Florists come in with sprays of irises and roses and stock.
Your silicone broke, Shane. The bullet popped your silicone so they had to take it out. Now you can have any sized breasts you want. The Rheas have said so.
“Foundation!” Sofonda says, blending the foundation into Shane’s hairline.
She says, “Eyebrow pencil!” with sweat beading on her forehead.
Kitty hands over the pencil, saying, “Eyebrow pencil.”
“Blot me!” Sofonda says.
And Vivienne blots her forehead with a sponge.
Sofonda says, “Eyeliner!
And I have to go, Shane, while you’re still asleep. But I want to give you something. I want to give you life. This is my third chance, and I don’t want to blow it. I could’ve opened my bedroom window. I could’ve stopped Evie shooting you. The truth is I didn’t, so I’m giving you
I tuck my clutch bag under Shane’s big ring-beaded hand. You see, the size of a man’s hands are the one thing a plastic surgeon can’t change. The one thing that will always give away a girl like Brandy Alexander. There’s just no way to hide those hands.
This is all my identification, my birth certificate, my everything. You can be Shannon McFarland from now on. My career. The ninety-degree attention. It’s yours. All of it. Everyone. I hope it’s enough for you. It’s everything I have left.
“Base color!” Sofonda says, and Vivienne hands her the lightest shade of Aubergine Dreams eye shadow.
“Lid color!” Sofonda says, and Kitty hands her the next eye shadow.
“Contour color!” Sofonda says, and Kitty hands her the darkest shade.
Shane, you go back to my career. You make Sofonda get you a top contract, no local charity benefit runway shit. You’re Shannon fucking McFarland now. You go right to the top. A year from now, I want to turn on the TV and see you drinking a diet cola naked in slow motion. Make Sofonda get you big national contracts.
Be famous. Be a big social experiment in getting what you don’t want. Find value in what we’ve been taught is worthless. Find good in what the world says is evil. I’m giving you my life because I want the whole world to know you. I wish the whole world would embrace what it hates.
Find what you’re afraid of most and go live there.
“Lash curler!” says Sofonda, and she curls Shane’s sleeping eyelashes.
“Mascara!” she says, combing mascara into the lashes.
“Exquisite,” says Kitty.
And Sofonda says, “We’re not out of the woods yet.”
Shane, I’m giving you my life, my driver’s license, my old report cards, because you look more like me than I can ever remember looking. Because I’m tired of hating and preening and telling myself old stories that were never true in the first place. I’m tired of always being me, me, me first.
Mirror, mirror on the wall.
And please don’t come after me. Be the new center of attention. Be a big success, be beautiful and loved and everything else I wanted to be. I’m over that now. I just want to be invisible. Maybe I’ll become a belly dancer in my veils. Become a nun and work in a leper colony where nobody is complete. I’ll be an ice hockey goalie and wear a mask. Those big amusement parks will only hire women to wear the cartoon character costumes, since folks don’t want to chance a strange molester guy hugging their kid. Maybe I’ll be a big cartoon mouse. Or a dog. Or a duck. I don’t know, but I’m sure I’ll find out. There’s no escaping fate, it just keeps going. Day and night, the future just keeps coming at you.
I stroke Shane’s pale hand.
I’m giving you my life to prove to myself I can, I really can love somebody. Even when I’m not getting paid, I can give love and happiness and charm. You see, I can handle the baby food and the not talking and being homeless and invisible, but I have to know that I can love somebody. Completely and totally, permanently and without hope of reward, just as an act of will, I will love somebody.
I lean in, as if I could kiss my brother’s face.
I leave my purse and any idea of who I am tucked under Shane’s hand. And I leave behind the story that I was ever this beautiful, that I could walk into a room deep-fried in a tight dress and everybody would turn and look at me. A million reporters would take my picture. And I leave behind the idea that this attention was worth what I did to get it.
What I need is a new story.
What the Rhea sisters did for Brandy Alexander.
What Brandy’s been doing for me.
What I need to learn to do for myself. To write my own story.
Let my brother be Shannon McFarland.
I don’t need that kind of attention. Not anymore.
“Lip liner!” Sofonda says.
“Lip gloss!” she says.
She says, “We’ve got a bleeder!”
And Vivienne leans in with a tissue to blot the extra Plumbago off Shane’s chin.
Sister Katherine brings me what I asked for, please, and it’s the pictures, the eight-by-ten glossies of me in my white sheet. They aren’t good or bad, ugly or beautiful. They’re just the way I look. The truth. My future. Just regular reality. And I take off my veils, the cut-work and muslin and lace, and leave them for Shane to find at his feet.
I don’t need them at this moment, or the next, or the next, forever.
Sofonda sets the makeup with powder and then Shane’s gone. My brother, thin and pale, sticks and bird bones and miserable, is gone.
The Rhea sisters slowly peel off their surgical masks.
“Brandy Alexander,” says Kitty, “queen supreme.”
“Total quality girl,” Vivienne says.
“Forever and ever,” says Sofonda, “and that’s enough.”
Completely and totally, permanently and without hope, forever and ever I love Brandy Alexander.
And that’s enough.
(The end)
Chapter 22
ump to this one time, nowhere special, just Brandy almost dead on the floor and me kneeling over her with my hands covered in her Princess Alexander partytime blood.
Brandy yells, “Evie!”
And Evie’s burned-up head sticks back in through the front doorway. “Brandy, sugar,” Evie says, “this all’s been the best disaster you’ve ever pulled off!”
To me, Evie runs up and kisses me with her nasty melted lipstick and says, “Shannon, I just can’t thank you enough for spicing up my boring old home life.”
“Miss Evie,” Brandy says, “you can act like anything, but, girl, you just totally missed shooting the bulletproof part of my vest.”
Jump to the truth. I’m the stupid one.
Jump to the truth. I shot myself. I let Evie think it was Manus and Manus think it was Evie. Probably it was their suspicion of each other that drove them apart. It drove Evie to keep a loaded rifle around in case Manus came after her. The same fear made Manus carry a butcher knife the night he came over to confront her.
The truth is nobody here is as stupid or evil as I let on. Except me. The truth is I drove out away from the city on the day of the accident. With my driver’s-side window rolled halfway up, I got out and I shot through the glass. On the way back into town, on the freeway, I got in the exit lane for Growden Avenue, the exit for La Paloma
