Invisible Monsters Remix Read online

  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 my life because I don’t want it anymore.

  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)

  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 Memorial Hospital.

  The truth is I was addicted to being beautiful, and that’s not something you just walk away from. Being addicted to all that attention, I had to quit cold turkey. I could shave my head, but hair grows back. Even bald, I might still look too good. Bald, I might get even more attention. There was the option of getting fat or drinking out of control to ruin my looks, but I wanted to be ugly, and I wanted my health. Wrinkles and aging looked too far off. There had to be some way to get ugly in a flash. I had to deal with my looks in a fast, permanent way or I’d always be tempted to go back.

  You know how you look at ugly hunchback girls, and they are so lucky. Nobody drags them out at night so they can’t finish their doctoral thesis papers. They don’t get yelled at by fashion photographers if they get infected ingrown bikini hairs. You look at burn victims and think how much time they save not looking in mirrors to check their skin for sun damage.

  I wanted the everyday reassurance of being mutilated. The way a crippled deformed birth-defected disfigured girl can drive her car with the windows open and not care how the wind makes her hair look, that’s the kind of freedom I was after.

  I was tired of staying a lower life-form just because of my looks. Trading on them. Cheating. Never getting anything real accomplished, but getting the attention and recognition anyway. Trapped in a be
auty ghetto is how I felt. Stereotyped. Robbed of my motivation.

  In this way, Shane, we are very much brother and sister. This is the biggest mistake I could think would save me. I wanted to give up the idea I had any control. Shake things up. To be saved by chaos. To see if I could cope, I wanted to force myself to grow again. To explode my comfort zone.

  I slowed down for the exit and pulled over onto the shoulder, what they call the breakdown lane. I remember thinking, How apropos. I remember thinking, This is going to be so exciting. My makeover. Here was my life about to start all over again. I could be a great brain surgeon this time around. Or I could be an artist. Nobody would care how I’d look. People would just see my art, what I made instead of just how I looked, and people would love me.

  What I thought last was, at last I’ll be growing again, mutating, adapting, evolving. I’ll be physically challenged.

  I couldn’t wait. I got the gun from the glove compartment. I wore a glove against powder burns, and held the gun at arm’s length out my broken window. It wasn’t even like aiming, with the gun only about two feet away. I might’ve killed myself that way, but by now that idea didn’t seem very tragic.

  This makeover would make piercings and tattoos and brandings look so lame, all those little fashion revolts so safe that they themselves only become fashionable. Those little paper tiger attempts to reject looking good that only end up reinforcing it.

  The shot, it was like getting hit hard is what I remember. The bullet. It took a minute before I could focus my eyes, but there was my blood and snot, my drool and teeth all over the passenger seat. I had to open the car door and get the gun from where I’d dropped it outside the window. Being in shock helped. The gun and the glove are in a storm drain in the hospital parking lot where I dropped them, in case you want proof.

  Then the intravenous morphine, the tiny operating-room manicure scissors cut my dress off, the little patch panties, the police photos. Birds ate my face. Nobody ever suspected the truth.

  The truth is I panicked a little after that. I let everybody think the wrong things. The future is not a good place to start lying and cheating all over again. None of this is anybody’s fault except mine. I ran because just getting my jaw rebuilt was too much temptation to revert, to play that game, the looking good game. Now my whole new future is still out there waiting for me.

  The truth is, being ugly isn’t the thrill you’d think, but it can be an opportunity for something better than I ever imagined.

  The truth is I’m sorry.

  Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Twenty-one

  ump to Brandy and me, we can’t find Ellis anywhere. Evie and all the Texas Cottrells can’t find their groom, either, everybody laughing that nervous laughter. What bridesmaid has run off with him, everybody wants to know. Ha, ha.

  I tug Brandy toward the door, but she shushes me. Ellis and the groom both missing . . . a hundred Texans drinking hard . . . that ridiculous bride in her big drag wedding dress . . . this is just too much fun for Brandy to walk out now.

  Jump to Evie riding her big parade float out of the butler’s pantry, her hands all fisted up, her veil and hair flying straight out behind her. Evie’s shouting about how she done found her butt-sucking fag-assed new husband face-downed enjoying butt sex with everybody’s old boyfriend in the butler’s pantry.

  Oh, Ellis.

  I remember all his porno magazines, and all the details of anal, oral, rimming, fisting, felching. You could put yourself in the hospital trying to self-suck.

  Oh, this is dazzling.

  Of course, Evie’s answer to everything is to heft her hoop skirt and run upstairs after a rifle except by now most of her bedroom is a Chanel No. 5 perfumed wall of flames Evie has to ride her parade float right into. Everybody cell-phones 911 for help. Nobody’s bothered enough to go into the butler’s pantry and check out the action. Folks don’t want to know what might be going on in there.

  Go figure, but Texans seem to be a lot more comfortable around disastrous house fires than they are around anal sex.

  I remember my folks. Scat and water sports. Sado and masochism.

  Waiting for Evie to burn to death, everybody gets a fresh drink and goes to stand in the foyer at the foot of the stairs. You hear loud spanking from the butler’s pantry. The painful kind where you spit on your hand first.

  Brandy, the socially inappropriate thing she is, Brandy starts laughing. “This is going to be messy good fun,” Brandy tells me out the side of her Plumbago mouth. “I put a handful of Bilax bowel evacuant in Ellis’s last drink.”

  Oh, Ellis.

  With all that’s going on, Brandy could’ve gotten away if she hadn’t started laughing.

  You see, since right then, Evie steps out of that wall of flame at the top of the stairs. A rifle in her hands, her wedding dress burned down to the steel hoops, the silk flowers in her hair burned down to their wire skeletons, all her blond hair burned off, Evie does her slow step-pause-step down the stairs with a rifle pointed right at Brandy Alexander.

  With everybody looking up the stairs at Evie wearing nothing but wire and ashes, sweat and soot smeared all over her luscious hourglass transgender bod, we all watch Evelyn Cottrell in her big incorporated moment, and Evie screams, “You!”

  She screams at Brandy Alexander down the barrel of the rifle, “You did it to me again. Another fire!”

  Step-pause-step.

  “I thought we were best friends,” she says. “Sure, yes, I slept with your boyfriend, but who hasn’t?” Evie says, with the gun and everything.

  Step-pause-step.

  “It’s just not enough for you to be the best and most beautiful,” Evie says. “Most people, if they looked as good as you, they’d tread water for the rest of their lives.”

  Step-pause-step.

  “But no,” Evie says, “here you have to destroy everyone else.”

  The second-floor fire inches down the foyer wallpaper, and wedding guests are scrambling for their wraps and bags, all of them headed outdoors with the wedding gifts, the silver and the crystal.

  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

  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 ti
me 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 café 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.”