I'll Be You(32)

And worse, now that I wasn’t Jenny Maxx anymore—or even Sam Logan, Actress—did that mean I was going to have to figure out how to be someone else? Who was Samantha Logan, Normal Kid, anyway?

My only concession to a social life in Santa Barbara was joining the film club, where I was the solitary girl among a group of kindly male geeks who spent their weekends debating the merits of assorted Criterion Collection films and gaping at me. When I was with them, I felt like I was onstage. I liked that.

To placate me—and to keep our résumés current—Harriet booked Elli and me a few small parts in big movies and guest appearances in network dramas, jobs that pulled us out of school for a week at a time. Our absences were forgiven by the high school principal, who liked to brag about his celebrity students to incoming parents. But this probably didn’t help our situation when it came to our peers. Our recurring absences and special treatment just reminded the other students that we weren’t like them, no matter how much my sister pretended otherwise.

I hated it in Santa Barbara. I hated how different I felt from the other girls in the school. Worse, I hated how much Elli wanted to be like them; it was as if she’d spent the last four years living on Mars and now was studying at the feet of earthlings, trying to pass as one even though she and I were (I knew!) creatures of the stars.

But most of all, I hated how I could feel her slipping away from me. Different homerooms, different class schedules, different after-school activities. Elli’s weekends were filled with soccer games and sleepovers; only rarely could I talk her into going on a hike with me in Rattlesnake Canyon or taking the bus to Starbucks. When I saw her in the hallways at school, she was always trailing after the group of popular girls she’d befriended; and even though she’d wave at me, beckon me into her circle, I knew I wasn’t welcome. One twin was already too much spectacle for them; if I hung on, too, I’d doom my sister’s chances.

In my parents’ brand-new house, paid for with their proceeds from To the Maxx, we each had our own bedroom, something we hadn’t requested but that had been presented to us as if it was a gift. To me, it felt like a punishment. I hated not being able to hear Elli’s breath when I woke up in the middle of the night. I missed the stuffy intimacy of our tiny set trailer, ripe with our shared stink. Even the epic dollhouse that Elli had built for the two of us, all those years ago, had ended up in the trash when we moved.

Most of that year I felt like half of me had been ripped away and I was standing there, exposed and raw, hoping that Elli would come back to complete me.



* * *



—

One afternoon, as I sat in a bathroom stall killing time between classes, I overheard two of Elli’s new friends talking about us.

“They’re not even that good. I mean, that show they were on is so cheesy, right? My grandma watches it. And they got killed off, which means that the audience didn’t like them very much.” I recognized the sharp crystal tones of the voice lifting over the stall door. It was a pretty redhead named Annika, a cheerleader who doodled lists of her best friends’ names on her binder during class. I sat behind her in math and I could see over her shoulder. Elli had never made Annika’s list. “You’re a much better actress.”

“I mean, thank you. But yes, right?” I could hear the faint pop of lip gloss being uncorked, the sound of smacking lips. This was Brittany, a bulimic brunette who, until we showed up, had considered herself the class thespian. She was currently playing the role of Red Riding Hood in the school production of Into the Woods—a production I’d carefully stayed far away from, not only because I couldn’t sing but because I didn’t want to come off as attention-seeking and damage Elli’s efforts at friendship.

I’d gone to the opening night with Elli, though. Brittany’s performance was pitchy and overwrought.

“They think they’re so special. I mean, they didn’t even go out for the musical; like, they think they’re better than us?”

The sandpaper rattle of paper towels being yanked from a dispenser, then, “Sam does. Elli is just kind of a fake, so nicey-nice all the time. It’s so obvious that she wants so badly for us to like her.”

“She’s the one who follows me around like a puppy dog, right?” Annika snickered. “Honestly, I can’t really tell them apart.”

A squeak of the door hinges and they were gone. I sat on the toilet seat, enraged; not because their assessments of us were so wrong (Elli was nicey-nice, and I did think myself better than Brittany), but because of their unwillingness to be generous about it. The ego of a teenage girl is a vicious thing; it relies on manufactured superiority to counteract all that rampant insecurity. We intimidated these girls, Elli and I, with our Hollywood polish and our knowledge of a life they only read about in magazines. We were never going to fit in.

I moved through the rest of that year like an unmoored sleepwalker, popping Adderall just so that I could feel alive, the way I had on set when I was playing two parts. It didn’t help.

And so, when Harriet came to us at the end of that school year with a dream role—starring as twins in a new Nickelodeon series—I pushed Elli to take the job. No, that’s not quite true: I manipulated her. I wept on her bed as she stared at me with alarm, my tears only slightly enhanced—even then, I was good at crying on cue—wailing, “I hate it here, the girls are so mean, we don’t fit in.”