“Come with me,” I whispered, and grabbed my sister’s hand, dragging her off the dance floor and toward the bathroom. Once we were inside, I locked the door and began pulling off my dress.
Elli watched with confusion as I stripped down to my underwear. “What are you doing?”
“Put this on.” I shoved the dress at her. Jessie in scrawled cursive on the front. “Be me. Go kiss him.”
“Kiss Dale? I told you—”
“Kiss Nick.”
She laughed, a nervous snort that ended in a hiccup. “But he’s your boyfriend!”
I gripped her shoulders, turned her around, began unzipping the Jamie dress. “Consider it my birthday present to you.”
She stood there in her bra and panties, pale eyelet, her skin a milky blue in the fluorescent bathroom light. “Sam. I can’t.”
“You can. It’s just acting. You’re an actor, remember?” I pushed my cup into her hand, with the salty remains of my half-drunk margarita. “Drink this. Then go out there and sit in his lap and just kiss him. He won’t know the difference. He’s loaded.”
She gazed into my drink, a watery smile on her face. “You’re sure?” She tipped the glass to her mouth, grimaced, licked salt from the rim.
“I don’t want anything if you can’t have it, too,” I said, and I yanked my dress over her head.
* * *
—
Was it cruel of me to send her out like that, my alter ego’s name written across her body? Was I testing my new boyfriend—to see how well he really knew me? Or was I testing her, with the same question in mind? Elli and I had been each other before; were we still close enough to pull it off now?
Or was the whole setup with Nick just a ruse to claw her back over the gap that had formed between us? Was I forcing her into another secret in order to bind her to me?
* * *
—
And so I watched her, from the far side of the restaurant, as she made her way to my boyfriend. I noted the split second of hesitation, the wobble in those oversized heels, before she let herself sink into his lap. I saw her eyes blink once, in apparent surprise, as he slid his unsuspecting arms around her, still chatting with the girl beside him. And I didn’t turn away when she turned sideways in Nick’s embrace, tipped her face down, and pressed her lips to his.
I didn’t turn away; I watched. It was like I was watching myself in a mirror, and I was fascinated by my own reflection. The way my sister’s jaw moved up and down, the lump of his tongue in her mouth, how her hand slid up his back. Was that what I looked like when I was with him, too? I could almost feel him, his hard muscles bunching underneath her palm, his lips liquid under hers. It was as if I were with her in his lap, as if my sister and I had suddenly slid into one body. I felt a strange kind of joy, coupled with a pang of pain that I hadn’t anticipated: Did he not even notice? Were we truly that interchangeable?
And then her eyes flew open and she jerked up and out of his lap, flying away from him as if he’d electrocuted her. She stumbled toward the edge of the patio, ringed with potted palms.
I waited for her to look over at me. I waited for her to meet my eyes with implicit acknowledgment: Now I know what it feels like to kiss a boy. I get it. We can be closer again, now that we’ve shared the same experience.
But she wouldn’t look at me at all. Instead, she gripped the edge of a planter, bent over, and threw up in the dirt. Camera flashes bloomed bright all around her.
* * *
—
The photos ended up on a gossip website—“Sam Logan Pukes at Her Own Party”—and minted my new reputation as a Hollywood bad girl.
* * *
—
Our mother was the one who rescued Elli that night, spiriting her through the restaurant kitchen to clean her up and then out to our waiting Town Car. I never knew whether Elli told her or my mother figured out what had happened all on her own. But she found me hiding out in the bathroom and forced me to put back on my own vomit-crusted dress before marching me back through my own party.
“You can’t do that to other people, tricking them like that. And you cannot do that to Elli.” She yanked the zipper so hard that it bit into the skin of my back. “Maybe you think you can handle it, but she definitely can’t.”
“But she wanted to do it.”
My mother spun me around and looked at me, smoothing my hair away from my face. “She wants to make people happy. She wants to make you happy. She’ll do anything that someone tells her to do if she thinks that it will eliminate conflict. And that means that you have to be the smart one here, for the both of you.”
“Why is that on me?”
“Because.” My mother pressed her hand gently on my jaw. It was cool against my skin, but firm, as if she was holding my chin upright. There was a sadness in her face that I’d never seen before. Since we’d come back to L.A. and grown up so quickly, I’d taken our mother for granted—treated her like an employee, a manager, a chauffeur, a nuisance, an embarrassment. I’d forgotten what it felt like to have a mother who treats you like a child.
“Because you’re her twin sister and you love her,” she said. “And you need to watch out for her when she isn’t watching out for herself. If she ever really gets herself in trouble, you have to be capable of helping her. Just like she’ll help you.” She patted my face once, before withdrawing her hand. “You’re lucky, you have each other. Not all of us get that. So for God’s sake, darling, don’t throw it away.”
* * *
—
We graduated from high school toward the end of the third season of our show. Elli and I had applied for college at our parents’ insistence—my father put his foot down on that one, the tuition money being the primary reason he’d said yes to our acting in the first place—and managed to get admitted to the University of Southern California, University of California Santa Barbara, and New York University. I thought our destination was obvious: We would go to the film program at USC so that we could stay in town and continue working on our show.
Elli waited until the deadline had almost passed to tell me that she wouldn’t be joining me at USC.
“I’m moving back home,” she said. “I’m going to go to UC Santa Barbara.”
We were in our bedroom in our Los Angeles apartment, just home from production, our hair still sticky with product and makeup ringing our jawlines. Elli perched on the edge of her bed as I sat across from her on mine. Just a few feet divided us but it felt like a world. “So, you’re going to come in from Santa Barbara every time we need you on set? That’s a lot of driving.”
She twisted the bedsheet between her hands, balled it up in tightened fists. “That’s the thing. Our contract for the show is up for renewal, right? And I think…I think I don’t want to do it anymore. Now’s the time to bow out, before we sign another contract.”
I couldn’t breathe. I’d just taken two Valium to come down from performing all day and it felt like my heart was beating out of time, a jarring arrhythmia. “But—Harriet was going to renegotiate. She said we can double, maybe triple, our rate.”
“But then we have to commit to another two years.” A knot rose and fell in her throat; I could see how much effort this conversation was taking. Had our mother put her up to this? You have to be capable of helping her.
“OK.” My drug-loosened mind grappled at the strands of our conversation, tried to tie them back together. “OK. So we bail on this show, we use their offer as leverage to get cast on a better show. A…a prime-time show. Not a children’s network. Harriet could do that! She’ll get someone to write a pilot for us. Or…or…we write it ourselves! I was going to take screenwriting courses at USC anyway.”
“You’re not listening to me.” Elli smoothed the sheet down again, tried to iron out the wrinkles she’d just twisted into the linen. “I don’t want to perform anymore. I never really did. I only ever did it for you. Because you loved it and I knew you needed me to do it with you. But I’m done now. It’s not my world.”