I'll Be You(34)

I looked up from my script. Elli thrust the pill bottle toward me, shook it like a rattle. In the kitchen, my mother was warming up takeout ramen; I heard the beep of the microwave and the faint murmur of her voice on the phone with our father, reporting in on our day.

“Shhh,” I hushed my sister. I jumped up and snatched the bottle from Elli’s hand. “They’re for concentrating.”

Elli looked confused. “You never had a problem concentrating before.”

“I was taking these before.”

“Oh.” She wrapped a strand of hair around her finger, twisted it tight. It was brittle from the highlights and hairspray they used on it. “Where do you even get it?”

I was getting it from a wardrobe assistant. Bettina was long gone, but it turned out that prescription pills of all varieties are easy to find on a set staffed by twentysomethings otherwise paid minimum wage. “The set doctor,” I lied. I popped open the pill bottle, poured a few capsules into my palm and thrust them toward her. “Here, try one. You’ll see. It’s no big deal. It’s kind of like coffee.”

I wanted her to take one. I wanted her to join me inside its pleasant penumbra, for the pill to wake her up and make her feel alive the way it made me. I wanted the pills to be another thing that we shared, a circle we could draw around our secret world. Maybe I already knew then that our differences were starting to be greater than our similarities, that the shared face that bound us together was being overpowered by the disparities in our personalities.

She made a face and drew back. “Coffee makes me jittery.”

Our mother appeared in the doorframe, steaming bowls in her hand. “Don’t tell Mom, OK?” I whispered.

And she didn’t—not that year, at least—but I could tell that the pills were a wedge that had been pushed between us. I saw how she would stare at me sometimes, when she thought I wasn’t paying attention: As if she were trying to see something hidden underneath my skin. As if I were a puzzle she didn’t know how to piece together anymore.



* * *



—

A year passed, and part of another, and we were turning seventeen as B-list stars. The studio threw us a birthday party at a Mexican restaurant in West Hollywood, with a cake that featured our faces rendered in frosting and a phalanx of photographers from the gossip websites and magazines that fed our teenage fans. Because it was a promotional event, the studio sent a stylist out with our outfits: identical silver dresses, with our characters’ signatures scrawled across the front in pink sequins. Jessie and Jamie were apparently turning seventeen, not Elli and Sam.

All of young Hollywood was there. I’d recently acquired my first boyfriend. Nick was two years older than me, possessed a fatal set of dimples and a whoosh of curly black hair, and was the star of his own eponymous game show on the same network as us. Nick had 429,010 followers on Facebook, mostly underage girls who cropped me out of the paparazzi photos of us that appeared online. Nick liked me, and he also liked to party, so he had recently introduced me to tequila and pot. I was on the verge of losing my virginity, though I’d held off out of a sense of allegiance to my sister.

Elli still had never been kissed. The erstwhile fame that I used to boost my self-confidence did the opposite to her: She constantly questioned the motivations of the people around us. As a result, boys who found us attractive seemed to gravitate to me—Sam the fun one, always ready for a good time—instead of her. And this felt like another wedge that was being driven between us, a widening gap that I was starting to worry we might never be able to close.

The night of our birthday party, I talked Elli into drinking a Long Island Iced Tea—Iced tea! It’s practically a soft drink!—and she got tipsy enough to join me on the light-up dance floor that the studio had installed under the stars. We danced together to the Black Eyed Peas as the crowd watched, camera flashes popping like comets in the night sky, our hands on each other’s silvered hips, laughing as we stared with mock intensity into each other’s eyes. Purple and yellow patches of light blinked on and off beneath our feet.

I noticed a boy standing on the edge of the dance floor, too nervous to step out and join us: an actor who had just joined the cast of On the Double in a supporting role. “Dale’s staring at you,” I murmured in her ear, over the thump of the bass. “You should kiss him.”

She glanced over her shoulder to look at him. He was soft-chinned, wearing a plaid shirt that was buttoned slightly too high, as if his mother had dressed him. “Ew,” she whispered. “He’s a dork.”

“He’s cute!”

“He’s not nearly as cute as Nick and you know it.”

I pulled back to look at her face. She was flushed. Maybe it was just the alcohol, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Oh my God, you like Nick?”

She shook her head woozily, blond hair whipping around and catching on her lips. “Nooo!” She stumbled a little in the kitten heels the stylists had picked out for us, a half size too big. I looked around the patio and finally located Nick. He was lounging at a table in the far corner of the restaurant, smoking a cigarette and holding court with a group of girls I didn’t recognize. He looked smeary. He saw me staring at him and raised his glass in a mock toast. Cheers. Even then, I knew he was temporary.

But Elli wasn’t.

“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.