“Start with my parents,” I said.
Tyler sighed, then his finger dropped away from his mouth.
“Okay, so your mom…” he said. “Helene Hart is her name, she studied acting in London, she has a master’s and everything. She’s kind of a force. A brand. She got famous online from doing all this interior design, fashion and lifestyle stuff. I never saw them, but apparently she used to do these long confessional videos about her personal life. That’s why they pitched her this. She’d been on and off with Carter for years—”
“Carter?”
“Carter Boon, your dad. He was still playing for the Red Sox when she met him, but he’s been retired for ages. They were always breaking up and getting back together, and then suddenly they were on in a big way. She made this whole twenty-minute video announcing her pregnancy. They were really popular then, with everyone following your birth and them being a new family and everything. When you were three they started the show. They signed these fifteen-year contracts saying it would run until you were eighteen. Initially they were the leads, but then they were in this really bad place, the fighting was so intense that the producers had to edit a lot out because they didn’t want to completely ruin the brand. I think it was around that time that Sara was cast as your younger sister. Things were better after that.”
Sara was cast as your younger sister. I had to go back to it, turning the words over like I was translating from another language. She was cast, not born. I remembered them bringing Sara home from the hospital, though. It was hazy, but it was there—the memory of sitting down on our living room sofa and holding her for the first time. She was my baby sister.
“Sara’s family gave her up for adoption?”
“Ohhhh…” Tyler’s mouth was a perfect circle. “Yeah…this might sound strange, but Lydia? Your family friend? That’s Sara’s mom. I think her dad died before she was even born.”
Lydia. We’d always joked that they looked alike, but Lydia had freckled skin and huge gray eyes. I knew she dyed her hair, I could see her dark roots, but Sara had a completely different complexion. She must’ve looked like her dad, because she had full eyebrows and wavy black hair.
“The show was always supposed to be more about the family, and your parents’ dynamic, but the last few years there’s been rumors that Carter and Helene hate each other’s guts and are just waiting out their contracts. Besides, I think the audience likes you better now. Since seventh grade, and that whole fight with Kristen where she stopped talking to you, and there was all that drama around the Bon Voyage dance? Suddenly the fan base exploded. Teenagers were watching with their parents, whole families were following along.”
Tyler sat down beside me on the edge of the tub. He was almost unrecognizable. I felt like I was shrinking into myself and he was somehow taking up more space, coming alive. He casually threw out these names and phrases I’d never heard, and he was smiling—actually smiling—as he told me all about the people in my life who’d been lying to me.
“Mr. Henriquez? Jen Klein? Kim?” I asked, trying to think of the most normal, genuine people I knew. “They’re all acting?”
“They’re all guest stars, smaller parts. I was only supposed to be an extra on the set. Like, just another one of the nameless, faceless people who populate the town. But then you hit me in the head with that ball in fourth grade. That was my big break.”
I felt like I might puke.
“Guignard’s Disease,” I said. “It’s made up. It’s not real.”
Tyler didn’t say anything. He just sat there, his elbows on his knees.
“They just made it up, and there was no real way I could know…” I said. My hands felt numb. I tried to shake the blood back into them, but I couldn’t. “But that means Sara isn’t really dying. She’s going to be okay?”
Tyler waved me off. “Technically she is dying, at least for the purpose of the show. She’s being written off. This season is supposed to be about you coming to terms with Sara’s sickness, and soon her death. She might’ve had a chance if puberty hadn’t hit her so hard. People hate watching her now, like really, really can’t stand her. She’s garbage for ratings. The audience just finds her really annoying and gawky and—”
“Will you stop?” I said.
He looked like I’d pushed him. It was hard to listen, when everything he did and said was so completely different from who he was before. Even his voice had somehow changed. It was higher pitched and faster, almost frenetic as he spoke.
“So Fuller died, and they replaced him with another dog…”
“I don’t know,” he shrugged. “There’s a rumor one of the disgruntled extras snuck into the set and stole him, just to screw over the producers. They thought they’d hold him hostage and the producers would freak, but they ended up just finding another dog that looked like him.”
“They didn’t think I’d notice?”
I kept counting the fourteen tiles on the floor, trying to steady myself. Fuller. Helene Hart. Carter Boon. My parents had names and lives I knew nothing about. My dad hadn’t spent the past twenty years building a successful extermination company, he’d been coasting on a reality-television contract. He wasn’t stoic, he just couldn’t stand being around us. My mom was using me to build her lifestyle brand. It had started as early as I could remember, the constant photos, the outfits she’d bring home that she’d want me to pose in. We couldn’t do anything—go to the park or bake cookies—without it being this huge production.
They were liars.
They were both gross, manipulative liars.
Even over the rush of the faucet I could hear it, the sound of a car pulling up the gravel driveway. When I opened my eyes Tyler seemed panicked. The front door slammed shut. Someone was home.
“It’s my stepdad.”
“Is he…” I whispered. “He’s an actor?”
Tyler nodded, but before he could say anything else Craig was in the kitchen, his voice clearer now. He was calling to him. To us.
“Tyler! Tyler Michael Scruggs! What the hell are you doing home?”