c06

My mom watches me in silence for what feels like a full minute before she speaks. I wonder how long she's been standing there. What she's thinking. When she finally does say something, she doesn't crack the door any wider, like she's more comfortable when there's something solid between us.

"Dinner is downstairs," she finally says, turning away before I have a chance to reply.

Food. Right. Yes.

My stomach gurgles at the thought of it, and I'm reminded of last night, the way I told myself that I needed to keep my shit together right now. I can't slide into old habits, the things that are natural to me when everything is falling apart. Skipping meals. Staying in bed all day. Avoiding friends. Wearing the same T-shirt for three days. Letting my hair get so greasy it makes my scalp ache. I couldn't allow myself any of that right now. Evie needs my full attention. For me to be at my best, my sharpest.

I take one more minute to look at the room, the perfection of it, my eyes traveling from surface to surface as if I'm checking them off a list.

"Thank you," I say as I grab a salad from the stack of take-out boxes arranged on the kitchen island. "I can pay you back. Just let me know how much I owe you. You still have Venmo, right?"

"Hazel, please," my mom says with a sigh, shaking her head as she stabs a pile of spinach with her fork. "Not now."

I'm confused at first by her reply, but then I realize what she means.

Even now, she thinks I'm trying to make a point, even when I'm trying to be polite, to acknowledge the fact that it wasn't so long ago that I said I'd never come here again, never expect an ounce of her help. I want her to know that I don't want to be here, either, eating her food, sleeping in her home. Instead, she thinks it's a show, an act, a way to seem above it all.

We eat in silence, her scrolling on her phone, me doing the same, and then her phone rings.

"It's them," she says before picking up, taking the phone into the other room.

"Mhm.

"Of course.

"Where?

"Oh, God."

I stand, arms crossed as I watch her pace in the living room.

"Thank you.

"Yes.

"I understand.

"Okay. Bye."

She hangs up and walks right past me back to her salad, slipping her phone into the side pocket of her leggings and sitting back down at the table. I wait for her to speak to me, to relay whatever she just heard on the phone, but instead she starts eating again.

"So?" I finally say, embarrassed that I have to beg for information.

"Yes?" she asks, eyes fixed on her phone again, her fork suspended in between.

"What did they say?"

She sighs, like she resents being interrupted, like this isn't the time.

"They found her car."

I stare at her, but she still doesn't look up. How could she be this calm? Why wouldn't this warrant a meltdown? A discussion? A new level of fear? Is the car, somehow, a good thing? An indication that Evie's okay?

"Where?"

She finally looks up at me, setting down her fork with a clang.

"Near Palm Springs," she says. "In a parking lot."

Palm Springs? My mind reels. That's almost two hours east of Los Angeles.

I close my eyes and try to picture it on a map, where it sits between here and LA. The route between the cities.

"Was she driving home, maybe?" I ask, considering that it would have been an easy stop on the way back to Phoenix.

"I don't know, Hazel." She sighs, standing to toss her salad, most of which is untouched, into the trash. "I don't fucking know anything."

I don't understand why she's being so difficult, so cagey, why she isn't more eager to let me in. In any other circumstance, yes, this would be expected, especially after last year. But this…this should be different. She's always known just how close Evie and I are, that my sister confides in me, that she needs me. There were lines my mother would never cross with me simply because she knew that it would push Evie away. Growing apart from Evie was unfathomable to her. Me being the reason for it? That wasn't even on the table.

I push for more answers, anyway.

"Well, did they get the security footage from the parking lot? Maybe that will explain it?"

"Tomorrow morning, they said," she replies. "They're focused on the car now. So far, they said no ID or wallet left behind. No purse sitting in the passenger seat. No…signs of a struggle."

She cringes on the last part, like it hurts her to say, to imagine what kind of evidence would be required to know someone had been hurt. Hair ripped from the roots. Blood pooled from a wound. Cracked fingernails from trying desperately to hold on to something.

I quickly shake the images away and remind myself that there was none of that. That my sister is somewhere unharmed. Safe.

"They said if it wasn't for the phone, it would be totally unremarkable," she says, opening the dishwasher as she loads items from the sink.

"The phone?" I ask.

"Her phone," she corrects me. "It was in the front passenger seat."

I wonder immediately why this isn't the first thing she said, why this doesn't seem to worry her more, why she isn't crying or yelling or beside herself.

"So can they…can they get into it? Track her GPS info, her recent searches…"

"That was what they were planning on doing, yes," she says, drying her hands with a kitchen towel. "That was before they realized it was wiped. Factory setting reset."

Fuck.

"So…" I start. "What does…what does that mean? That someone planned this? Why wouldn't they just dump it…I don't understand."

"I don't know what it means," she says, her voice softer now, her eyes clearer. She sits down across from me at the table again, folding her hands in front of her like she's about to pray. "But what I do know is that we have to be on the same page here, Hazel."

I don't understand. Now she wants to work together? To communicate?

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that we need to make sure the world knows that the three of us are solid. You and I especially. They need to know that we love Evie. That we'd never hurt her or take advantage of her," she explains.

I shake my head like I'm not following her. Why would anyone think that we had something to do with this?

"I know you're seeing the same stuff online I am. This is about to get very ugly, very quickly. And if we turn on each other…if everything comes out…" she says. "None of this will be about finding Evie anymore. It will be about last year…about all of it."

Last year.

"Are you…what? Threatening me?"

She laughs then, the sound eventually dissolving into a sigh, like I'm a child asking about something obvious.

"No, baby," she says. "I'm not threatening you. I'm reminding you of the same thing I've always told your sister…all this, the internet…what we do…it's work. It's not just being ourselves and hoping for the best. It's ugly, nasty, dirty work. So what I'm saying is, if you want to protect your sister, we both need to make sure no one is talking about last year. About all of that. We limit the distractions. We make sure this is never about us as much as it's about your sister, about how much we love her and want her back. How we'll do anything to make that happen."

I focus my eyes on her hands, which are still folded in front of her, each perfectly round nail painted the same almost-pink shade of nude, gleaming. I wonder when she got the manicure. On the third day Evie had been missing? The fourth? The one-week mark?

But she's right. I don't want to think about what happens if the world is suddenly talking about what happened last year. If Evie eventually comes home and that's what she's met with. It's the only thing I can think of that's almost as bad as the worst-case scenario, that she's not actually safe at all.

"Fine," I say. "Whatever brings Evie home."

"Good," she says, laying her hands flat on the table as she stands up, like she's exiting a board meeting. "It's like I've always said…you don't want to admit that you get it, but you do. You're like me in that way. Practical."

I ignore her, the thought making my stomach twist even though I've heard this all before, even though I shouldn't be surprised. She always did want an image of a family who sticks together in the hardest of times instead of what she had in reality: a thing that was splintered enough to draw blood.

I announce that I'm going to bed and walk straight upstairs, eager to put the entire day behind me, feeling more lost and uneasy than I did when I woke up this morning. I remember the last thing Williams had said to me after our interview. "The experience of someone you love being missing…the fear of it. It's the only thing in life that time makes worse. It grows instead of fades." In the moment, I had been uncomfortable with what she was saying. It had felt too ominous, too loaded. I don't need someone to coach me through this emotionally, I thought. I need someone to find my sister. But now I get it. She was preparing me for this part of things. The slow unraveling with each second of not knowing. The weight of it. She was saying: You're going to feel like you're about to lose control, but you can't.

I close the door of what was briefly, technically, my childhood bedroom, leaning against it before I slide to the ground. I was once a teenager in this exact same room, but it always felt more like what it is now—an impeccably designed space for a very temporary guest—than it ever felt like mine. I look around, noting the familiar layout, the changes.

It's cleaner now than it used to be, of course. This was the one room that my mom had instructed the housekeeper not to touch because it was never featured in content, so my clothing was always strewn across the floor. Now it's spotless. Instead of a stack of books gathering dust in the corner, there's a mini fridge stocked full of snacks and cold drinks with aesthetically pleasing labels. A small wicker basket of tiny skincare items rests on top of the dresser, right next to a stack of the fluffiest towels I've ever seen. It all is designed just so, down to the perfectly angled USB outlet beside the bed, to make the entire room feel comfortable, effortless. And yet here I am, crawling out of my skin.

I lie on the ground, stretching my limbs in all directions just to release the tension of the day, the stiffness I feel being in this place. Even the stretching seems to exhaust me, though. And now I'm just lying here, staring at a hole in the wall just above the baseboard. Almost hidden behind the dresser, but not quite. I stretch my hand to the spot, a flaw so small that it's hard to believe it's survived the many iterations this room has seen since I was seventeen, that it wasn't covered up by the paint or the plaster or the looming shadow of the professional-grade Pilates reformer my mom had insisted on buying five years ago, before she built the gym room. Evie had texted me about it when it arrived, describing it as "if Gwyneth Paltrow had designed a medieval torture device." I laugh at the memory now, the way we had referred to it in our conversations simply as "The Beast," right up until the day Mom sold it on Facebook Marketplace.

Through all of that, this little hole in the wall remained. I move my fingers over the spot, feel its grooves and remind myself that it's real, that I'm real, that my sister is real. And real people don't just vanish into nothing.

"Hazel. Truth or dare," Evie had once asked me, looking over at me from where she lay on my living room floor, a borrowed air mattress beneath us. It was the first time she had been allowed to stay at my place after I had moved back west and accepted the job in Vegas. I missed my friends from college, Brooklyn. Seasons. Feeling like I was doing something hard but noble, letting myself and everyone else believe I was doing it all on my own.

But after seven years of roommates and cockroach-infested apartments, I was proud to have my own space, somewhere with central air conditioning and an in-unit laundry machine. It wasn't exactly glamorous—the faucet constantly dripped and the walls were tissue-thin, but it was mine, and that thought made any other complaint seem manageable. That, and the fact that I was finally able to be there for the small stuff in Evie's life—the friends and school dances and first kisses—made it bearable that I was giving up the dream of living somewhere else, of making it in a big city. Besides, Las Vegas was a big city. The job was an opportunity to catch my breath. I told myself I'd work hard, make some great connections, and save enough money that wherever I lived next would be somewhere that didn't make me feel like I was drowning. In the beginning, it all seemed temporary. And when I did panic, sure I had made a mistake, I thought about my sister. That this meant I could be there for her high school years, for her.

I was finally close enough for Evie to come visit. It was almost a five-hour drive, but after a month of begging, my mom let me meet her halfway in my own car, picking up Evie for the weekend. I loved those drives, the long stretches of desert, the songs she'd play for me. The conversations we'd have. Sometimes, I was embarrassed that I didn't have glamorous, exciting stories from New York to share with her anymore. I knew on some level that she must have thought it, too, that it was so clear I had given up on my dream. But other times it felt like I was teaching her about how life really worked. That it was okay to try something different, to press pause, to reassess what works for you and what doesn't. It's what I told myself to feel better, anyway.

"Truth or dare," she pressed again, peeking out from the edge of a blanket, her eyes blinking behind the sharp beam of a flashlight. Before I could reply, she went on, anyway. "Great. Truth it is."

"Oh, that's how it is? What if I wanted dare, huh?" I teased. We both knew I would go along with it. These sleepovers were more about her than me, no matter how old she was.

Evie was propped up on her elbow now, her face resting on her hand. It was summer and her freckles had darkened and spread farther up her cheeks, while her auburn hair had lightened. Both features were from my dad, my mom's green eyes sandwiched between them. "You got his face," I'd tell her sometimes, and she'd sigh and say, "And you got to remember him more." I never told her that that only made things harder.

"A true tragedy," she responds to my complaint about the game. She had started talking like this recently, everything tinged with a hint of sarcasm and drama. I couldn't tell if it was because she was trying to be funny or just trying to seem older. "There's time for dares later. First, let's hear the truth: Have you ever broken anything? At home?"

I didn't follow. "What do you mean?"

"Like, something nice. Important. You knocked over a vase, or you spilled a soda on the couch and then flipped the cushion before Mom got home. When you were my age, maybe. Did you ever have secrets that were just yours?"

It was a weird question, maybe, but Evie was barely fifteen. Who wasn't a little odd at that age? I could remember me then, could still practically feel the discomfort I felt in my own body, the way I felt paralyzed with fear around adults, all of it only emphasized by five-year-old Evie—always perfect and adorable and charming in all the ways I was gangly and awkward and nervous. Plus, Evie had always asked questions like this when it was just us. Strange hypotheticals. Silly stuff. The questions she was too scared to ask everyone else. I thought for a minute, remembering.

"I smashed all of Mom's lipsticks once," I offered. "In high school. I forgot to put the lipstick part down before I put the lids back on. Every single one was wrecked. I never told her, though."

Evie blinked hard through the beam of the flashlight instead of laughing, like I expected.

"And what happened?"

"What do you mean, what happened?"

"I mean, did you get in trouble?" she asked. "Did she mention it to you?"

"No, never," I said. "I just figured she never noticed they were broken, or she just bought a thousand new ones. Had some brand send her some. I don't know. Maybe they just got lost in the mountain of makeup she had then. But no, it never came up. I never got in trouble."

What I didn't say was: She always suspected it was Evie who did it. A five-year-old messing around with her mom's makeup. A five-year-old who she couldn't risk reprimanding lest she look sad on television or refuse to take photos together.

Evie smiled and rested her head on the pillow again. I could just make out the outline of her head beside me, slowly nodding in the dark.

"That's the question you use when I say truth?" I laughed. "Aren't you supposed to ask me if I ever hooked up with Blake Sokolowski or, like, if I pee in pools or something?

She laughed a bit at that, and then I saw a small sliver of white flash. A quick eye roll.

"Boring," she said. "Plus, I think we both know that Blake Sokolowski was far, far out of your league."

Blake was a boy who had lived next door to us when we moved into the big house. I was seventeen and he was eighteen, and beautiful. My mom teased me relentlessly about being in love with him, even though she knew that he looked at her more than he ever did at me.

"Oh, shut up." I laughed, lightly punching her on the shoulder. "What about you then? If you think it's such a good question."

"I think we both know I only pee in the pool in emergencies."

"I mean about breaking things." I rolled my eyes. "What things have you broken, then? I find it hard to believe that Mom would fail to notice, like, virtually anything you do."

She hesitated for a moment, eyes fixed at the ceiling.

"Lots of things," she said finally.

This surprised me.

"What do you mean, lots of things?"

"Big things. Small things. Silly things." She sighed. "All the time."

"Like what, exactly?" I asked, having trouble picturing my little sister silently moving around my mom's house, destroying things.

"Like things no one notices," she said. "Things they don't care about, anyway."

I forced myself to stay silent then, to encourage her to keep talking instead of cutting her off, something I had learned from a journalism professor in college.

"At first, it was by accident," she started. "I was in the laundry room looking for a safety pin and accidentally spilled bleach on one of Mom's sweaters, so I hid it in my room, balled it up under my mattress. I figured it was easier than explaining it and getting in trouble. She never even asked about it. It was like it never existed, so I tried it again. I drew on the walls of the closets in the rooms that no one ever goes in. Wrote my name in Sharpie on the bottom of shoes that she hasn't worn in years. Scratched smiley faces in walls that no one ever looks at. Whatever I wanted. Not that I really wanted it. I just did it. I barely thought about it sometimes. I put all these tiny holes into the walls of the guest rooms, all along the baseboards. They've been there for years, and no one has ever noticed."

My pulse had raced faster with each admission. None of this felt like the Evie I knew. It was all harmless, damage that no one would notice, but oddly that made it feel worse. Less understandable.

"She never noticed?" I said. "Not once?"

"Not once." Evie laughed as she bent her arms at the elbow, cradling her head as she stared up at the ceiling, despite the darkness. I wondered if she could see the outline of the slow-growing water stain above, the one that had been there since I moved in months ago. "You haven't noticed either, you know. You never did."

I tried to make out her expression in the dark. Had she really been doing it that long, since she was seven or eight and I was still at home? Or was she saying something else, I wondered, like she had been changing things now, too?

"Here?" I asked, expecting her to laugh off my suggestion.

"Sure, here," she said. "It doesn't matter where. It's not, like, personal. Or angry. It's not like your landlord will notice. It's not like you have."

"Okay, well, obviously you have to tell me where it is now, tiny Banksy…"

I joked, but I was unsettled. I wracked my mind to think back to the day before, the morning and the afternoon, trying to figure out when she could have possibly damaged something.

"Oh, chill." She sighed. "It's not, like, graffiti, Hazel."

She pointed the flashlight to a tiny spot next to the TV, just barely visible underneath a picture frame. I got up and moved closer to where the light was shining. There it was, the tiniest, faintest hint of a stick figure, its face serious, a jagged line where the upturned smile should be.

"Not very good graffiti, maybe," I said, forcing my voice to sound lighter despite the chill I felt. "Here I was expecting your name written in bright red marker or something. This is nothing. It could have been from anyone, any of the previous tenants."

"Sure, it could have been," Evie said, turning the flashlight around so the room was dark again except for her face, the beam making her green eyes look paler than usual. "But it was me."

"But it was you." I heard myself laugh, but it didn't sound funny, or light. None of this should have been serious, really. It's not like she was hurting anyone, or herself. Like she said, it was harmless, small. So why didn't it feel that way? "Mom is always so worried about you going to parties without telling her or dating without telling her or having some footage of you drinking out of a Solo cup go viral. Whatever. Little does she know…this is what she has to worry about. Stick figures and barely visible pin holes. Miniature moments of destruction."

I expected her to laugh. I wanted her to laugh. If she laughed, then it would be proof that none of this was as strange as it felt to me. That it was all in my head, something that seemed scarier at night in the dark than it would in the light of day. We'd laugh about this tomorrow, for real, I reminded myself.

"It's hard to worry about things you don't really see at all," she finally said.

I wasn't sure what to do with that.

"Okay, well, no more drawing on my walls, please?" I said, still trying to keep things light. Trying to be the cool sister. "You can go to town at home, though. Be my guest."

"Gladly," she said before clicking the flashlight off.

I fell asleep then, and now, thinking of all the other hidden places in my room, the well-shadowed corners of the world that we were missing.

r/InfluencerSnark

EVIE DAVIS MISSING? | June 21, 2023, 4:55 p.m. EDT

LoneStarrrrr

Holy shit. I think Evie Davis is actually missing. Like, for real.

363 97

Incoherentbabble

I was JUST coming here to talk about this…did you see Pour Toi's post???

It's basically confirmed.

HowYallDoin

Maybe it's time for *some* people to feel bad about joking about this now

PrincessLeona

Oh please. You clearly don't know anything about the Davises. Erin basically molded her out of silly putty while still in the womb and then catapulted her into the world as some perfectly designed child robot to sell us all diet pills and loungewear and make herself unholy amounts of money. It wouldn't surprise me if she's in on this whole thing, too.

CartwheelHart

Evie has never advertised diet pills…or tummy tea. None of that. She's VERY against that stuff. She's told us.

Tattletale

Honey, you do know that she isn't talking to *you* right? Just because you've watched her grow up like she's your little sister and now all-grown-up bestie doesn't mean that she—brace yourself for this—actually cares.

P0is0nandWine

Wait, wait, wait…how do you know this? For sure? Has Erin released a statement or something?? Did she delete it? I've been searching her feed and nothing…just vague posts from her of, like, mugs of tea and captions that say "really needed this today" I mean, slightly less deranged than usual, sure…but would you be posting photos of TEA when your kid is missing?

PrincessLeona

Hmmm, I don't know, would you exploit your kid for your own financial gain, giving every creep across the world hundreds of photos of her face to jerk off to in their basement? Maybe not!! But Erin Davis sure would.

CartwheelHart

That's disgusting. Evie herself has said she loves what she does…and the pedo thing is just a rumor. It doesn't actually work that way.

PrincessLeona

I'm a private investigator. And I can tell you that it does. These monsters take photos of famous kids and superimpose them on the darkest, sickest images you've ever seen. Just because they like their particular face. Erin has been told this, I'm sure. She must have been told a hundred times by now. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a whole FBI file of the dark web sites Evie Davis's face has ended up on, starting from when she was 5. She kept putting her fucking kid on the internet, though. And now here we are. Gee, I wonder what could have happened…

ForEvieandEver

Oh, wonderful. Another private investigator on Reddit. Just what the world needs. Truly, thank God. /s Anyone who has followed Evie for a while knows that that whole narrative is bullshit. Evie loves what she does. She helps people. She's the reason why I started going to therapy.

PrincessLeona

Yeah. And all I'm saying is that her parents are the reason *she* started going.

SwipeUpForBS

Has anyone heard that Darker is covering the Davises on their episode next week? Apparently they hinted at it in their latest episode and teased some sort of exclusive guest to finally address the rumors about "the internet's favorite influencer." The pod subreddit is absolutely losing it.

LoneStarrrrr

You're shitting me.

Incoherentbabble

I fucking knew it.

PrincessLeona

Oh. Oh my god. This is going to be so, so good.