APRIL 2000
HARPER RETURNED A FEW DAYS LATER. I WASN’T SURE how to behave—I’d driven myself round in circles: from refusing her and phoning my security to see her out or just accepting whatever she asked of me in the knowledge she would grow bored of this as she did all things.
By the time she actually came, I was wired and shaky. I’d taken something, I think, but less than normal so maybe it was withdrawal, or the nerves, but I felt I might be sick.
She pushed a tin foil container toward me.
“Eat,” she ordered.
Was this it? I pictured the sort of hazing pranks we’d missed at CADS. I expected pet food or rotten fruit—was surprised to find pasta inside.
“What?”
“With the quantity of illicit substances you’ve apparently been taking I don’t imagine regular meals have been on the cards,” she waved that envelope again, which she didn’t need and had only brought as some sort of dramatic prop. “I’m not a monster. I’m not going to torture the malnourished.”
I hadn’t had any form of appetite for a long time, but in front of her, in the wake of the humiliation she’d inflicted and preparing for it all over again, I felt my first whispering pang of hunger. I picked up a piece of the fusilli and ate it. Cold, vaguely dry, a hint of cheese.
“There. Food consumed. So onto that torture you mention.”
“Have a seat,” she said, opening the bag she held. Scissors. My stomach tightened, and it didn’t ease when she added. “I’ve never liked this hair. Time to do something about it.”
“Harper, be serious.”
She quirked a brow. “Serious would be leaking those photos.”
I knew it was better to simply acquiesce—if I agreed, she’d get bored quicker. If I pushed back, she had more to enjoy.
So I sighed, put the pasta down, and sat down before her.
“Eat the rest of that later. You look gaunt, and I’m not having the tabloids give you credit for being skinnier than me when your diet choice really is heroin chic.”
“I haven’t touched heroin.”
“Well, look who suddenly has standards.”
She took a lock between her fingers and sliced without even looking.
I winced and found myself starting to detach myself from what was going on—but that had caused all this. So I forced myself to pay attention to the way she hovered above me, her quick fingers, the way each breath was a little too close.
“I remember your hair at school,” she said. “Strawberry blond and that subtle wave, like within London you’d managed to find salt sea air.”
As she spoke, she cut. I could feel the cold scrape of the scissors against the back of my neck and wondered just how close she was getting.
“I miss that hair,” she said.
“Well, I’m certain this is how you get it back.”
She laughed, reaching for another lock. Maybe she realized she was racing through this too quickly to savor it, because she slid her fingers down it slowly and trimmed with precision.
From the way it flopped against my ear while others rested at my jaw, I suspected an uneven hack job was what she was going for.
“Perhaps I should be relieved,” I offered, like I might regain the upper hand through sheer nonchalance. “The way you were carrying on with Joel, I thought you’d shifted your sights to outdoing Posh and Becks rather than me.”
“Oh god, how droll that would be?” she said. “I think Joel’s certainly interested in scoring more front pages than his teammates, but it’s not what’s driving me.”
“Is that it?” I asked. “What brings the two of you together? Fame-hungry whores creating competition to fuel you where your passion lacks?”
Harper stepped back, under the guise of examining her work.
But I think it’s so she could look at me as she spoke, wanted to see me acknowledge how superior her life was to mine.
“No. He’s considerate. He listens. We have the same sense of humor.
He’s thoroughly besotted but still challenges me. Do you need a full list?”
“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 had so much that 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 the want, the hunger unfurling 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 not your joy, 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 stepped closer 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, nothing would 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 a spinster 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 our Blood Wedding debut, 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 I couldn’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.
“I am not having this conversation,” he said. “Please, Nadine, you can’t wear that. Everyone knows I’m your stylist—”
“It’s the Kids’ Choice Awards; we can spin it into a joke.”
“You are not a joke! You’re Nadine fucking Heywood and I’d love for you to start acting like it again, Clipboard.”
That old nickname nearly sent me over the edge, because yes, this was not me.
My phone rang.
“Do you like it?” Harper asked when I answered.
I let the phone fall to the floor without hanging up.
“Amos, I need you to get Ruchi.”
———
I told her everything—about how stupid I’d been, how weak, how I wasn’t sure why exactly, just that I could no longer make it through a day without some sort of assistance. And about how Harper had pictures of it. How she was using them against me.
I wasn’t sure what I expected—scolding that I should have gone to her earlier, maybe, or a rant about Harper. Not Ruchi clasping me in her arms and saying: “You’re the bravest person I know, Heywood.”
“What?”
She stepped back so she could look me in the eye when she spoke. “You’re not weak. You’re not stupid. Addiction is a disease, and I’m so sorry you’ve been battling it alone.”
“But—”
“No buts. I should have been there.” She brushed her hands down her trousers nervously. “We should have got you therapy, a grief counselor—”
“I would have said no, Ruchi. I would have said it was a bad look. Don’t blame yourself. I did this.”
She sighed. “Maybe we should settle it with assigning fault and blame to how this happened isn’t a fair or reasonable thing to consider at all. I don’t want to move us onto where we go from here and how we play this—it feels callous.”
“I’m callous; you’re practical,” I said. “I don’t want Harper holding this over me. Which I think means letting her leak those pictures.”
“We can manage this privately,” she suggested. “I can speak to her publicist, loath as I am to ever speak to Adrian fucking Navarro, but there must be something she’d agree to. This would be terrible for her too, if the full story leaked. We can settle it and get you into an evening program.”
“No, that’s not enough. I know what I could lose if I don’t sort this, Ruchi. I want to get better. So I want whatever gives me the best shot of that.”
She looked at me, and I wondered if we were about to discuss the risks: that I might be throwing everything away before the drugs themselves snatched it from me. Things like these were supposed to be handled quietly. Shamefully.
Instead she nodded. “I’ll phone Victor and confirm with him. But we’re with you—all of us.”
So we sent the press release ourselves: Nadine Heywood has been struggling with substance abuse since the tragic and shocking death of her parents. She has elected, preemptively, to enter a rehabilitation program so she can rest and attempt to begin the journey of healing.
Instead of the Kids’ Choice Awards, I went to rehab.
Ruchi ensured the paparazzi couldn’t follow me.
Amos promised to have a wardrobe waiting for me that would make Harper cry (there was even a burlap belt. A bag. A thinly woven scarf).
Ivan—when he visited me a few weeks into my program after I was finally allowed visitors—distracted me with tales of his new projects until I finally demanded to know why he was still putting up with me.
He looked at me, level and serious, and it hit me just how little he’d changed in the years I’d self-detonated and said: “Very early on, Nadine, I stopped caring quite so much about mutual interests and started caring about you. Perform to the whole theater all you like, but I’ll always be your front row. ”
Then, of course, there was Harper.
I didn’t see her, but the cameras couldn’t get enough of her while I was away. Mournfully, she told reporters: “My heart goes out to her. I just really hope she gets the help she needs.”
Then she sent those pictures to every paper in the country.