When they’d switched from DMs to texts, the first thing Fig learned was Rebecca’s name wasn’t Rebecca.
Rebecca: Stop calling me Rebecca!!!!!!
Then: Everyone calls me Bex
Fig: Oh
Then: Why?
Bex: Because it drives my mother crazy [winking emoji]
Then: Also it sounds like sex [two winking emojis]
Then: Sorry. Are you too young? I forget 10. I’m sweeeet 16
Fig: I know
Bex: You do?
Fig: Mom told me
Three dots. Three dots. Three dots. She talks about me?
Fig: All the time
It was hard to think of Bex as Bex after so many years of thinking about her as Rebecca. It was hard to think of her as a junior in high school after so many years of thinking about her as a baby. It was hard to think about her as a sister when she wasn’t really, or as a friend when they’d never met, or as her own person when Fig was used to thinking of her as Camille’s, as someone her mother gave Camille. Really it was hard to think of her at all because she was a secret. Fig told her mother everything, but she didn’t tell her this. It’s not that she thought she would be mad, exactly, but she didn’t know what she would be, and she knew if her mother told her to stop texting with Rebecca—Bex—she would have to. And she didn’t want to stop. She was learning so much.
For instance, she learned maybe she could be in choir because Bex was in choir which was surprising because …
Fig: My mom can’t sing
Bex: I know
Fig: You do? How?
Bex: [Laughing till it cried emoji]
Fig thought about how it was weird that one of the things her mother was famous for was something she couldn’t do. She thought about the whole nature-versus-nurture thing and decided there needed to be a third category since she and Bex could both sing.
Besides choir, Bex’s other elective was video production, so the one she’d made wasn’t just a regular selfie video. It had music and good lighting and a great special effect. In the video, Bex said she couldn’t be silent anymore. It was time to come forward. Someone close to the situation (it was Fig!) agreed that help was needed, and the person who could provide the help was her. She knew she had to do the right thing. She owed it to the person who needed the help. She owed it to the world. She took a deep dramatic breath and brushed her hair off her shoulders and lowered her chin so she could look up through her lashes at the camera.
Then she said, “My name is Rebecca Eaney. I’m sixteen years old, adopted, and live in Seattle, Washington. And India Allwood—yes, the India Allwood—is my birth mother.” She waved all up and down herself and stopped with her hand near her boobs. “In case you’re math addled or just generally clueless, this means India Allwood gave birth to me when she was a teenager. So if you’ve been acting like a total fuckwad, you can stop now.” Bex was India Allwood’s child only in genetics, not in real life, so Fig guessed she could say whatever bad words she wanted. “She’s legit. She’s authentic. She’s a ‘trauma local’”—Bex had the camera pull away so you could see the quotation marks she was making with her fingers—“not a ‘trauma tourist,’ or whatever you’re calling her, and anyone who says she’s inauthentic doesn’t know what they’re talking about because India Allwood definitely knows what it feels like to be a pregnant teenager and give a baby up for adoption.”
Then she did her special effect. The camera panned to a picture in a heart-shaped frame which clearly showed a girl in a hospital gown in a hospital bed, who was obviously a teenager and also obviously Fig’s mother, holding a tiny swaddled baby. “That’s me,” Bex’s voice said while the camera zoomed in on the tiny baby. Then it moved up to Fig’s mother in the picture. “And that’s India Allwood.” She looked different, but she didn’t look that different. Fig thought anyone would recognize her. But then Bex did a thing where the sixteen-year-old images of baby Bex and Fig’s mother dissolved into current Bex and a photo taken of Fig’s mother on the red carpet at the Emmy Awards last year. Her head was in the same sort of position, and she had the same sort of smile on her face, so you could see that not much had changed (for her mother; Bex, of course, had become a person instead of a baby) and that it was definitely India Allwood. Then Bex’s video cut to her taking the photo out of the frame and pointing with green glitter nails to the date printed right on the bottom so you could see it really had been taken sixteen years before. Then Bex replaced the photo with her face, just as close, so you could see right up her nose when she said, “India Allwood gave me life. Lots of you really need to get one too,” flashed a sideways peace sign, and stopped the video.
Later, hours later, after the video got viewed a million more times, after probably half of those views were by Fig’s mother herself, after the dwebs spent the whole rest of the day calling her mother horrible names the FCC definitely would not let them say on television, after Ajax came back and talked loudly in the kitchen some more, after Evelyn Esponson rang her mother’s phone forty-four times and left seven voice messages, after every reporter in California came with a camera and a microphone to the end of their driveway, after Fig felt like it would probably be understandable if her mother wanted to forget she even had children, given the day she’d had, but then stuck to their bedtime routine anyway except for tucking Fig in like she was wrapping an overstuffed burrito that absolutely could not leak because she planned to put it in a really nice purse, so tightly, in fact, Fig was sweating by the time she managed to free a hand from under her sheets to grab her phone, she found another text from Bex:
Maybe you were right the first time
Fig: When?
Bex: When I said I should come out and you said to LA