Chapter 4

By the time my mom picked up my calls, it had been more than 144 hours since Evie was last seen. It took me almost five hours to drive through the long stretch of desert between Vegas and Phoenix, a distance that felt just far enough to me when I was first offered the digital editor job for a local newspaper a few years ago. It took twenty-five minutes to work up the nerve to get out of the car, even though I knew my mother had to know I was there since she had talked to the neighborhood security guard and buzzed me through the front gate. Even after I came inside, it took another twenty for her to look me in the eye.

It's less than twenty-four hours later, and I have spoken to two different detectives twice. I have watched the screen-recorded clip of Evie's TikTok Live no fewer than twenty-five times. I have scrolled through the 943 comments on the now-viral screen recording four times, my thumb carefully hovering over each username. Each time, I expect to find an answer that will make all of this seem explainable, laughable even, that will prove we're all just overreacting. And each time, all I find is strangers who don't know my sister at all. The video has three million views now.

I've never been particularly good with numbers, but I've always liked them. Ever since I was little, they felt comforting to me, predictable and cool. Numbers are all clean lines and solutions, things that feel manageable in a way that other descriptors don't. Hours seem like things you can hold in your hands. Minutes seem like tiny building blocks, something solid. But I've learned that even numbers can get out of control eventually, too. Days, weeks—those soon grow too large, looming over you in a way that makes them lose their shape, their scale. Eventually, they all start to mean too much. But for now, right now, sitting in my mother's house that has never really been my home, Evie has been missing for one week, six hours, twenty minutes, and thirty-five seconds or so, and I can still grip onto those figures, even as I feel them start to slip.

The detectives have told us repeatedly to stay put, stay quiet. Stick together. Ignore the media. No press. They know it's coming by now, that it's already started, really, but from our conversation earlier I've gathered enough to bet that they aren't even a little bit prepared for the shitshow that will ensue when the internet realizes Evelyn Davis is really, truly missing.

"No offense, miss, but I've never even heard of your sister," Buxton tells me when I try to explain the extent of Evie's notoriety, like he needs to make me understand that I am somehow too close to the situation, that I don't really realize how not-so-famous she is. Because if he doesn't know who she is, then how many fans could she really have? How big a deal could this really be? "I don't think we need to blow up the situation unnecessarily when we have our best people following every single lead. It will only turn this into a spectacle, and trust me, when the media gets a hold of this, because of what your sister looks like, it's a whole other ball game. You might think you want more attention on this, but it's going to get messy."

He chuckles, like something he thought had made him laugh but he can't quite share it with the group—not the way he wants to, anyway.

"Listen, when this goes public in a real way, half the stories will immediately be about the fact that your sister is a very beautiful, very white girl, and why don't we focus on other cases like we're focusing on this one, and then suddenly it's about how we're all a bunch of racist assholes and not about how we find your sister." He shakes his head, like I wouldn't believe the shit he has to deal with.

We both sit there for a beat, and I wonder if he wants me to—what? Feel bad for him and commiserate over his not-so-subtle racism? Not a chance, buddy.

"That happens whether she's famous or not," he goes on. "The only thing that changes, if she's really as well-known as you're saying, is that people are even less sympathetic. That's the cold hard truth, I'm sorry to say."

I'm angry now—that this is the guy who's in charge of finding my sister, sure, but also that I feel like I don't have much of a choice. For the first time it crosses my mind that maybe pushing back and making myself unlikable even here, even now, might backfire. That there's a possibility that the more disagreeable I am, the less this guy will want to do his job.

But before I can say anything, Williams cuts in.

"What we're saying is that right now, it's in our best interest to keep our eyes on this only," Williams says, leaning toward me with her elbows on her knees. "People knowing. That will happen. A statement from your family. That will happen, too, likely soon if nothing changes. But in this exact moment, if there is foul play at work here—and please understand, we have no reason to believe that that's not the case right now—then it only benefits us to make sure the perpetrator is in the dark."

The perpetrator? It strikes me as such a big, ugly loaded word to use for a situation, for something that I'm trying desperately to convince myself is simply a mistake, a misunderstanding. I suddenly feel helpless, struck with the realization that neither of these people are helping me in the ways I want to be helped. That I know nothing to do in this situation other than answer their questions, give them what they want, not get in the way.

I hear a sound from the kitchen then that I instantly recognize as my mother's sobs, fading as though they were muffled by something. Her own hand, or that fucking dish towel.

Williams exhales deeply and leans in closer.

"There will be a time and a place for a statement and for social media outreach, but it should only happen at our discretion," Williams says, her eyes darting behind me in the direction of the kitchen then back toward me again, a message. "Is that clear?"

"Crystal," I reply. It shouldn't surprise me that even now, I am charged with minimizing the wake of my parent's damage. A buffer until the very end.

The rest of our extensive interview is like everything I'd seen in hours of true crime docuseries, or British procedurals, right down to the detail that none of it felt even remotely real. None of it felt urgent, though of course it was. I had imagined emergencies all my life, especially those related to my sister. What if a crazed fan hid in her room? What if a stalker came to the door holding a gun? What if she sped through a light when driving, took a turn too fast, was in a hurry when she shouldn't have been? In all of those scenarios, there had been running, screaming, rushing. Nonstop frantic movement. There had been clear choices to make, an obvious path forward. A way to be useful or brave. In reality, there was nothing to do but wait, and answer these questions that all seem so pointless, and talk and talk and talk. I am at the mercy of these two people, and all I can do is follow their lead. They are the only ones in the room with a guide for how this works. Who else is going to tell me how to act, what to do, who to call, what to say? So I sit here in my mother's comfortable home, everything soft and beige, and I answer their questions calmly, one by one, hating myself for not running through the streets screaming my sister's name. For being safe and still and so very helpless.

Did Evie seem happy, they ask. Sure, I say. She just got back last month from an all-expenses-paid trip to the south of France where her only requirement was to wear a certain foundation once or twice. If she wanted. Who wouldn't be happy with a life like that?

What do I think of Gavin? How long do they have, I almost say, but I soften when I remember his call, the fear in his voice, the way he had helped me, and I think better of it. He's a twenty-year-old kid, I say. It won't last.

And how about Ashlyn Price, her former best friend? What about other friends, other people she talked to, other admirers?

She has more than four million followers across all social platforms, I emphasize again, only half trying to hide the other question in my tone: Do I have to do your job for you?

That quiets them for a minute, but we're soon back to the specifics of her relationships, her habits, her schedule.

"And she's never done anything like this before?" Williams asks. "It's completely out of character for her to disappear like this? To go off the grid for a bit, or to do something unexpected? To be deceptive, even?"

This question makes me pause for a beat, something in the last few words snagging on a memory, but I know there is only one answer I can give them.

"No," I tell them. "She's never done anything like this. This is not normal. It's not her."

I make a point to make eye contact with them then, to show them how much I mean what I'm saying. How the answer I'm giving them is the only one that matters. By the time we're done, I feel like they believe it.

"We have a lot to go over," Williams says, standing to shake my hand. Her eyes are somewhere behind me, though, and I turn my head to see my mom leaning against the doorway. "We'll be in touch regularly. Please know that this case is our number-one priority right now. We'll be in touch later tonight, then tomorrow morning again. And, of course, as anything relevant comes in between. Call us if anything comes up before sharing information anywhere else. That's very, very important."

Williams looks at me then, her gaze steady and measured, full of implications. I nod as if to say: I'll try my best, same as always. Part of me is relieved that she seems to get the balance of things here. That it's not me she has to worry about. Another part of me resents that I'm back here, once again managing the selfishness of my mother and the damage it could do.

My mom walks toward us, shaking the detectives' hands herself before we both walk them to the door. As soon as the door shuts, my mother moves away from it as if even the forced proximity with me is too much for her, like it makes her skin crawl, too. I've been in the house for almost a whole day now, but we haven't managed to have a full conversation yet. The detectives and commotion have made it easy enough to ignore each other, to talk through other people instead of directly to each other. It's cleaner that way, anyway.

"I need some time," my mom says, pacing on the opposite side of the room for a minute, frantically detangling the three delicate gold necklaces she's wearing that have woven themselves together throughout the day. "To just…to figure this out. To be alone."

I nod, partially relieved that I'll soon be alone again, even though I still can't feel comfortable here. Mostly, it's been easy to distract myself, to avoid my mother during the odd times she wasn't with detectives, or on the phone. In the meantime, I've tried to be useful to pass the time. I called Evie multiple times, listening to her voicemail each time, letting it get all the way to the beep before I hang up. Now, I go through our text messages for a third time, desperate to find something. It's a two-week-old chain of live stream commentary about the newest season of Lost in Love, a survival-meets-dating show where singles are stranded on an island together.

No way Shaina makes it more than two days, Evie had written.

Honestly generous, I wrote back. I give it two hours. And there will be crying.

She responded with a skull emoji, and that was it. That was the last thing we talked about. The last stupid, stupid thing. My brain instantly imagines being interviewed one day, someone asking me what the last thing my sister said to me was, and the emoji popping up in my head. It's so mundane that it makes me almost embarrassed for her, for us. It makes me want to text every friend, every person I've ever dated, and say something meaningful, interesting. Anything so the last message I sent them wasn't something silly, so ridiculous that it almost distracted from the fact that it might be ominous, too.

But then I catch myself: What is wrong with me? Evie is coming back. People disappear sometimes, right? They come back more often than they don't. They show up. They're fine. I close my eyes and shake my head at the way I spiraled. My brain had been imagining this was the end without even wanting to. I hate that even now, I am outside myself, just like I was at work. A former boss once told me that I was so focused on the worst-case scenario that I prepared for that instead of doing my actual job, instead of considering what was actually in my control. "I swear you invite it into the room," she told me on her last day before transferring to another department. "Whatever the bad thing is you're thinking—how you're going to fail, how a story will fall apart, if someone hates you—I think you think about it so much that eventually it just appears." At the time I thought she was being dramatic, overanalyzing. In the end, though, she had been right.

I can't do that now, though. I can't get to that place again. I won't.

I hear the hum of the shower turning on upstairs and it reminds me of routine. Showering. Sleeping. Feeding myself. I need to focus on the basics if I'm going to keep my head above water. That's the only way I'll stay clearheaded now, in this place. I walk to the kitchen, where I decide I'll eat something. Something healthy, balanced. Fiber and nutrients and all that. The kitchen looks the same as it did the last time I was here, honed marble countertops, the type that are painfully beautiful but that design experts on TV always warn will stain easily. I search for a single mark, a ring from a coffee mug, the faint remnant of a spatter of tomato sauce, but they look as new as the day we moved into the house. I grab some sort of granola bar from the counter that looks trendy and vaguely healthy, opening the wrapper with my teeth. It smells like a Whole Foods, sterile and woody. It tastes the same. I choke it down anyway—I haven't eaten since lunch—and roam the rest of the downstairs, reacquainting myself with the space. I stop in front of the large gallery wall and I'm surprised to see some of the photos still feature me. I imagined Mom would remove them at some point after I stopped coming by. What's the point in pretending?

My eyes land on one of the four of us outside the bus turned tiny home, the familiar shade of green comforting me even now. My eyes are half closed in the image, and Evie's smile is bright and wide. Next to it is a shot of my sister, my mom, and me standing backstage before Evie's first appearance on a daytime talk show, the one where we were presented with a giant, human-sized check for "inspiring people."

"So…what? We're here because we made people cry?" I said to my mom backstage as Evie had her makeup touched up. "Because they feel bad for us?"

"Don't be ridiculous, Hazel," my mom said, eyes fixed on Evie's face in the mirror. "We're here because we touched people's hearts. Do you know how rare that is these days?"

Not that rare, I thought, imagining the slate of other sob stories the show would feature for the rest of the week.

"Perfect," my mom said, standing in front of Evie, adjusting her two tiny buns. I could have sworn she moved one just slightly down, so that they looked almost identical to how they were in the video.

We had walked into the hallway to meet with a production assistant, whom my mom promptly asked to take a photo of us. I had agreed to the appearance on the show—I had been excited to be on a television set. But I made my mom promise no photos. I didn't want to be on stage, or be interviewed. The spotlight of the viral video had made me feel hyperaware of my emotions, my body, my reactions to social cues. My mom and Evie had seemed to instinctively know what to do with it all, but I was never able to. I laughed when things were sad. I hunched when I should have stood up straight. I stared blankly when I should have smiled. It all made me feel scratchy, anxious, like I was tripping over my own body, my thoughts. If I disliked the photos before, the blog posts, now I hated it all.

I tried to push back when she thrust a digital camera into the hand of the intern, who didn't look much older than me at the time, but my mom wedged her arm between mine and my body, hooking us together there. Finally, I managed to squirm away, and they got a few more photos of just Evie and Mom. She could have used those for the gallery wall; I knew they existed somewhere, that they both looked great in them. But this was the one that Evie liked the most. Or that my mom liked the most. I couldn't remember now which. Either way, this was the one that they had framed and hung.

I could still hear what she had said to me afterward, when I groaned about the photos, our agreement.

"You promised," I said.

"We make people feel better about life, baby," she said, simultaneously pointing to the spot on Evie's cheekbone where she wanted the makeup artist to add a little bit more highlighter before they went onstage. Then she looked at me, hands on her hips. "If that's not worth celebrating, I don't know what is."

I didn't respond, but I remember thinking that she was right. I'm sure people loved knowing that at least they weren't us. That no matter what else was going on in their own lives, at least that had somehow dodged all of this. At least they hadn't lost what we had. At least they weren't parading around the worst thing that had happened to them like a badge of honor, or an opportunity. If nothing else, at least they had that.

Re: Just thought I'd hop on here.

From:Such a Bad Influence

July 1, 2022

Good morning, friends. Just thought I'd hop on here and share what's on my heart this morning. Just something I've been thinking about during this season of life. Because I told y'all I'd always be honest about the highs and lows. And it's not all fake eyelashes and spray tans over here. Not all matcha and manifestations. Not all workouts and wine nights. Not all sunsets and slow dancing in the kitchen with my best-friend-who-happens-to-be-my-hubby. Not all highlights and highlighter. It's more than that. Yes, it might look glamorous, but that's only because it usually is.

That's how it feels, right? To sign on to your phone these days? To get on Instagram and expect to be entertained, only to find yourself annoyed? Yeah, yeah, we all know you could unfollow the Serena Bakers of the world, wave goodbye to the opportunity to find out what breed of pygmy goat the next Baker kid will get for their birthday (and actually, goats are great for clearing weeds—so it's an investment, really, an environmental fucking wonder). But will you? Will I? Probably not.

Look, I'm not saying it's noble to follow someone for the sole purpose of occasionally (or frequently) rolling your eyes at their ridiculous antics, acting like they're surviving on nothing but God's abundance and twenty jars of home-canned tomatoes when they have an inheritance to rival the GDP of a small nation. But I am here to say for all of us: It's not that hard, is it? To do the right thing? To have even an iota of self-awareness? To see the line between real and real fucking annoying? Wanting transparency from the people we follow is nothing new, but is it really too much for us to ask for a little self-awareness, too? For them to make note that several hundred thousand strangers follow them and think: Huh, they'll probably have an opinion about all of this bullshit, too. I wonder if I should consider this from the other way around.

I mean, of course, they don't think it's bullshit. It's their life. It doesn't have to look like anyone else's. That's why we follow them, right? To escape into a world that isn't ours? Or, wait, is it because their life does look like ours in some way? Is it the faux relatability we like, even if most of us have learned that this quickly slips away with time and followers and money, anyway? Is that why we stick around? Or is it because there's a weird type of satisfaction in knowing that we're doing this—existence—the harder way, the way that doesn't include validation from thousands of people immediately after we post a photo of ourselves, our kids, our homes, our homemade spelt fucking pie crusts, our lives?

I started this newsletter because I'm trying to figure this out myself. To make sense of the ever-shifting Venn diagram that is my own feed. The influencers I used to love to follow but now mostly hate-follow (don't judge me, I know you do it, too). The people I keep track of from afar (How are people still buying this bullshit? This pair of leggings? This aesthetically pleasing water bottle?). The people I enjoy following but, if I'm being honest, am always waiting to see mess up, or change. Because they always change, don't they? They give us one thing, we give them a platform, and then they make money off of it. And when the money changes them (because that's what money does) and we call them out on it, they're offended. Wounded. As if they don't need our approval anymore, anyway. As if we aren't giving them what they need to be relatable again: perspective.

So that's why I'm here. To put actual words to the passive-aggressive messages that make our favorite and not-so-favorite influencers cry on their stories. To bring some much-needed context to the mix. And to have a little fun, maybe. I could use some of that, too.

Won't you join me?

(Sign up at the link in my bio.)

(I'm kidding.)

(Or am I?)

Before I go, let's get to a quick roundup of the hottest tidbits around the industry this week, from Instagram-famous pet deaths to shapewear controversies:

· Evie Davis's Insta-famous cat, Mochi, died suddenly this past week. With nearly 600K followers, Mochi was beloved by Davis family lovers and haters alike—and a testament to Erin Davis's ability to squeeze every single dollar out of any living creature in their home. Though Mochi's battle with cancer was sudden and shocking, we're pretty sure they were able to milk it for all it was worth, content-wise. RIP, Mochi, you were cute and fluffy, and we hope you enjoyed that four-story pet palace sponsored by Whole Foods half as much as we did.

· Laurie Arthur posted a single link to a voter registration website, prompting waves of praise and admiration from her millions of Gen Z followers. It seems that Arthur, who spent the majority of the last election cycle claiming that she "loves everyone" in response to questions about her political leanings (though, really, do we have to speculate?), is more compelled to speak up this year. If there's anything we can all count on, it's that doing the bare minimum is considered going above and beyond when the expectations are so, so low.

· Kelsey Steedmeyer has been skewered by your favorite online snark site for taking a paid trip to a Mexican resort only to lock herself in her ocean-view room because she "feared for her life." Steedmeyer, who lives in rural Idaho with one dead-eyed husband, three adorable children, and two doodle-adjacent dogs who I am personally considering saving from the chaos of it all, says that she wasn't expecting Mexico to be so "different" and that she has "had the worst diarrhea of her life for four days straight."

That's all for this week's newsletter. Check your inbox next week for the latest on the influencers, the influenced, and the in-between.

Until next time,

SABI