Genuine Fraud(36)

“I took everything I had been wearing and put it all in a plastic grocery bag. In the morning I pretended like I was going to school.”

Jule dropped her hands to her sides. She suddenly felt tired and dizzy and empty.

“Was he dead?” Kenny’s lady asked.

“He wasn’t dead, ma’am,” Jule said slowly. “I searched for his name online. I searched every day for it and it never came up, except in a local paper, next to a photograph. He won a poetry contest.”

“For real?”

“He never reported what happened. That was the night I knew who I was,” Jule told Kenny’s lady. “I knew what I was capable of. Do you understand me, ma’am?”

“I’m glad he wasn’t dead, honey. I think you’re not used to drinking.”

“I never drink.”

“Listen. I had that thing happen to me, years back,” said the lady. “Like that girl you talked about. I don’t like to bring it up, but it’s true. I worked through it and I’m all right now, you hear?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“I thought you’d want to know that.”

Jule looked at the lady. She was a beautiful lady, and Kenny was a lucky man. “Do you know Kenny’s real name?” Jule asked. “What’s Kenny’s real name?”

“Let me take you to your room,” the lady said. “I should make sure you get there all right.”

“That was when I felt the hero inside me,” said Jule.

After that she was in her room and the world went black.





Jule woke up the next morning with blisters. Each hand had four pus-filled lumps on the palms, just below the fingers.

She lay in bed and looked at them. She reached for her jade ring on the bedside table. It wouldn’t slide on. Her fingers were too swollen.

She popped each blister and let the liquid soak into the soft white hotel sheet. The skin would callous over faster this way.

This isn’t a movie about a girl who breaks up with her undermining boyfriend, she thought. This isn’t a movie about a girl who breaks away from her controlling mother, either. It’s not about some great white hetero hero who loves a woman he needs to save or teams up with a lesser-powered woman in a skintight suit.

I am the center of the story now, Jule said to herself. I don’t have to weigh very little, wear very little, or have my teeth fixed.

I am the center.

As soon as she sat up, the gagging started. Jule rushed to the bathroom and pressed her blistered palms to the cool of the bathroom floor and heaved nothing into the toilet.

Nothing and more nothing. The gagging went on for what seemed like hours, her throat constricting and releasing. She pressed a washcloth to her face. It came back wet. She huddled around herself, shaking and heaving.

Finally, her breathing slowed.

Jule stood up. She made coffee and drank it. Then she opened Immie’s backpack.

There was Immie’s wallet. It had a million small pockets and a silver clasp. Inside were credit cards, receipts, a Martha’s Vineyard library card, a Vassar ID, a Vassar dining hall meal card, a Starbucks card, a health insurance card, and the key card for Immie’s hotel room. Six hundred and twelve dollars, in cash.

Jule opened Immie’s package, delivered yesterday. Inside were clothes FedExed from an online retailer. Four dresses, two shirts, a pair of jeans, a silk sweater. Each item was so expensive Jule put her hand over her mouth involuntarily when she looked at the packing sheet.

Immie’s room was next door. Jule had the key card now. The room was clean. In the bathroom, a grubby makeup bag sat on the counter. In it, Jule found Imogen’s passport, plus a surprising number of tubes and compacts, all disorganized. On the towel rack hung an ugly beige bra. There was a razor with a few stray hairs in it.

Jule took Immie’s passport and looked at the photograph next to her own face in the glass. The height difference was only an inch. The eye color was listed as green. Immie’s hair was lighter. Jule’s weight was significantly higher, but most of that was muscle and didn’t show under certain clothes.

She pulled the Vassar IDs from Immie’s wallet and looked at those. The meal card photo clearly showed Immie’s long neck and her triple-pierced ear. The student ID was smaller and blurrier. It didn’t show the ear. Jule could easily use that one.

She cut the meal card into tiny pieces with nail scissors and flushed the pieces down the toilet.

Then she plucked her eyebrows—thin, like Immie’s. She cut her bangs shorter with nail scissors. She found Immie’s collection of vintage engraved rings: the amethyst fox, the silhouette, the wooden carving of the duck, a sapphire one with a bumblebee, a silver elephant, a silver leaping rabbit, and a green jade frog. They wouldn’t fit on her swollen hands.





The next couple of days were spent going through Immie’s computer files. Jule used both rooms. They were air-conditioned. Sometimes she opened a terrace door to let the thick heat pour in over her. She ate chocolate chip pancakes and drank mango juice from room service.

Immie’s bank and investment accounts had a total of eight million dollars in them. Jule memorized numbers and passwords. Phone numbers and email addresses, too.

She learned Imogen’s looping signature from the passport and the inside flaps of Immie’s books. She copied other handwriting from a notepad Immie had, which was covered with doodles and shopping lists. After creating an electronic signature, she found the name of Immie’s family lawyer. She told him she (Immie) would be traveling a lot in the next year, going around the world. She wanted to make a will. The money would be left to a friend who didn’t have much, a friend who was an orphan and had lost her college scholarship: Julietta West Williams. She also left money to the North Shore Animal League and to the National Kidney Foundation.