Such a Bad Influence

c09

My mother has never looked better.

It’s been six days since I arrived at her house. Twelve days since Evie was last seen. I’ve spent the majority of my time here talking in circles with the detectives, scrolling on my phone, and waiting for news that hasn’t come. I’ve distracted myself with hours-long walks in the blistering heat, repeated listens to Evie’s favorite playlists. I can see what days she added certain songs, and I listen to them and picture the Tuesday or Thursday or Saturday in my head, imagine she was happy or sad or heartbroken. Seeking out more of her feels natural to me, like it’s the only thing to do. It’s taking care of myself that feels harder. It is taking everything in me to do the bare minimum—brush my teeth, shower, feed myself.

Meanwhile, my mother has the energy of someone who’s been on vacation for a week. Not happy, necessarily. Not unbothered. But there’s something about the situation that makes her seem like she’s in her element, the balanced eye of the storm while everything is in chaos around her. Terrifying, but unshakable. All the adrenaline has left her with something that I can only describe as a glow. I’m studying her face now, as we both sit at the giant antique farmhouse table in the kitchen. The table is ten feet long, and she’s all the way at the other end, staring at her phone, scrolling.

This is what we do now for dinners. We avoid each other most of the day, if the detectives aren’t here, but dinners we eat at the table. It’s our only time to really look at each other, to occupy the same space. We’ve learned to coexist in the house again, the same way we did when I was seventeen and eighteen, silently keeping an eye on each other, neither of us willing to back down.

“Hungry?” she says suddenly, looking up from her phone. “I made a kale salad. Lemon dressing.”

My mother eats salad like it’s been medically prescribed to her. She’s had one every single evening I’ve been here, even after the worst days—the one when the detectives finally told us they weren’t able to recover the parking lot security footage after all, for example, or when they explained that they found a set of prints on Evie’s phone and male DNA on the steering wheel, both unidentified.

On the nights that I’m able to feel my hunger, it hits me all at once, and I dream of escaping into my favorite foods—a heaping bowl of spaghetti pomodoro made with basil so fresh that the smell of it lingers on your hands the next morning. Thick, crispy hunks of sourdough toast topped with burrata and tomato jam. Stove-top popcorn, still warm, with pieces of dark chocolate thrown in, melting into the salt and butter. I fantasize about all of it, right here at this table, just like I did when I was seventeen. But I refuse to give her the satisfaction of knowing that I need more than a nightly salad. That I’m weak enough to crave something richer, heavier. That I need more. All of this is the same as it was at seventeen, too.

“Sure,” I say lightly. “Thank you.”

She moves to the kitchen to prepare it as I go back to my phone. In a different house, a different family maybe, this is when I would offer to help. To set the table. Grab two glasses of water. But that’s not how things work with us. We may be in this house together, but we aren’t working together on anything. We’re not cooking together. Not spiraling together. And we’re certainly not grieving together. No one wants to be the first person to do that. No one wants to be the first person to admit there might be something to grieve, not yet. There are tears, always from my mother, but only when the detectives are here. Like she’s saving the emotion for the people who can actually do something with it. And I can’t say I blame her. What am I going to do with her tears? What would she do with mine? This has never been a place for comfort.

A few minutes pass and my mom puts a wide, low-rimmed bowl in front of me, and it’s beautiful. The bowl, the salad, its tiny, gem-colored pomegranate seeds popping against the lush green of the kale. She brings her own bowl to the opposite end of the table and sits down. Her portion, I notice, is much smaller than mine.

“I just don’t crave a big dinner like you always did,” she says, noticing the way I’m eyeing the plates. “The lighter the meal, the better I sleep.”

It’s the kind of small talk that I’ve heard a million times before, a completely unnecessary tidbit of information that no one asked for. It might be a bit of a dig, but mostly it’s a family habit. My mom does it. I’m sure her mom did it. I’ve taught myself not to do it out loud, but it still happens in my head. And now Evie does, too, despite my best efforts to make sure she was safer. Hunger has always required an explanation in this family.

The last time I saw Evie in person was more than a month ago. She had driven all the way to Vegas to visit me, her first major trip in a brand-new car. She had insisted we spend the afternoon driving around together, even though she had been driving all morning long. I chose the playlist, and we spent an hour or so blasting our favorite songs and driving down long, empty stretches of highway, clouds of dust everywhere. The sky was starting to fade to pink and orange when we had stopped for In-N-Out for dinner, a tradition on these road trips to nowhere, as we called them. We had just pulled into a parking spot to eat when I’d lifted my phone above our meals—double-double for me, protein style for Evie—to snap a photo without thinking. Evie groaned before I had even put down the phone.

“What?” I said, confused. “Is it because it’s a millennial thing? Am I cringe? I am, aren’t I? I get it. And you know what? I’ve accepted it. I’m owning it. I am cringe and I have a side part and I am alive.”

“No,” Evie said, though she didn’t say it with a laugh like I was hoping. “It’s not that. And I’ve already told you that the side part thing is a myth. It’s the jeans that are the real problem.”

I threw one of my fries at her. “How dare you. My ass looks phenomenal in these jeans.”

She laughed that time, but she was still stuck on the photo. “Just don’t post it, okay?”

The request surprised me, because I knew Evie had seen how carefully I had approached my own social media when it came to her. My account was private, though a few Evie superfans had managed to start following me over the years; I’d drunkenly pressed ACCEPT on random requests or misread a username. It didn’t really matter, though, because there wasn’t much for these fans to see. I had made a point for years not to share photos of my sister on social media. I was all too aware of just how much it looked like I was trying to use the photos to selfishly signal something to the world. To say: look who my sister is! So instead, I didn’t really share photos of Evie. Or even myself, for that matter. At this point, my Instagram grid was mostly made of pictures of books, food, and nature. No Evie in sight. So where was this concern coming from?

“You’re not even in it, Ev,” I said gently. “But that’s fine. I won’t post.”

“The car. They’ll know it’s mine from the color of the interior,” she said, matter-of-factly, like it didn’t sound insane at all. “And it’s just—the burger. The lettuce instead of the bun. They’ll assume I’m dieting.”

I took a sip of my drink, studying her slightly anxious expression as I decide how to reply now. I’ve always treaded carefully around food with my sister.

“Well…aren’t you?” I eventually asked, making a point to keep my tone light, casual, anything but accusatory or judgmental. Immediately, though, I saw how sad the question made her, how the anxious line across her brow seemed to deepen. Wrong question.

“Not really. It’s not—it’s not forever or anything. I just have this big campaign coming up and I really can’t deal with the comments. If I’m dieting, I’m a bad influence on everyone who follows me. If I’m not dieting, I’m too big.”

Evie? Too big? The idea was so utterly absurd that I wanted to laugh, but I kept quiet.

I forced myself not to say anything.

“I saw a comment the other day that said, ‘Our midsized queen!’?” Evie went on. “I’m a size four. Sometimes a six, I guess. But also sometimes a two. I couldn’t tell if they were joking or not. Is four midsize now? Should I, like, lean into that?”

She can’t be serious, I thought. Could she?

I looked over and she was pulling apart the piece of lettuce that was poorly substituting as a bun. She seemed nervous, worried. Embarrassed, even.

I knew the feeling, of course; I had been a teenager once, too. I had felt the same pressures, the same concerns about not fitting into whatever box of attractiveness was required that year. I still remembered the agonizing span of my early twenties when I realized that I was still doing the same thing I had at fifteen, staring in the mirror and waiting for a new body and face to arrive. I still hadn’t accepted they might never come.

Part of me always thought that Evie’s beauty—those eyes and that face and all the other things about her that made her so easy for the world to look at every day—would give her a different story. She’d never feel as bad as I did, I thought. She’d never be as hard on herself as Mom was, as quick to change her face. She’d check her messages, her comments, and realize that everyone wants to look like her. That she’s the standard. And even if she didn’t see it, I figured the mere existence of social media would remind her of the thing I never really believed in middle school or high school: that there are all kinds of ways to be beautiful. I thought a world with body positivity and plus-size models and a universal condemnation of “almond moms” would be easier to navigate. But the opposite had proved true.

Evie was like any other eighteen-year-old, oblivious to her own smooth skin and shiny hair, hyperfocused on becoming that impossible level of desirable in which you stand out and fit in in equal measure. Our mom certainly didn’t help. But what made things particularly hard was that Evie couldn’t talk about any of it. Couldn’t acknowledge it even once. No one wants to hear a beautiful girl cry that she’s not beautiful enough or see someone diet who is already thin by any standard. No one wants to hear how hard it is to be a teenage girl, even if everyone knows being a teenage girl is impossible. I knew this because I felt the same way sometimes. I couldn’t stand to see her most human moments—the dieting, the obsession with angles, the Photoshop of a barely there stretch mark. If I was honest with myself, I was just like everyone else. I said if I looked like her, if I had what she had, then I wouldn’t waste a single second trying to change any of it, and I hated it when she did.

“You look great. Always,” I reassured her, trying again to keep things positive, uplifting. “And a four is only midsize if you consider that the largest size a human could be is, like, a size eight. And that is…a pretty disturbing concept.”

She smiled, finally taking a bite of her food.

“Though,” I added, “based on the truly horrific experience I had last weekend in a Zara dressing room, that may actually be the case for some brands.”

A laugh then from Evie. A real one. It felt like winning.

I smiled and pushed back the memory behind the joke, ignoring the rest of the story—the fact that I had gone to the mall searching for a dress that I had seen Evie wear on Instagram. I made a point not to dress like my sister, for a lot of reasons. I was older, we had different body types, and the last thing I was searching for was more comparisons between the two of us. But I had my college roommate’s wedding coming up and had bought and returned so many other options that I was starting to worry that I’d end up wearing an oversized sleep shirt and a pair of heels to the ceremony. Plus, this particular dress was cute. Really cute. It had looked so good on Evie, and on so many of the people who had bought it, who’d tagged her in their fitting room photos, who she’d reposted to her stories. Besides, who said I was immune to being influenced, too? In the end, I fell into the same state of mind that everyone who follows my sister does, thinking that maybe we’re not that different. Plus, the dress came in multiple colors and patterns—it’s not like I was going to wear the same exact one as Evie Davis, SuperInfluencer.

It was only halfway over my shoulders in the dressing room when I considered that I should turn back, not pass go. There was a very clear series of red flags telling me that if I forced this garment on my body it would not be coming off without a fight. But Evie wore this dress. So why couldn’t I?

I pushed on. I will make this work, I told myself. It’s a dress, not a wetsuit. It felt like a wetsuit, yes, but that was beside the point. After a few completely unnatural contortions and a good deal of sweat, I got the garment on my body. By that point, though, I was floating above myself somewhere near the large fluorescent lights overhead, watching me below, my body stuffed uncomfortably into the dress. I looked like a piece of fried chicken sitting under a heat lamp. Lumpy, greasy, overheated. I had gotten the dress on, sure, but at what cost? Blood flow was being cut off somewhere, I just knew it. I imagined that the only way I’d be getting out of this thing would be via the Jaws of Life, that a very hot (they’re always hot) fireman would make his way through the fitting room curtain and be forced to cut the dress off my body.

Eventually, using this scenario as motivation, I managed to get myself out of the thing. I exhaled, letting my body expand to its normal size once again, and looked at the tag, but I already knew. It was the largest size they sold. And, I realized, the side seam of the dress had ripped.

Maybe I could have just left it there, pretended that it was already damaged before. Or simply explained the situation. But I didn’t have it in me. The dress from hell was going home with me. I emerged from the fitting room drenched in my own sweat, my hair matted to my forehead, my face flushed. I balled the dress up in one of my hands, hiding the damaged seam, and went to the counter to buy it.

The associate at the cash register smiled and asked me if I found everything I was looking for today and what I really wanted to say was: you have no idea what I’ve been through. And: why is it eighty-five degrees in there? And: curtains instead of doors in dressing rooms should be illegal. But instead I smiled and nodded.

The associate carefully folded the garment, and then their eyes lit up. “Oh, my gosh,” they said. “Do you follow Evie Davis? We’ve been selling out of this left and right ever since she shared it. I can’t believe you got the last in this size.”

“Me either!” I replied, forcing an extra-wide smile on my face as I handed over my credit card and walked out of the store, forty dollars less to my name and filled with the intense urge to cry.

I got to my car and threw the dress in the trunk, where it would likely stay for months. I didn’t want to look at it. I knew it was just a dress. That I should brush it off, watch some body-neutral video content about how clothes are supposed to be made to fit our bodies and not the other way around, blah, blah, blah, but I can’t. I can’t get over how effortlessly beautiful the dress had looked on my little sister, how quickly I had forgotten just how good she was at this. How good she was at making one dress represent a whole other way of existing, an easier, lighter, more beautiful way of being you. That was the appeal of Evie, I remembered, she made it all look so easy. I tried not to hold it against her that it never really was for me.

I’m midbite, barely tasting the salad, when I feel a knot start to form in my throat. The same one that always comes now when I think of Evie, her face, her laugh. The ways I failed her, the tiny cracks in our relationship that I ignored. Every day she’s gone feels one day closer to learning the worst. I desperately want to leave here, to deal with this somewhere else. Cry and eat and fall apart alone, like I always have. But leaving would mean there’s nothing else to do. That she’s a more permanent type of gone, the kind that means it’s time to move on. And I’m not ready for that. As long as I’m here, it means there’s still hope.

I set my fork down and take a drink of water, swallowing down the emotion. Not now. Like every other time this has happened since I’ve been here, I calm myself down by walking through the facts of the last few days. The things I know. I start at the beginning, replaying the first conversation with Gavin in my head. I remember the words he had used to describe my relationship with my mom. “No contact.” It sounded like legalese, cold and official. I bet he hadn’t pictured this, the two of us politely sharing a kale salad in silence, sleeping under the same roof. But none of this is new to us.

It would be easy to say it started with Evie. That she was born, and then my dad was gone, and then everything looked different. That that’s what killed my mom’s and my relationship. It might even be easy to say I was jealous of Evie’s success. Resentful of my mother and sister’s relationship, their intertwined careers. That I missed when things were simpler. But I think part of me had an inkling before all of that, before there was a platform to share any of it. I felt it as soon as I could say no to the endless photos or push away the digital camera that seemed to follow me to every event, every milestone. I saw the disappointment in my mother’s face every time, the longing. I learned to count the ways that I wasn’t anything like she expected.

“You know I grew you in here and everything,” she’d say, pointing to her abdomen. “You’d think that would mean I could show you off to the world. Be proud of my little girl.”

She’d look at my dad. “Can you believe it, Chris? Twenty-three hours of labor and everything, and now the child I pushed out of my vagina won’t even let me take her photo. Unbelievable!”

My mom’s tone always said she was joking, just teasing me for being so stubborn, but I knew that she meant it. That deep down, it really did bother her that her body had put so much time and energy into someone who didn’t have the decency to like the same things she liked, to want the same things. It was the photos, sure, but it was everything else, too. I never thought about aesthetics the way she did—decorations for birthday parties and dress-up and dance recital tutus. I was an introvert from the start, more likely to be curled up with a book in my reading nook than I was to enter a room and announce, “Hey, Mom, look at this!”

“Ew, Mom,” I’d say, and my dad would laugh and pull me in for a hug, tell me that we had plenty of photos already. That I was fine.

I couldn’t have known for sure then that the blog and Facebook posts about me would go up anyway, even without the photos. It was her outlet, she said, her way of making sense of her life, motherhood. She was never trying to be famous, she’ll say now. She just wrote about and shared what she knew. And what she knew, what she shared with that then tiny group of followers and readers, was often about me. Long, rambling posts about the talk she had with me about my changing body, or confessionals about how I still wet the bed occasionally during bad dreams, like it was her shame to carry instead of mine. I didn’t see every post then; some of them didn’t surface until years later, when fans were mining the archives of the blog for never-before-seen content. But even at age eight or nine, I had a feeling. A gut instinct that I needed to tiptoe around my life, conscious that it belonged to her before it ever belonged to me.

“Your mom’s just so proud of you, Haze,” my dad would assure me in these moments, freckles curving up his face with his grin, and I’d nod, telling myself he was probably right even though I didn’t believe him.

Everyone assumes that Evie being born made me feel angry or jealous, but it was more like relief. The second I saw toddler Evie twirling in front of a camera, my mom beaming as she stared at her face on the screen, I knew that my mom finally had a daughter she could see herself in, and that I had an out. It’s part of why I always felt like I had to protect Evie. I owed it to her.