“Don’t fucking touch me, witch,” Justine snapped. She turned and stormed toward an Italian restaurant across the road.
“Justine! Justine!” Jennifer called. “Sorry about her. I don’t know what her problem is.” Jennifer turned back to me. “Is your sister here? Is she still coming?”
“I’m her sister,” Vivi offered.
“I think she’s coming,” I said. “We haven’t heard from her today.”
“Do you think you’ll go to Cuckoo afterward?” Jennifer asked. “Oh my God, do you think Tyler Yang will be there?”
“Cuckoo?”
“Only the coolest and most ultra-exclusive nightclub in London. Duh. It’s impossible for regular humans to get in, but Grey and Tyler go all the time when she’s here.”
A slow, sharp smile spread across Vivi’s face. She despised when people talked about our sister like they knew her. Grey was ours. She belonged to us. “We’ll be sure to let you know,” she said, maintaining the smile. “See you later.”
Jennifer was apparently unaware that she’d been dismissed. “Oh, actually, I kind of lost my place in line. Do you think I could come in with you? I would love to see backstage.”
Vivi took one long last drag on her cigarette and let the clove-scented smoke bloom in Jennifer’s face. “Do you know any of our music—or are you just here to starfuck Grey? Can you name one song?”
Jennifer stumbled over her words. “I . . . I don’t think . . . That’s not fair.”
“Actually,” Vivi said as she stubbed out her cigarette with her boot, “what’s our band called?”
Again, Jennifer made gasping fish sounds.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Vivi said. “Back in line.”
“Ah. Classic Vivi. Making friends wherever she goes,” Laura mused as the bouncers opened the doors for us and we made our way inside.
Vivi threw her arms around her bandmates’ shoulders and swaggered into the club like the rock star she was. “Starfuckers never change,” she said, oblivious to the fact that I would be the one who’d have to face said starfucker—now glaring at me with her arms crossed—and her henchwomen at school tomorrow.
* * *
We hung out backstage while the support act warmed up the crowd. Then, when Sisters of the Sacred took the stage and Grey was still MIA, I messaged her again:
They’re starting. WHERE. ARE. YOU?
It was weird for her not to have seen my previous messages. Vivi could go weeks without checking social media, but Grey was chained to it. I opened Instagram. My account was set to private, but I had thousands of message requests. Everybody wants a piece of you when your sister is famous. Or rather, they want a piece of your sister, and they want you to deliver it to them. Ghouls haunted my Instagram, my Facebook, hungry for a filtered taste of her.
You go to school with my cousin. I think you’re so hot. Send me a pic of you naked, beautiful. (Or your sister if you’re too shy!)
Tell Grey that if she breaks Tyler’s heart I will literally kill her. Literally.
Hey, I have a theory about what happened to you as a kid. Have you considered the possibility that you were abducted by aliens? My best friend’s great-uncle works at Area 51 and she says he has proof. I can share the details for a low price. Message me back!
I know you will probably never read this but I feel like I am DESTINED to become a catwalk model and I would REALLY appreciate you passing my headshots on to your sister.
I checked Grey’s page to see if she’d posted recently. Grey Hollow, supermodel, had ninety-eight million followers. NINETY-EIGHT MILLION. There were pictures of her with other supermodels, pictures of her on magazine covers, pictures of her backstage at concerts with pop stars, pictures of her on yachts, pictures of her with her model boyfriend, Tyler Yang, at some pink-lit club—Cuckoo, I guessed—in Mayfair.
Grey had first told me about Tyler six months ago on our trip to Prague, after we’d each drunk a few shots of absinthe from delicate glasses. We sat close together at a booth in a nightclub, warm and glittery on the inside from the alcohol and the wormwood, her head resting on my shoulder as we watched Vivi move on the dance floor with a girl she’d met at the bar. Grey held up her left hand and I held up my right and we pressed our fingertips together in an arch. I felt her heartbeat in my skin, in my chest, felt the strong thread that bound us together.
“I think I’m in love with him,” she’d said quietly, her breath carrying a trace of sugar and anise. I could hear the smile in her voice. I already knew she loved him. I’d known it since the day before, when we’d met at Václav Havel Airport and I’d hugged her for the first time in months. She’d smelled different. She’d smelled . . . softer, somehow. It suited her. Being in love made her even more intoxicating.
I was surprised and unsurprised in equal measure. Unsurprised because I already knew they were together. I’d seen paparazzi shots of them holding hands on the front of tabloid magazines, and Tyler had started to appear more and more frequently in her Instagram stories. Surprised because Grey had never had a real boyfriend before, only lovers who interested her for a short time, and—unlike Vivi, who frequently offered the details of her love and sex life—Grey was a locked box. She shared no more than morsels.
“Tyler Yang?” I’d asked her, and she’d nodded sleepily.
“He’s quite special,” she’d continued. “You’ll know what I mean when you meet him.”
The meeting had yet to happen, but maybe it would tonight—if she bothered showing up.
Grey’s last post was from five days ago, an image of her in a green tulle gown lounging against a red banister with a glass of champagne in her hand, her skin saturated in fluorescent pink light, her blond head wreathed in baby’s breath. #TBT London Fashion Week, the caption read. The location was tagged as the Cuckoo Club. Just over fifteen million people had liked it.
There were two levels inside Jazz Café: the lower level with the stage, the audience pressed up close to it, the band soaked in orange light and laser beams. Overhead, a mezzanine restaurant and bar wrapped around the space for those who preferred sipping wine to getting doused with beer in the mosh pit. I spotted JJ sitting at a round table, both looking sullen.
Grey wasn’t there for the first song, or the second, or the third. Candace moved across the stage with Mick Jagger swagger, sex on legs, but I watched Laura, a thimble of a woman with Bambi eyes transformed into a she-beast as she attacked her drums. Hair in her face, sweat and spit flying, her T-shirt riding up to reveal a soft slip of stomach.