The studio audience howled with laughter. Bryn’s stomach turned sour, her tongue tasting metallic like it wanted to spit out what her eyes were ingesting. She almost puked when she realized that it was a running gag. This man, who had supposedly known Vivian’s character her entire life, was counting down the days until she was “legal”—a concept Bryn couldn’t even begin to unpack.
To Bryn’s silent disgust, the scene devolved into an even more horrifying plot. Someone dressed as Chewbacca showed up at the door to take Cyndi to a Halloween party. From the moment the silent Chewy put a furry, possessive arm around her bare shoulders, Bryn had a terrible feeling.
The payoff followed moments after Cyndi and “her date” left. Moments later, Cyndi’s actual boyfriend, dressed as Han Solo, arrived to find his girlfriend was already gone. The laugh track roared through the ensuing mix-up.
The scene cut to later that night. Cyndi stumbled back into the living room, looking flustered. The plastic chain that connected her collar to her wrist had snapped in two. The creepy neighbor was there again, drinking beer on the couch and groaning over his shrew of a wife. What a prince.
“Whoa, back so soon? What happened to you?” he asked, gesturing with his beer bottle at her broken costume.
“Ugh, it was so embarrassing. My costume just… broke. I had to come home.” Cyndi sighed. “It’s just as well. Brian didn’t talk to me all night. He wouldn’t even take off his mask in the car.”
The neighbor leaned forward with what could only be described as a leer. “Broke, huh? Let me guess, that Wookie couldn’t keep his paws to himself in the backseat?” He stared at Cyndi’s body,Vivian’sbody, so exposed under the harsh lights. “Bet the lucky schmo didn’t last two minutes.” He laughed along with the audience. “There are some benefits to getting older, you know,” he added with another lascivious stare.
Bryn slammed her phone face down on the duvet to keep from choking on a violent wave of nausea. She’d witnessed a public violation packaged as a punchline. A sick punchline. The monstrous sound of laughter echoed in her skull like a root canal. Maybe the termrape culturehadn’t been a thing thirty years ago, but how could anyone witness that without their skin crawling? Without internal alarms blaring?
A cataclysm of questions hit her like a firehose. How had Vivian survived this? Where the hell were her parents?
Bryn picked up the phone, closing the window and opening a new one. She’d meant to find out more about Vivian’s history when she found an unexpected headline:Late Night’s Lustful Countdown: Host Puts Clock on Vivian Taylor’s 18th Birthday.
Bryn’s blood turned to frozen sludge. She clicked the link with the same compulsory curiosity of driving by a car crash.
There it was in grainy detail. A late-night host, one of the most famous of his time, had made Vivian’s impending adulthood a national joke. It wasn’t just the neighbor on the show. It was real life.
Below the headline was a photograph of Times Square. TimesfuckingSquare. And a massive digital billboard ticking down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds until America declared open season on a seventeen-year-oldchild.
Skin clammy and backs of her eyes burning, Bryn dropped the phone again. She couldn’t stop thinking about Vivian. Not Cyndi. Not a character she could at least take off. Vivian. A real girl, whose burgeoning womanhood had been a public commodity. A joke for leering men and cheering audiences.
Bryn clenched her jaw to hold in a scream and wondered if that’s how Vivian had fortified herself. If she’d held in scream after scream until it acted as mortar to seal herself in. If that’s how she’d endured.
ChapterSeven
Bryn barely slept.When she dozed off between tossing and turning, she had stress dreams about Vivian. Even awake and washing her hair, the image of teenage Vivian haunted her. It was almost as bad as the revolting sound of canned laughter.
At seven in the morning, Bryn was dressed and sitting on the couch like it hadn’t just been her bed. When the knock came at the door, she already recognized it as Iris’s. She opened the door to the woman carrying a tray.
“Let me help with that.” Bryn took the heavy tray and signaled for Iris to follow her inside. “Thank you so much for bringing this. I could’ve grabbed it. I feel so bad that you schlepped this all the way here.”
“It’s no trouble.” Iris stopped to look at the violets Bryn had moved from the top of a bookshelf to the big window overlooking the pool.
“I promise she’s low maintenance,” Bryn said, attention darting between Iris and the açaí bowl at the center of a ton of smaller dishes of cut up fruit and nuts. “She just needed more direct light.”
“You really love plants, huh?” Iris strode toward the kitchen to make tea while Bryn added toppings to her breakfast.
“Not as much as everyone else in my family, but probably more than plant civilians,” she joked, sprinkling chopped macadamias over bananas. Bryn waited for Iris to finish making the tea and sit with her at the table before asking, “She didn’t trust me to eat on my own, did she?”
With a quick swing of her head, Iris moved curls out of her face without touching her hair. She didn’t address Bryn’s question, but the smirk that flashed on her lips told her she’d been right.
Instead of being annoyed at having a minder, Bryn stirred honey into her tea. She wanted to ask about Vivian’s acting life. To ask if she was okay after having been a spectacle. But she couldn’t figure out how to ask without sounding like she was prying. She pivoted to the other reason sleep had been so hard to find.
“So you’ve probably been around for a few books,” Bryn guessed.
Iris inclined her head. “At least one a week for several years.”
“That’s so many books,” Bryn muttered, but mercifully kept her jaw from hanging open like a bumpkin. “How many times has she had to start over?”
Iris hesitated, light brown eyes shifting. “Never.”
Bryn stopped chewing. Her gut had never been more pissed off at being right. It gurgled in raging protest.
