I'll Be You(24)
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.