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I stopped the day I started appearing on every channel. One day I was idly flipping channels, and I chanced upon a lady talking about how she’d created an Isaiah-meter to measure dudes’ hotness on. On a scale of 1 to 5, how Isaiah-hot is your date? Disgusting. Then the next day they had a ‘documentary’ about my dad, how he died, where he’s buried, and how to book a ticket to see the grave. There were pictures already of fans lining up in buses to the cemetery. My mom was devastated. She didn’t stop crying for two weeks. I didn’t cry. I was only disgusted.
When I stopped throwing up, a few days later, I made the decision: It was the radio for me from that day on. I just stopped using the internet. Completely. I haven’t slipped up in four years. Not once. Staying busy helps—but being scared to death of what I’ll see written about me is my main motivation.
Skye and my assistants scour the internet and the news every second of every day anyway, and they tell me what I need to know.
“No, I don’t watch the news,” I repeat to Spencer, who is just frozen on the screen, his mouth hanging open. “Why?”
“Oh, God.” He buries his head in his hands. His shoulders shake a little. “Well, this is the worst timing in history.”
“Wes,” I beg, “tell me, man. Please. Dammit, I… I can’t breathe.”
“Ok ok,” he sits up a bit. “I’m sending you a link. Eden was on the news a few years ago. She…” He freezes again and looks at me for a long time. I’m shaking all over. “Isaiah, I don’t know if it’s a good idea.”
“Tell me!” I scream. I spit a little too.
“Fine, fine. Just… promise me you won’t watch it alone, ok? You should…”
I end the call before he’s finished talking, and click on the link with trembling fingers.
The Elliot sisters chat room
Eden: Ok, so I’m sending this in one huge block of text, because I don’t know how else to tell you guys, but I wanted you to know that I’m leaving Issy Woo’s employ. I’ve left the hotel and am now waiting for a taxi. I hope to be able to get a flight once I get to the airport. I know there will be huge delays, and it will probably be more than 24 hours before I can finally get to New York. I’ll keep you updated whenever I have a signal.
You know why I wanted to leave in the beginning: he was ignoring me, he was weird with me, he didn’t even want to work with me. But four years ago, I had been the one to leave, so I felt that I owed it to him to be the one who stayed this time. I stayed because I had left before.
That’s what I kept telling myself.
How long was I going to stay? However long I could stand it. I felt I owed it to the boy he was.
Well, guess what? He’s not that boy any more. He hasn’t been that boy for a long time. Sometimes, I thought I could see that boy in him still, forgotten and lost and buried deep. That boy who saved me back when there was no one around.
But it turned out to be just my imagination.
He doesn’t exist anymore. And I’m done letting him hurt me.
thirty-three
I start watching the video. At some point, while I watch, I realize I’m being led to my car and being driven back to my hotel. But I don’t actually take in my surroundings. Guards open doors for me, propel me to walk, to stop, to go through doors they open for me. I pay no attention to any of it.
I’m in my room. I don’t take off my shoes.
I just keep watching.
In the video Spencer sent me, a news reporter starts talking in this professional voice. But there’s something wrong with him. His voice sounds completely toneless and professional, but meanwhile his face looks really pale, as if what he’s about to say is making him sick to his stomach.
“Edie, the stolen girl,” he announces the title of the documentary. “This is the gruesome and horrifying conclusion of Edie’s story, the girl who was kidnapped from her family when she was three months old and raised by her wealthy uncle until her late teens.”
I know this headline.‘Edie, the stolen girl’ has been all over the news in the past four years. It started popping up everywhere shortly after I got famous, and interest in it grew and grew to the point of obsession. Edie was a minor at the time, and her family went to court (and to any lengths) to stop the press from leaking her last name all over the planet.
Of course, since she had literally been on the news since she was kidnapped at three months old, her first name was already leaked. People already had known about ‘Edie, the stolen girl’ for more than ten years by the time her story became every headline in the country, and the world.
The presenter keeps rattling on about the facts of the kidnapping. Edie was kept locked in a single room for most of her life by her uncle, who told her that he was her father. Her mom died of a broken heart when Edie was ten. I heard all of this on the radio, many times over. God, I can’t listen to this again.
I rub a hand over my jaw. There is no getting away from this story. To this day, it still keeps blowing up every few months, as the media keep coming up with supposed news or follow-ups—that’s how juicy it was back then. People seem to be fascinated with this baby who survived her captor into adulthood and then was reunited with her family. The story captured me too. I remember listening to the updates, which lasted for months, on the radio. My gut twisted for that girl who, through no fault of her own, now had to deal with the fact that she had lived a lie her entire life. The emotional baggage she must carry, being abused and gaslit for fifteen years.
I can’t wrap my mind around it.
Whenever I think about this girl’s story, I feel so ashamed of my own, supposed problems. There is no heartbreak in my story when I compare it to this girl’s. Losing my dad and grandpa is a pain I will carry inside my heart like a bullet for the rest of my life, but this… This is a whole new level of grief. To lose your father, who was not really your father.
