Invisible Monsters Remix

You hear that butt-slapping sound from the butler’s pantry.

“Shut up in there!” Evie yells. Back to Brandy, Evie says, “So maybe I’ll spend some years in prison, but you’ll have a big head start on me in hell!”

You hear the rifle cock.

The fire inches down the walls.

“Oh, God, yes, Jesus Christ,” Ellis yells. “Oh, God, I’m coming!”

Brandy stops laughing. Bigger and prettier than ever, looking regal and annoyed and put-upon as if this is all a big joke, Brandy Alexander lifts a giant hand and looks at her watch.

And I’m about to become an only child.

And I could stop everything at this moment. I could throw off my veil, tell the truth, save lives. I’m me. Brandy’s innocent. Here’s my second chance. I could’ve opened my bedroom window years ago and let Shane inside. I could’ve not called the police all those times to suggest Shane’s accident wasn’t. What stands in my way is the story of how Shane burned my clothes. How being mutilated made Shane the center of attention. And if I throw off my veil now, I’ll just be a monster, a less than perfect, mutilated victim. I’ll be only how I look. Just the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Honesty being the most boring thing on the planet Brandy Alexander.

And. Evie aims.

“Yes!” Ellis yells from the pantry. “Yes, do it, big guy! Give it to me! Shoot it!”

Evie squints down the barrel.

“Now!” Ellis is yelling. “Shoot it right in my mouth!”

Brandy smiles.

And I do nothing.

And Evie shoots Brandy Alexander right in the heart.

Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Twenty

Chapter 24

he man at General Delivery who asked to see my ID pretty much had to take my word for it. The picture on my driver’s license might as well be Brandy’s. This means a lot of writing on scraps of paper for me to explain how I look now. This whole time I’m in the post office, I’m looking sideways to see if I’m a cover girl up on the FBI’s most wanted poster board.

Almost half a million dollars is about twenty-five pounds of ten- and twenty-dollar bills in a box. Plus, inside with the money is a pink stationery note from Evie saying blah, blah, blah, I will kill you if I ever see you again. And I couldn’t be happier.

Before Brandy can see who it’s addressed to, I claw off the label.

One part of being a model is my phone number was unlisted so I wasn’t in any city for Brandy to find. I was nowhere. And now we’re driving back to Evie. To Brandy’s fate. The whole way back, me and Ellis, we’re writing postcards from the future and slipping them out the car windows as we go south on Interstate 5 at a mile and a half every minute. Three miles closer to Evie and her rifle every two minutes. Ninety miles closer to fate every hour.

Ellis writes: Your birth is a mistake you’ll spend your whole life trying to correct.

The electric window of the Lincoln Town Car hums down a half inch, and Ellis drops the card out into the I-5 slipstream.

I write: You spend your entire life becoming God and then you die.

Ellis writes: When you don’t share your problems, you resent hearing the problems of other people.

I write: All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.

Jump to us reading the real estate section of the newspaper, looking for big open houses. We always do this in a new town. We sit at a nice sidewalk cafe and drink cappuccino with chocolate sprinkles and read the paper, then Brandy calls all the realtors to find which open houses have people still living in them. Ellis makes a list of houses to hit tomorrow.

We check into a nice hotel, and we take a catnap. After midnight Brandy wakes me up with a kiss. She and Ellis are going out to sell the stock we picked up in Seattle. Probably they’re screwing. I don’t care.

“And no,” Brandy says. “Miss Alexander will not be calling the Rhea sisters while she’s in town. Anymore, she’s determined the only vagina worth having is the kind you buy yourself.”

Ellis is standing in the open doorway to the hotel hallway, looking like a superhero that I want to crawl into bed and save me. Still, since Seattle, he’s been my brother. And you can’t be in love with your brother.

Brandy says, “You want the TV remote control?” Brandy turns on the television, and there’s Evie scared and desperate with her big pumped-up rainbow hair in every shade of blond. Evelyn Cottrell, Inc., everybody’s favorite write-off, is stumbling through the studio audience in her sequined dress begging folks to eat her meat by- products.

Brandy changes channels.

Brandy changes channels.

Brandy changes channels.

Evie is everywhere after midnight, offering what she’s got on a silver tray. The studio audience ignores her, watching themselves on the monitor, trapped in the reality loop of watching themselves watch themselves, trying the way we do every time we look in a mirror to figure out exactly who that person is.

That loop that never ends. Evie and me, we did this infomercial. How could I be so dumb? We’re so totally trapped in ourselves.

The camera stays on Evie, and what I can almost hear Evie saying is, Love me.

Love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, I’ll be anybody you want me to be. Use me. Change me. I can be thin with big breasts and big hair. Take me apart. Make me into anything, but just love me.

Jump way back to one time, Evie and me did this fashion shoot in a junkyard, in a slaughterhouse, in a mortuary. We’d go anywhere to look good by comparison, and what I realize is mostly what I hate about Evie is the fact that she’s so vain and stupid and needy. But what I hate most is how she’s just like me. What I really hate is me, so I hate pretty much everybody.

Jump to the next day we hit a few houses, a mansion, a couple palaces, and a chateau full of drugs. Around three o’clock we meet a realtor in the baronial dining room of a West Hills manor house. All around us are caterers and florists. The dining room table is spread and heaping with silver and crystal, tea sets, samovars, candelabras, stemware. A woman in dowdy scarecrow social-secretary tweeds is unwrapping these gifts of silver and crystal and making notes in a tiny red book.

A constant stream of arriving flowers eddies around us, buckets of irises and roses and stock. The manor house is sweet with the smell of flowers and rich with the smell of little puff pastries and stuffed mushrooms.

Not our style. Brandy looks at me. Way too many folks around.

But the realtor’s already there, smiling. In a drawl as flat and drawn-out as the Texas horizon, the realtor introduces herself as Mrs. Leonard Cottrell. And she is so happy to meet us.

This Cottrell woman takes Brandy by the elbow and steers her around the baronial first floor while I decide to fight or flight.

Give me terror.

Flash.

Give me panic.

Flash.

This has to be Evie’s mother, oh, you know it is. And this must be Evie’s new house. And I’m wondering how it