. It's the second time I feel like I'm going to cry, but I hold it together.

"A whole house, all to ourselves," I say. "Just for a sleepover. Our younger selves would be dying right now."

"My younger self would expect far more unicorn-themed items in the room," Evie says. "But yes, we would be thrilled."

I laugh. "Oh, so unicorns aren't coming with your new furniture?"

"Who knows," Evie says, and it gives me pause.

Didn't she say that she picked out her furniture? I wonder if that was something she said because Natalie was there, to make things seem more comfortable than they really were. But if this is the last evening I have with my sister for a long time, then I'm not going to spend it arguing about this place.

We burrow into the blankets and turn off the lights, and now it's easy to imagine we're kids again, that we're back in my mom's house, and there are so many years stretching before us when we can change and fix whatever we want.

"So you knew," I say, breaking the silence. "About the cameras."

I feel her eyes on me, searching for something.

"I met Charlie," I explain. "Found her. Or she found me, I guess, depending on how you look at it."

"Ah," she says, stretching the word out. "Of course."

"And she showed me the journals," I admit, then remember the moment at my mom's. The photocopies of Evie's diaries. I clarify: "The ones you wrote when you were with her."

She doesn't respond, and I wonder if she feels like this is a violation, too. Like even this little bit of privacy was something I wasn't willing to give her.

"I only read one before I came here. Just part of it, really," I said. "An entry about how you found the cameras. How you realized what Mom was doing."

There's a pause again, like she's waiting for me to go on. "Right," she finally says, though something in her tone sounds confused, like she's piecing something together.

"That's why you're here, right? That's what all of this is about?"

She's staring up now, studying the ceiling fan. I wonder if she's thinking of the voice recorder, too. "The cameras were part of it, yes."

"Part of it?"

"I felt like I was drowning, Hazel," she says. "Like I couldn't breathe. Like I had to change all the time, and at the same time, I couldn't. Like people would hate me either way. I couldn't think of a single choice I had ever made where I didn't account for everything else first—the internet, the followers, the money. Mom's feelings. Your feelings, too." She says the last part quietly, and my heart drops. "I couldn't think of one moment when I was able to trust myself to make a decision that was separate from it all. Not when I was fifteen or ten or five, or even before then, maybe.

Before Dad."

I hear what she's saying, of course. I understand it. But does all of that really mean that we had to end up here? Like this?

"You could trust me," I offer.

A long pause hangs between us before she goes on, seemingly ignoring what I had said.

"When everything is material or content or something that can be packaged in a better way…by you, or the people around you…" she says. "It just becomes this thing, this monster that makes you believe that if you really are good enough or smart enough or savvy enough, then you can optimize it. You can optimize anything. You can optimize yourself. And when that happens, nothing is real anymore."

"I know it's hard, Ev," I say. "I tried my best to make it easier for you, even when I was away. It's part of why I came home. I just…I couldn't. Nothing I did was enough. Your world, you and Mom…it was all so much bigger than me."

"You know," she says, and I can already tell she's about to do the same thing again—talk around what I said. Not ignore it, necessarily, but not engage with it, either. What isn't she telling me? "In a way, I don't even think that any of these problems are unique to me. I think it's maybe how everyone feels, living in the world we do, always connected online but disconnected from ourselves. It's part of what I like about ReBrand. They're honest about the thing that the rest of us have spent so long lying to ourselves about."

She's using that specific brand of therapy-speak that sounds like Natalie, and it makes me uneasy. My sister was always more grounded than this.

"We all like to believe that these online versions of ourselves don't rob us of something, but that can never really be true. Right? It just can't. If one version is the optimized version of us, then what's the unedited version? The kind that doesn't end up in photos or videos? How can any of us walk around and feel okay as is when that's how things are? We've all been set up for failure. Eventually what happened to me will happen to everyone…the real version gets sanded down into nothing."

"You are so far from nothing, Ev," I push. "Whatever else you are, you're never that."

"I don't…I don't need that, Hazel," she snaps. "The pep talk. I can do that for myself now. That's what all of this is giving me—the chance to see myself. The good, the bad, the ugly. To just sit with it. To be okay with it."

I'd imagined what it would feel like to see Evie again a hundred times over the past two weeks. I'd wondered what questions I would ask. But this reality is like an alternate universe. I feel desperate to comfort my sister, to convince her to change her mind. And she just keeps pushing me away.

"We need to sleep," she says eventually, turning to face me in the darkness. "But let's go on a hike tomorrow, okay? Before you leave."

You. Not we.

"Okay," I say. "That sounds good."

"Night, Hazel," she says sweetly.

I blink into the darkness of the room for a few minutes, noting the steady change in Evie's breaths, the way she settles into sleep. It comforts me, the rhythm of it, how it's so similar to how it was when she was little. I want to wake her and tell her all about it, to point to something and say that some things are unchangeable. Instead, I let myself feel like she's seven again and I'm seventeen. That she's dozed off and I've promised to stay awake next to her, to keep away the monsters as she sleeps.