“I’m quite bored enough.”
“I’m happy, Nadine,” she said firmly, her gaze utterly penetrating. “Deliriously happy. It turns out every cliché is true. So call it what you want: a whirlwind, falling hard and fast, soulmates even. Evidently joy is a thing you’re sorely missing—but you should bear that in mind when you pop your next pill. I’m happy and you’re not. I have everything and you have nothing.”
My heart pounded, and I had to still my hands to stop them curling into fists. I already knew all this. I was already angry about all this. But she was wrong—I didn’t have nothing. I hadso muchthat was at risk if she leaked those photos. So much that had me sitting here, swallowing everything she was leveling at me, when all I wanted was to throw her from my house, scream, perhaps even swing those itching fists …
(God, it had been so long since I wanted anything that wasn’t oblivion, and here was Harper, infuriating and cruel, and more than my anger or my upset was thewant, thehungerunfurling within me, to be so much more than this. To make her regret it.)
“Everything you have,” I said through clenched teeth. “You have because of me. It’s notyourjoy, Harper. It’s mine. Doesn’t that infuriate you, that you can taste me beneath it?”
“So long as you can taste me in your misery.” She steppedcloser and reached for my hair again. With the sudden frenzy of rage in my veins, each snip sounded like a shot. My goading had worked, I could see it in the tightening of her jaw. I could fall. I could destroy myself. I could, in her words,fucking die, and it wouldn’t change the fact she owed everything to me—“That bitch Harper Moore.”The whole world knew her name because they heard it on my lips. Every step up she climbed was another I had launched her to and nothing,nothingwould anger Harper more than the reminder of that.
“Don’t fret, darling,” she said cheerfully as she took the final lock. “If anyone can pull this off it’s you.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
She grasped my chin between her fingers and tilted it up to face her, standing so close her knees brushed mine.
“Your investigator,” she said quietly. “That’s how I knew, how I got those pictures, why I’m doing all this. You sent him after me, and I paid him double to turn back to you. Don’t test me next time. You can always lose worse than this.”
———
I called Lana the moment Harper left and got her to send a hair and makeup artist to my house.
I’d worked with Rebecca a few times, which meant she felt comfortable enough to berate me for “whatever the fuck” I’d done to my hair and why didn’t I call her the instant I got gum stuck in it and how had I done that anyway?
It was a weak lie, and she didn’t believe it for a second.
The fashionable look of the time was long with a center part, either dead straight or crinkled. But I took it back to a mid-’90s crop cut, messy and fun. Nothing I would have ever chosen for myself, but I was beyond caring about a thing like my hair.
Harper phoned me the first time I was photographed with it.
“Well, that’s not in the spirit of things, is it?”
“What did you expect me to do?” I countered. In no world did I imagine she thought I’d accept what she’d done. I was doing all this to keep the world from knowing about how badly I needed help—a cut like that was a veritable cry for it.
“I have something for you. I’ll courier it over,” she said instead of replying. “Tell DuPont not to bother sorting an outfit for the Kids’ Choice Awards. I’ve got you covered.”
———
I asked Amos to come over before it even arrived, and we unzipped the monstrosity together.
“No, absolutely not,” he said, stepping away from it in a huff. The KCAs were a week away. He’d prepared something cutesy and fun that stayed serious but leaned into the occasion.Double Down, that Disney film I’d been in, was nominated. It hadn’t done all that well in theaters, but its eventual TV premiere had sent tape sales skyrocketing, and now, two years after its release, it was nominated for a KCA. I wouldn’t have bothered attending, but my lack of a public relationship since Oisín meant the misogynistic media was beginning to push aspinster narrative, even if they didn’t call it that. Going to the Kids’ Choice Awards implied it was only a matter of circumstance, and I would indeed love a family one day.
I did not actually want children, though, and resented the fact I apparently needed to pretend to in order to make it as an Oscar-winning actress.
“I have to,” I said quietly, picking it up out of the wrapping.
Well, I guess we were about to test whether I really would look good in a burlap sack—because that’s what it was, a dress made of burlap. Four sacks stitched together shapelessly, one still with a logo emblazoned upon on it.
I thought of Harper telling me she’d force me to my knees. I thought of her at CADS, that night of almost friendship, telling me to wear my hair down. And I thought of her at ourBlood Weddingdebut, mocking my costume as I told her I’d outperform her in burlap.
Was this still all we were? I thought we’d moved beyond pettiness to the sort of hatred that rooted deep and became a driving force. But maybe we were the same as we ever were: me taking it all entirely too seriously and Harper only playing the game because it was a bit of fun.
“Nadine, do I need to stage a fucking intervention?” Amos asked, cringing away from the burlap like the fabric might taint him, and I nearly laughed because I was already waiting for the moment he left so I could pop a pill and hope it stopped the tears. How had it come to this?
I hadn’t done anything hard in a few days, and I knew Icouldn’t resist much longer, was already itching for a party, the dizziness, the forgetting of all this. I’d become reliant on substances to cope with everyday life, let alone whatever the fuck this was, and I just wanted to blaze out and not think about any of this.
“Look, is there anything you can do with this?” I asked, prodding at the sack.
