Catie Disabato - The Ghost Network

Molly, even in college, was the absolute opposite. She was a dramatic personality, a theater nerd who expressed herself aggressively. Molly befriended Nix not because they were opposites but because they were both performing. Nix performed the lack of emotion. Molly performed the excess.

Under Molly’s influence, Nix loosened up. “I changed after college, when I started working for Molly, I know that,” Nix said. “I enjoyed myself more. It helped that I didn’t have anything to live up to, not a team or a GPA, nothing like that. I started painting my nails a lot even though I kept them short.”

Nix worked for Molly during the majority of the pop star’s short career. Her job went from a twenty-hour-per-week, minimum impact position to an eighty-hour-per-week, intense scramble to keep up with Molly’s rising profile. When Molly’s first tour, the Célèbrety Ball, was in full swing, Nix worked about twelve hours a day, every day, with only non-performance days off. The non-performance days were few and far between. Nix was unfazed by the increased hours. Her compensation had swelled accordingly, and with the record label covering most of her expenses while on tour, she managed to save a nice amount of money, a financial cushion that made her father proud. Furthermore, although a professional distance always existed between them, Nix became one of Molly’s friends and confidants.

Nix was unaware of the extent to which Molly hid things from her, because Molly always made it seem like Nix knew all her secrets. They gossiped about the dancers; while she was getting her hair done, Molly told Nix detail-laden stories about her tumultuous romance with her first producer, Davin Karl; in the evenings, they drank wine together and talked about the purpose of art, sometimes just the two of them.

When Molly disappeared, Nix slipped into a depression. Still unwilling to exhibit deep emotions in front of her parents, and without an apartment of her own to run to, Nix escaped to Taer’s. From the moment she moved in, she did nothing to hide the depths of her melancholy. She slept for twelve hours a day, and stayed up half the night. She sometimes paced the short, carpeted hallways in Taer’s apartment, picking at the chipping white paint on the walls. She pulled Taer’s books off her IKEA shelves, read ten pages, then left them on the coffee table. She sat on the couch for hours, scrolling through Tumblr, absorbing nothing but a constant wash of bright colors. In the middle of a conversation, she would stop talking mid-sentence, stand up, and walk away. Bundled in sweatpants and a flannel button-down pajama top, swaddled in a gray fleece blanket with a pattern of yellow ducks, she spent the night staring at the ceiling.

For the first week and a half after Nix moved in, Taer tried to help. She bought Nix presents, like a chocolate bar or a used DVD of Love and Basketball . She cooked Nix meals and brought home bags of bar pretzels from Rainbo. She tried very hard to be good to Nix, becoming more like a girlfriend every day, but according to Nix, Taer got irritated easily over the small annoyances of sharing space with another person. Taer snipped at Nix over leaving towels on the ground or crumbs on the kitchen counter, then got angry because Nix’s apologies seemed forced. They would both snap back and forth, raising the stakes with each rejoinder, until the little bitch sessions turned into proper fights.

When they fought, Taer screamed at Nix, opened the door, and demanded that Nix move out, take the train back to Flossmoor. Nix would try to talk Taer down or, if she was feeling particularly frustrated, she would ice Taer out, refusing to speak to or acknowledge her.

These fights ended when Taer apologized, cranked up the heater, and crawled under Nix’s blanket. “Even though she got mad fast she’d forget about it even faster,” Nix said. “Cait doesn’t hold grudges. Like, fifteen minutes later we could be talking about music or watching Netflix like she’d never been pissed.”

While Berliner certainly experienced fewer of Taer’s mood swings, he was more blunt in his discussions of Taer’s relationship with Nix. He said, “Nix always said, all Taer needed to forget she was upset was a back rub and a blow job.”

While Nix wallowed in depression, Taer descended into her own crushing obsession with Molly Metropolis and her notebook, a fixation that demanded more of her focus every day and sometimes took precedence over Nix’s emotional well-being. Even though Taer could see that Nix was falling apart, she prodded her for details about Molly’s day-to-day life, her hobbies, her proclivities, anything that could give Taer a clearer picture of what might’ve happened to Molly. Nix gritted her teeth and obliged. She also tolerated Taer’s compulsive listening and re-listening to Molly Metropolis’s posthumous album.

The day after Nix moved into Taer’s apartment, SDFC released Molly’s last album, Cause Apocalyptic . The album debuted at number one, while all eight songs battled over the top spot on iTunes’ digital singles chart. SDFC sent a complimentary copy of the CD to Nix, who gave it to Taer. Taer played Cause Apocalyptic dozens of times while she read Molly’s notebook.

Taer’s reading and research brought her to a series of dead ends, which brought her again to Berliner’s phone number, her only remaining unwalked avenue. Unable to contain herself, Taer decided to call Berliner without telling Nix — her first betrayal. Taer also stole Nix’s cell phone to make the call, assuming Berliner might recognize Nix’s number and pick up the phone. Berliner did answer and after an awkward introduction, Taer told Berliner she had Molly Metropolis’s notebook.

Berliner refused to discuss the notebook over the phone. He instead asked Taer to meet him at a soul food restaurant in the Loop called Redfish—“neutral territory.” As Taer agreed, Nix walked into Taer’s bedroom, still dressed in her pajamas at 4 p.m., and overheard the end of the conversation. Taer said goodbye to Berliner staring directly into Nix’s eyes, guilty but unwavering. After Taer hung up, Nix snatched the phone out of her hands, checked the number and, recognizing it as Berliner’s, asked, according to Taer’s notes, “What the fuck have you done?”

Nix and Taer had another screaming match. Nix fought with the moral high ground; she had been dismissed and deceived, her desires had been ignored, and so on. Taer cut deep and low; she dismissed Nix’s depression as self-indulgence, and questioned her devotion to Molly, shouting something like: “Why is it that I, who never fucking met her once, give a shit about where she is, and all you can do is sit on your ass all day?”

Eventually, they calmed down. Taer cried a little. Nix swept up shards of a glass Taer had thrown on the floor in anger. Taer apologized for calling Berliner behind Nix’s back and for saying terrible things. Nix didn’t apologize for anything, but told Taer the reason she was reluctant to call Berliner: Molly’s strange insistence that Nix not trust him, and the several strange encounters Nix’d had with him. When he visited Molly on tour or on the set of the “Never Work, Only Party” music video, he either ignored Nix completely or spoke animatedly about his time working in a vintage map store as if Nix had asked him questions about it. Berliner had been sleeping with one of the dancers, Irene Davis, and the whole tour crew gossiped about his weird sexual proclivities, some kind of architectural fetish Nix never really understood. “I guess he likes to rub his dick against sconces or something,” Nix told Taer. Taer thought that was so funny, she posted it on her Facebook page.*

Nix didn’t want to give Molly’s notebook to Berliner, and thought he might be capable of overpowering them and taking it out of Taer’s purse. Taer suggested they rent a safety deposit box to stash the notebook in, and despite the theatricality of the idea, Nix agreed. Before going to Redfish, they took the L to the Chicago First National Bank and Trust. They locked up the notebook, then took the train downtown.