Sara Benincasa - Great

“You know, about earlier today—I don’t want you to worry one bit. It’s not going to affect anything. We’ve already got my lawyer working on it, and today I met with the most amazing PR man who is going to fix this mess. I may have to sue a few parties in the process, but that’s all right. What’s important to me is that you know I’m fine.” She was jabbering away at a mile a minute.

“I’m going home, Mom.” My voice sounded faint in my own ears.

She missed a beat then.

“You’re w-what?” she asked.

“I’m going home. To Chicago. Tomorrow. I’m going to buy a ticket online. I’ll have a shuttle service bring me to the airport.” I said it all mechanically.

“But darling, you’re still here for another two weeks!” she said. “Surely you want to spend more time with your little friends.”

I was silent for so long that she finally said, “Well—I’m not coming back tonight, so I won’t get to say goodbye to you. I want to say goodbye. Don’t you?”

“Goodbye, Mom,” I said, and hung up.

She didn’t call or text back.

I called my dad, even though I knew he was probably at a game with his summer league team. He didn’t pick up his cell, but the sound of his voice on his outgoing message made me tear up. I still didn’t feel anything, exactly, but my eyes got wet all the same.

“I’m coming home, Daddy,” I said hoarsely, after the beep. “Tomorrow. I’ll see you soon.” And that was it.

I ran a bath and poured some bubbles in. I stripped off all my clothes and stepped into it. It felt like a womb, warm and safe. My shoulders dropped a little, and I let out a ragged sigh, and opened Jacinta’s envelope.

The note had a URL and a password. It also contained other things—passwords and certain instructions—but she’d drawn big arrows pointing to the URL and password, so I figured that was the most important part. I got out of the bath just as soon as I’d gotten in, wrapped my wet body in a towel, and went to my laptop. The URL led to a website, Vimeo, with a password-protected video. My fingers shaking, I typed in the password and hit enter.

The video was nothing fancy. Jacinta had clearly shot it on her web cam earlier that day. She’d put on one of her fabulously weird outfits, pinned her hair up at odd angles, and done her makeup to perfection. She looked, as always, like a stunning alien visitor to Earth. And she told her story, straight to the camera.

“I want you to know that while I’ve lied about plenty of things in the past couple of months, everything I’m about to tell you is a hundred percent true.

“I’m Jacinta Trimalchio, but my real name is Adriana DeStefano. I was born on Staten Island. My father was a weapons contractor; my mother was a housewife. When I was little, my father got a big contract to provide body armor to the US government. We made a lot of money. We moved to the Upper East Side, and they enrolled me in Little Trumbo, Trumbo Academy’s elementary school. That’s where I met Delilah Fairweather.

“We loved each other right away. We were best friends, but we were always something more, something bigger than friendship. When I couldn’t see her for a day, I cried. When she couldn’t see me, she threw tantrums so bad her mother would call my mother in desperation and ask when our next playdate could be. We were a part of each other, Delilah and me. We were intertwined. She was a year younger, but we used to tell people we were twins. We said we were going to marry brothers and live in the same house.

“When I was eleven and Delilah was ten, my father was indicted on federal charges. The court found that he had knowingly and deliberately sold faulty body armor to the government, and that it had been used in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and had resulted in injuries and deaths. My father had blood on his hands, the papers said. The news cameras camped outside our building all day and all night. They followed my mother when she brought me to school. We couldn’t go anywhere. We couldn’t do anything. And nobody would talk to us. In school, Delilah would look at me with these big, sad blue eyes, but she wouldn’t speak. I knew it wasn’t her fault. I knew her mother had told her not to talk to me. But it cut my heart.

“They took everything—the apartment in the city, the cars, the beach house in East Hampton, and all the money, everything but my trust fund. They sent my father to prison for a long, long time. He killed himself there, right away—hung himself with his bed sheets. We had nothing left. His family came to the funeral, but none of my mother’s family, none of my friends. Nobody even called.

“We moved to Florida. It was supposed to be temporary. My grandparents gave my mom some starter money, and she rented a one-bedroom apartment. I slept on the couch. She got a job as a cocktail waitress. She met a guy there. Soon he was my stepdad. He hit me when he was drunk. I told her, and she hit me, too. She said I was trying to ruin the only good thing in her life. She sent me to live with my grandparents in their retirement village. About a year later, her husband was arrested and put in prison for assaulting a man at a bar. My mother didn’t apologize, but she asked me to come back home. I went.

“Divorced and down to one income again, my mother quit the restaurant and started dancing at a place up the road. She’d done ballet in high school. But then she’d married my father and had never worked a job until we’d moved to Florida. Anyway, she was a good dancer and got a lot of feature spots and made a lot of money. She would come home with big, fat rolls of cash. Sometimes she’d come home with customers, too. Once she brought two of them home at two in the morning, and I left the house so I couldn’t hear the noises they made.

“Ever since we’d moved to Florida, I’d kept track of what my old friends were doing. They were all on Facebook, and none of them locked down their profiles, so it was easy. I knew they wouldn’t accept a friend request from Adriana DeStefano, so I made a name up and made a fake profile. Except eventually it became my real profile, because I liked the fake name so much that I started using it on the fashion blog I made to distract me from everything else in my life.

“I didn’t have many friends at school except for this one kid, Alexander. Alexander was the only out gay kid in eighth grade. We used to dress each other up like we were dolls, with makeup and hairstyles and everything. The rule was that you couldn’t peek at what was being done to you until the look was totally complete. We always took before and after photos. Alexander and I read fashion magazines like they were our bibles, and I spent all my free time on style blogs, so that meant I could identify practically anybody’s clothes and say who designed them.

“And that’s pretty much what led to me starting The Wanted. At first it was just a daily record of what I was wearing from the neck down. But then it turned into a way for me to keep in touch with people from Trumbo, even though they didn’t know they were keeping in touch with me. I started copying and pasting their photos from their parties. And then they’d come to the page and see it and share it with their friends and their friends’ friends, and pretty soon kids from other schools started sending me photos from their parties, and at some point newspaper and magazine writers took notice, and the serious fashion world, too. It was the first time in my life anyone noticed me for something I did on my own. It changed my life.

“The whole time, I followed Delilah Fairweather’s life. She grew up to be just as beautiful and as wonderful as I knew she would when we were little. I always knew she would be a star. And I always knew what I would do when I turned eighteen and got my trust fund: find a way back to her. Find a way back to us.