I'll Be You(22)

She shook her head. “We can’t share the address. Can you tell me how you learned about it?”

Roni was smiling, all solicitous concern, but something about the naked smoothness of her face put me on edge. I thought of a doll denuded of its hair, perpetually grinning. “My sister is there. I was hoping to go speak to her. We want to make sure she’s OK.”

The woman gave me a sharper look then, as if seeing me for the first time. The smile faded as she took me in, recognizing something in my face. “Sorry, your sister’s name is…?”

“Eleanor—Elli—Hart.”

I waited for understanding to dawn across her face—I’m speaking to Elli’s twin—but Roni’s face twitched only once before settling back into its unnervingly smooth mask. “Hmmm. I can’t say I recognize the name.”

She turned to walk over to one of the laptops, where she typed a few words into a search field. In the back of the room, the young woman was standing at the edge of the curtains, her hands clenching and unclenching the velvet. The room was silent except for the tip-tap of the keyboard. Finally, Roni spoke. “I’m not finding her in our database. You’re sure she’s part of GenFem?”

“Try Logan,” I said. “That’s her maiden name.”

Roni typed again, clicked a few buttons, let out a little sigh. She turned back to face us with an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry,” she said, and gave a tiny little shrug. “We have no record of your sister at all. She’s never been here.”

I was about to protest but I felt Caleb’s hand on my back, pinching the fabric of my T-shirt, tugging me back toward the door. “Our mistake,” he said. He reached down and extricated Charlotte’s damp hand from the fountain, folded it into his own, and then reached for Mae. “Thank you for your time.”



* * *



—

Outside, the girls raced toward the frozen yogurt shop, Charlotte dripping a trail of pennies behind her. Once we were out of eyeshot of the GenFem center, Caleb turned to look at me, a deep line splitting his forehead in two.

“They’re lying,” he said. “They don’t want us to know that she’s a member.”

“I know.”

“They clearly don’t want to tell you how to find her, either.”

“They acknowledged the existence of the retreat in Ojai, though. She’s there, I’m sure of it,” I said. “I just don’t know exactly where it is.”

He looked at me and frowned. “Ojai’s a small town,” he said. “How hard can it really be to find?”





THEN





8




THE FIRST TIME ELLI and I switched places, we were thirteen years old. We were a few months into the fourth season of To the Maxx and I had watched Elli grow more wan and apathetic by the day. It was late spring and she wanted to go back to Santa Barbara, to spend long days with her books and her iPod in the sun. “Wouldn’t you rather be at the beach than sitting on set every day?” she’d ask me, and when I said no, not at all, she would get petulant and pick at the tiny zits on her nose until Bettina, the makeup artist, swatted her hand away.

The director had noticed the change in her, too.

“Hey, you,” he barked at her on set one afternoon. Hey, you was what the crew fell back on when they couldn’t remember which one of us they were looking at, when the call sheet was misplaced and all they knew was that they had a twin in front of them. “Can we talk about how you’re playing this scene? You’re supposed to be happy that your mom is taking you to visit New York and instead you look like someone killed your cat.”

Elli sat glumly on the white shag rug of our mock bedroom. The plane ticket she was supposed to be clutching to her chest instead hung limply from her fist. The walls of the set ended just yards above her head; if you looked up past the lights, all you could see was the dark void of the backlot warehouse, the ceiling invisible in the gloom. It felt like we were on a spaceship, in the middle of a black hole, flying off into nowhere.

Paige Bart, who played Marci Maxx, gave Elli an encouraging little pat on her head. “It’s OK, honey, let’s go again.”

Elli smiled tremulously at Paige and tried her line again. “Oh, Mummy. You shouldn’t have done this. I know we can’t afford it.” The words caught in her throat and came out as a peevish whine. Paige flicked her eyes at the camera and raised an eyebrow.

“Cut!” the director screamed. From where I sat, in a chair just behind him, I could hear him murmur to the assistant director. “This one’s gotta be Elli, right? Can we get Samantha back?”

“We used up Sam’s hours already today. We’re stuck with Elli unless you want to strike and run it again with Sam tomorrow morning.”

The director swore under his breath, and then stood up. “OK, half-hour break, let’s regroup and try this again in a bit. Elli, go grab a Coke, get your blood sugar up, whatever it takes, OK, kid?”

My mother materialized out of the darkness behind me, a look of grim concern on her face as she stepped into the lights of the set. Elli saw her coming. She stood up and bolted for the exit, moving fast. I followed my sister out, blinking in the sudden flood of daylight, and chased her across the parking lot to our trailer. I could hear our mother behind us, calling our names.