I'll Be You(64)

Across the table, Sam laughed into her napkin and I thought I might explode with the joy of our secret.

I liked being Sam, more than I liked seeing myself in her. The Elli I saw mirrored back in Sam’s face was never quite as interesting, never quite as vivacious. I sometimes wondered why I didn’t just step into the Sam persona and stay there, forever. Why couldn’t we both be her?

Of course, I didn’t know then what lay ahead for her in life, how quickly she would crash.

The game stopped being fun on the night of our seventeenth birthday, the night I became Sam in order to kiss her boyfriend. When my lips met Nick’s—when I felt the strange, soft shock of his tongue—I suddenly knew that I’d given some critical piece of myself away to my sister. My first kiss had belonged to her; the desire he felt was for Sam, not me. I would never get that moment back. Some piece of first love was forever lost to me.

How much more of myself was I in danger of losing to our game?

Queasy, my stomach churning with Long Island Iced Tea, I’d leapt from Nick’s lap, but not before I’d seen my sister across the illuminated dance floor. She was watching us, her eyes hot with ownership. Not ownership of Nick, ownership of me. But—me as her, or her as me, or me as myself? It was all getting too confusing. Even drunk, I knew that we’d gone too far.

We had to stop, but I knew that if Sam had her way, we never would. And if I broke away—if I ended the game, killed our TV show, put space between us—it was going to tear Sam apart. What would happen to her if I wasn’t there to pick her up and set her straight?

Even then, even before she fell into the abyss, I understood where Sam was weak. She thought she was the tough one, the strong one, that she had to protect me from my fears—and she wasn’t wrong—but I also knew exactly what would make her fall apart. She was no good at all at being alone.



* * *



—

This was a Trigger Moment that I was unwilling to share, not with Iona, not with Dr. Cindy. I was afraid to tell them that I knew that Sam’s addiction was my fault, because I was afraid of getting lost in her, and so I sacrificed us in order to save myself. I was afraid of Reenacting this moment with them and changing it forever.

The guilt was all I had left of my sister, and so I clung to it, unwilling to let go.





19




I WAS IN A cult.

Even now, these many months later, these words feel strange in my mouth. Eleanor Hart, née Logan, former child actress, former cult member. Both feel equally antithetical to my vision of myself, and yet both are true.

When I first returned from Ojai, I spent many sleepless nights skimming cult recovery sites with names like Dare to Doubt and The Art of Leaving, reading testimonials and taking quizzes: Wonder if you are in a cult? Eleven important signs. I’d take the tests over and over, just in case the calculations might come out differently, absolving me of this particular sin—the sin of cluelessness—but the results were always the same. I could be absolved of nothing.

Like it or not, I had joined a cult.

Although what you also have to understand is that no one decides to join a cult. It’s something that sneaks up on you, like a frog in a pot with the heat turned up underneath it, swimming complacently in the warming water, until it boils alive.

You do not join a cult, because cults don’t advertise themselves as cults. They are self-help groups or spiritual movements or guru-centric religions. When you join one, you believe that you are simply being a proactive person identifying a core issue in your life and using a success strategy system to resolve it (this, at least, was the GenFem terminology). And how could that possibly be a bad thing? You weave your way through a world that beats a constant drum of self-improvement—whether through meditation or lip fillers or hypnotherapy, through watching Oprah or reading Deepak—and you believe that joining one of these groups is just another path toward a better you. Toward a brighter, shinier, more self-assured future.

You have to continue believing that, too; even as you find yourself spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to reach this ever-elusive brighter future; even as everyone you love is slowly peeled away from you; even when you find yourself locked inside a gated compound with a shaved head and a case of mild malnutrition. Even when you find yourself committing crimes in the name of self-improvement. Our innate compulsion toward confirmation bias means that until the moment when you feel that water boiling around you—the pain too excruciating to ignore—you will keep telling yourself that it’s everyone else who is getting it wrong. Because look how much you’ve already given up for this dream! You have to keep believing that you were right—that this isn’t a cult, for God’s sake; that your shiny future is still a possibility—because the only other option is to accept that you have made a colossal mistake.



* * *



—

I made a colossal mistake.

Somewhere, deep inside me, I knew this. Even before I left the GenFem compound, I think I was aware. The water had grown too hot to deny. What was happening there, in Ojai—what had happened to me, with my life, with Charlotte, with Sam—had moved beyond the soft boundaries of self-improvement and descended into a world that was downright bad.

And yet, when Sam tracked me down at the compound and looked me straight in the eyes and accused me of joining a cult, I still experienced a jolt of rejection. I joined a cult? Nononono. I did not. It wasn’t possible. Samantha was wrong. She was the one who would make that kind of mistake, not me. Never me.