I'll Be You(36)

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We graduated from high school toward the end of the third season of our show. Elli and I had applied for college at our parents’ insistence—my father put his foot down on that one, the tuition money being the primary reason he’d said yes to our acting in the first place—and managed to get admitted to the University of Southern California, University of California Santa Barbara, and New York University. I thought our destination was obvious: We would go to the film program at USC so that we could stay in town and continue working on our show.

Elli waited until the deadline had almost passed to tell me that she wouldn’t be joining me at USC.

“I’m moving back home,” she said. “I’m going to go to UC Santa Barbara.”

We were in our bedroom in our Los Angeles apartment, just home from production, our hair still sticky with product and makeup ringing our jawlines. Elli perched on the edge of her bed as I sat across from her on mine. Just a few feet divided us but it felt like a world. “So, you’re going to come in from Santa Barbara every time we need you on set? That’s a lot of driving.”

She twisted the bedsheet between her hands, balled it up in tightened fists. “That’s the thing. Our contract for the show is up for renewal, right? And I think…I think I don’t want to do it anymore. Now’s the time to bow out, before we sign another contract.”

I couldn’t breathe. I’d just taken two Valium to come down from performing all day and it felt like my heart was beating out of time, a jarring arrhythmia. “But—Harriet was going to renegotiate. She said we can double, maybe triple, our rate.”

“But then we have to commit to another two years.” A knot rose and fell in her throat; I could see how much effort this conversation was taking. Had our mother put her up to this? You have to be capable of helping her.

“OK.” My drug-loosened mind grappled at the strands of our conversation, tried to tie them back together. “OK. So we bail on this show, we use their offer as leverage to get cast on a better show. A…a prime-time show. Not a children’s network. Harriet could do that! She’ll get someone to write a pilot for us. Or…or…we write it ourselves! I was going to take screenwriting courses at USC anyway.”

“You’re not listening to me.” Elli smoothed the sheet down again, tried to iron out the wrinkles she’d just twisted into the linen. “I don’t want to perform anymore. I never really did. I only ever did it for you. Because you loved it and I knew you needed me to do it with you. But I’m done now. It’s not my world.”

“But it’s mine,” I whispered.

She stood and crossed over to sit next to me, pressed her knee against mine. I’d grown skinnier than her, I noticed; the pills I was taking were suppressing my appetite. “So you keep doing it. We don’t need to do everything together, you know. You can go out there and be your own star. Not just one-half of a pair. You can be you.”



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We killed our contract a few weeks later, much to Harriet’s dismay. On the Double died its untimely death, immediately relegated to the ash bin of forgotten kids’ TV series. I helped my sister pack her things and drove her and my mother back to Santa Barbara. I even spent the summer with them there, tanning on the beach and getting pedicures and going to bonfires with some of Elli’s old high school friends. They were nicer to us now that we were legitimate stars.

When the school year began, I drove back to Los Angeles, started college, and began going out for auditions alone. I ran around the city like a madwoman, juggling scripts and homework, using Adderall and Ritalin and the occasional line of cocaine to stay focused, then relying on booze and Valium to relax at the end of the day. I was finally living alone, far from the watchful eyes of my family, which meant that I could party as much as I wanted without getting the side-eye from my sister. And since I didn’t have to hide my habits anymore, I let them balloon to fill up the empty space in my life where Elli had once been.

Before I was even legally old enough to drink, I’d become a full-blown addict.



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The thing about addiction stories is that they are all the same, and they are boring. God knows I’ve heard enough of them to know. I’ve heard them at AA meetings and NA meetings, in group therapy circles at residential rehab centers and in books that my rehab counselors gave me to read. I’ve sat over cups of coffee in darkened cafés and let my new recovery friends spill their tales of woe to me, just as I’ve spilled mine, both of us hoping that our confessions might cement a new intimacy that would somehow keep us both sober.

It rarely did. And then when we found each other again, on the other side of yet another relapse, mostly what I’d feel was shame, to be repeating the same sad story that everyone had already heard before, hoping that this time it might finally culminate in a happy ending.

So, at the risk of boring you utterly, I will make my own addiction story brief.

At thirteen, as you already know, I took my first Adderall.

At fifteen, at a Grammy preparty, I had my first drink (a margarita, puckery and sweet, which remained my go-to cocktail for the next fifteen years).

At sixteen, with Nick, I smoked pot for the first time.