And so for the next eight weeks, until we finished shooting the season, I played two roles: Elli’s and my own. No one ever suspected that when Elli and I disappeared into the bathroom at lunchtimes or in between scenes, we were swapping places. As far as the crew was concerned we were just teenagers, spending too much time preening in the bathroom; and if we sometimes came out a little backward, our hair not quite right and costumes awry—well, no one looked that closely at kids anyway. No one paid close enough attention to note that “Sam” was a little less assertive than usual or that “Elli” seemed to have developed Sam’s swagger. Who would it benefit anyway, to sniff out our ruse? The director was happy to finally be getting strong performances out of Elli; he wasn’t about to question how he’d gotten them.
Maybe our mother knew what was going on; how could she not? But maybe she also understood why we did what we did—that this was a matter of my sister’s survival, and my own. That was how our mother had always been: willfully blind, stubbornly optimistic. It was easier for her to believe that our problems had seamlessly resolved themselves.
So Elli spent her days being me, reading gossip magazines and playing Tomb Raider on my Game Boy. I got to perform in double the scenes—as well as playing Elli, a role inside a role—and I loved it. By the time we finished shooting the rest of the season, Elli had stopped looking so haunted and I had honed my acting skills to a fine point, and the production was even ahead of schedule. Everyone was happy, so how could what we were doing possibly be wrong?
* * *
—
Only one person ever found us out: Bettina. Our gum-cracking makeup person, the bird tattoos flying off her arms as she puffed our faces with powder and brushed gloss over our lips. She studied our faces so closely, knew every contour of our cheekbones and crooked lash in our brows: Of course she would have been the one to notice.
The first morning when I sat in her chair as Elli, she paused for just a moment and caught my eyes in the mirror.
“Elli?” she asked, the l’s drawing out languidly on her tongue.
“Yes,” I said, perhaps a little more firmly than Elli might have said it, because this caused Bettina’s eyebrow to arch upward.
“Sure.” She gave me a tiny, knowing smile. Then she gripped my chin with a gentle hand and tilted it up so that she could eradicate my face with a layer of thick foundation.
She said nothing further, not that week or the next. She remained silent until three weeks in, when the strain of playing so many parts—staying up late to learn two sets of lines, getting up early to do my schoolwork before we went to the studio lot, and then doing a double shift on set—began to show on my face. “You’re going to wear yourself out, kiddo,” she murmured to me one afternoon as she patted concealer on the circles under my eyes. “You look exhausted.”
“I can handle it,” I said. “I’m fine on only a few hours of sleep.”
She glanced over at my sister, who was happily napping on the couch of our trailer. “How long do you plan to keep this up?” she asked.
I thought about this. “Forever, if I have to.”
She stared at me for a long minute, her thin face twitching. Then she reached into her purse and pulled out a prescription bottle. She opened it and shook a few small orange capsules into my hand.
“Adderall,” she said. “It helps with focus, energy. Try just a half. But if you like it, I can get you more.”
I stared at the capsules in my palm. I was thirteen years old and fearless—already high with the deception that I’d managed to achieve—so of course I barely even hesitated before popping one in my mouth. Not just a half, but the whole thing, as Bettina watched with a wry smile.
She was right. It helped. Adderall made me feel quick and sharp; it made my lines rise up in my mouth almost as if I’d conjured them myself; it gave my performances a little edge that made the asshole director sit up and look at me as if seeing me for the first time. I finished off Bettina’s entire bottle before we’d wrapped the season. And then she sold me two more.
And that, my friends, was how I started down the long, slow road to addiction; and how Bettina became my very first drug dealer.
* * *
—
Fans of the show sometimes said that Elli and I should have been nominated for an Emmy that season, that something about the performances that year felt elevated and sparkling.
At the end of the season, they killed us off anyway. For the ratings, they said. We’d been murdered, at the tender age of fourteen.
* * *
—
On the drive back to Santa Barbara that June—the open sunroof baking the back seat of our mother’s new Mercedes with sun, the ocean glittering on our left and the shrubby bluffs looming on our right—Elli leaned across the seat and rested her head on my shoulder. She whispered in my ear, so our mother couldn’t hear: “We won’t do it again, OK? I’m glad you did that for me, but it doesn’t seem right. I don’t feel good about it.”
“Never again,” I whispered back.
But of course, we did.
9
THE TEMPERATURE GAUGE IN my car clicked up and up as I drove inland, away from the cooling ocean breezes of the coast and into the heat sink of the Ojai Valley. Over the winding hills and through the dusty oak groves, until the rolling peaks of the Topatopa Mountains came into view. By the time I reached the valley floor, the thermometer read 102 degrees. Horses stood listlessly in their pastures, seeking the shade of the shedding eucalyptuses. Orange groves shimmered like a mirage on either side of the car. Even the migrant workers who worked the farms were inside right now, out of the midday sun.
Four years earlier, I had stayed at a high-end rehab center not far from town, the kind of place where pop stars with substance abuse problems go to dry out after they collapse onstage. It cost forty thousand dollars a month, and since my own savings were completely gone by then, Elli footed the bill. I bailed out a week early with a talent manager that I met there, a handsome huckster who had convinced me that we weren’t addicts “like the rest of these losers.” We snuck out after dark one night and headed to Los Angeles, where we checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel with a gram of cocaine and spent three days screwing our brains out and toasting our newly discovered “sobriety.” When I woke up on the fourth day, he was gone and had left me with a six-thousand-dollar hotel room bill.
Elli drove down from Santa Barbara and paid the hotel bill. She tried to convince me to check back into rehab and finish out my stint, but I couldn’t. I’d broken the rules and had been banned for life. I got pancakes with her at Norms and apologized for being the worst sister in the world and we both cried; and then after she left I took an Uber straight to a bar and got obliterated. I was a terrible human.
Point is—I hadn’t been back to Ojai since.
It hadn’t changed much. The town, once a home to Chumash Indians, was now a destination for affluent bohemians with eagle feather tattoos on their shoulder blades. Signs advertised Reiki treatments, energy alchemists, crystal healers, and food harmonics. Faded Tibetan prayer flags fluttered on fences outside of farmhouses that had been converted to massage centers. Even the fruit that fueled the town—citrus picked by a working-class population that was invisible to the weekending Hollywood crowd—suggested an underlying health.
Downtown Ojai consisted of a modest strip of stores under a Spanish Mission colonnade, a clutch of wine tasting rooms and boutiques selling sun hats and rope sandals, a single-screen movie theater with a crumbling fa?ade. Women in athleisure walked the streets, carrying reusable bags full of leafy vegetables. I felt pale and pasty and weak. I desperately wanted a macchiato but the signs all advertised vegan elixirs.
Caleb had offered to come with me today and I’d said no, concerned how my sister might react if I showed up at her retreat with a strange man in tow. Or maybe I just thought that I could handle this one myself. I don’t need no man. But as I drove through the streets of Ojai, I regretted leaving him behind. I had no clue where I was going. I could have used an extra set of eyes.