I'll Be You(33)

“They’re not that bad.” She sounded crumpled, like a wad of discarded Kleenex. “They all grew up together and we’re strangers to them. We intimidate them. We need to prove ourselves. You need to put some effort in. It’ll just take time.”

I could tell that the idea of going back to Hollywood panicked her. I was panicked, too. In her fearful blue eyes I saw my own future drying up and blowing away, like dead leaves scattered by a fall wind. If I let Elli win this time, I knew that it meant we would never act together again. Instead, I would be stuck here, in Santa Barbara, watching my sister drift further and further away, having lost not just one of the things I loved the most but all of them.

I let selfishness win.

“I don’t want to waste any more time.” I swallowed, dredged up the ammunition I’d been saving up since the day I first put on Elli’s face and walked on set: “You owe me. For when I pretended to be you. I did that for you. It’s your turn to do something for me. I want this.”

Her throat moved up and down; she was swallowing back her tears. “I know, but—”

But I hate acting. She didn’t have to say it, because I knew it already. Even then, I understood that performance went against my sister’s instincts. I thought I could find myself in a character; she was afraid of losing herself. She didn’t want to be onstage, pretending to be someone else. She mostly wanted to be left alone.

Maybe that scared me. Maybe that’s why I pulled out the big cudgel, the one I knew would make her do what I wanted.

“Don’t do this to us,” I said. “Don’t ruin our relationship. Because you will if you say no.”

She pushed the palm of her hand into an eye, smeared away a tear. She sighed. “Fine.”

“Thank you.” I hugged her, feeling her soften and grow limp in my arms. As toddlers, we’d slept in the same bed, our arms wrapped around each other, breathing in time. These days, I realized, we rarely touched each other. As I pressed my face into her hair, the smell of her came as a shock to me. There was the shampoo we both used, and the citrus of our mother’s detergent, and the familiar sweet tang of our identical body odor; but there was something new underneath this now, something dangerously unfamiliar to me. A sour tang, like a frightened animal: the scent of our growing difference.

I pushed this aside. We were going back to Hollywood. We were going to be together again.



* * *



—

Before, on To the Maxx, we’d been token children on a show for and about adults. There were rarely any other kids on set. This time, we were teenagers doing a show on a kids’ network with a whole portfolio of fresh-faced young stars. It was a whole new ball game.

Finally, finally, my sister and I had each been given our own part. She was Jamie and I was Jessie, twins separated at birth who end up at the same high school by accident. The parts had been written to fit our personalities—Jessie the bold one, Jamie the straitlaced one—which suited Elli just fine, as it didn’t require much of a stretch on her part. And if I chafed a little at the corny dialogue the writers put in our mouths, or the ludicrous scenarios they imagined for us—well, at least I was being treated like the main event now, instead of a footnote in someone else’s story.

The television executives imagined they had a new pair of Olsen twins on their hands—and I, for one, was prepared to believe them—but in retrospect nothing about our show was ever going to launch us toward that level of stardom. On the Double was totally mediocre. No one beyond a subset of eleven-to sixteen-year-old girls watched it. And yet, in the small world that we inhabited, we felt enormous. The tweens that did tune in were rabid fans. We couldn’t get a pedicure without a shrieking pubescent accosting us for an autograph.

There were promotional events, so many obligatory appearances at mall openings and amusement parks and morning shows. Often, we did these with the other teens in our network’s lineup: the four girls who played members of a teen rock band, the boy in a wheelchair who played a detective in a teen mystery show, the two kids who played sibling ghosts. We were part of a family of teen stars now. We attended set school with them; we got invited to the same brand-sponsored pool parties; we ate lunch together in the backlot cafeteria and complained about the executives who controlled our every move and the stylists who chose our clothes. For the first time, it felt like we had real peers, and I could tell that made my sister happier.

I’d believed that being back in Hollywood would bring my sister and me close again: a return to the swampy intimacy of trailer living and shared moisturizer, our own little world of two. And for a while, it did. The moments when we weren’t in each other’s company were rare. Most days we were on the studio lot, standing side by side under the hot lights, all eyes on us as we built a show together. At night, we whispered each other to sleep: gossip from the set, who we had crushes on and who we disliked. I did my homework with my head in Elli’s lap. She popped the zits on my back.

But being close again presented issues of its own. Because I had secrets now, and while I was adept at hiding them from my mother and the crew on our show (if nothing else, acting had taught me the art of deception), it was much harder to conceal them from my sister.

Elli found the Adderall one night, late in our first season. We were back at the apartment, studying the next day’s scenes while our mother made dinner. She’d gone fishing for a stick of gum in my purse and came up with the half-empty bottle instead. She held it up to the light, jiggled it, frowned. “What the hell are these, Sam?”