Chapter 7 - The Currency of a Sister
The Suffolk County Jail on Nashua Street in Boston is an imposing fortress of gray granite and reinforced glass that overlooks the tidal basin of the Charles River.
On Tuesday afternoon, ten days after the wedding, I sat in Visitor Room Four.
The room was five feet square, divided down the center by a pane of wire-reinforced security glass that was scratched with fingernail marks and greasy forehead prints.
Kendall sat on the other side.
She had been in custody for nine days.
The change in her was not dramatic; it was structural, like an expensive house that had been built on sand when the tide came up twenty feet.
The platinum-blonde highlights in her hair were greasy, pinned back with two gray plastic bobby pins provided by the commissary. She wore a dark-green institutional v-neck scrub top that was faded from industrial washing, the cotton thin enough that I could see the blue outline of her collarbones beneath. Without her sixty-dollar foundation and her ring light, her skin had the pale, grayish-yellow translucency of an unbaked turnip.
Her hands—the hands that had held the microphone, the hands that had flung the salt-heavy slug of lye into my face—were resting flat on the stainless steel shelf beneath the glass, the cuticles bitten down to the raw pink quick.
She looked at my face.
She looked at the white sterile dressing that covered my left cheek. She looked at the polarized sunglasses that hid the milky, damaged circle of my left eye.
Her mouth opened slightly.
"Claire?" she whispered.
Her voice didn't have the breathy, melodic, podcast lilt anymore. It was dry, cracked, thin as tissue paper.
"Hello, Kenny," I said.
She flinched. No one had called her Kenny since our father died on the sunporch in Gloucester with his oxygen tank hissing beside his chair.
"Claire... they won't let me have my phone," she stammered, her fingers twitching against the steel shelf, her thumbs moving in that rhythmic, phantom scroll that people develop after ten years of twelve-hour screen time. "My manager... Jenna won't take my calls. The lawyer says the agency dropped me on Monday. They took the website down, Claire. They took down Ever After. If you search my name on Google, it’s just... it’s just mugshots. There are eight hundred articles about the chemical."
"I know," I said.
"They're calling me a monster," she wept, her forehead hitting the glass with a dull thud. "People who used to comment on every single post... girls who bought the sweatshirts... they're making videos about how they always knew I was evil. They're making fun of my wedding dress, Claire. They're saying the lace was polyester."
I sat with my hands folded in my lap, feeling the heavy wool of my trousers, feeling the cold air from the intake vent above my head.
"Did you know about the lye, Kenny?" I asked.
She looked up, her eyes wide, wild, and bloodshot.
"No!" she screamed, her voice cracking against the glass. "I swear to you, Claire! I swear on Dad’s grave! Mom gave me the glass! She said it was club soda and a drop of blue syrup! She told me you were in on it! She told me you had agreed to the reaction shot during the rehearsal dinner so the production company would clear the loan!"
"Mom told you that?"
"Yes!" she sobbed, her tears running down her cheeks, unhindered by tissue, dropping onto the gray scrub top like rain on concrete. "She said you were being stubborn about the signature because you wanted to feel important, but that you’d agreed to the stunt if it meant the family debt was paid! She told me to throw it high! She told me to make sure it hit your eyes so you’d have to cover your face and the cameras could get the tight shot!"
I leaned forward until my face was three inches from the wire glass.
I took off my sunglasses.
I let her see the eye.
The pupil was still eight millimeters wide, fixed and dark as an inkwell. The inferior three clock-hours of the cornea were not clear; they were white, scarred with a thick, fibrous haze that looked like an oyster shell ground down on an emery wheel. A web of tiny, bright-red capillary vessels was creeping from the pink conjunctiva into the edge of the clear tissue, the body’s desperate, clumsy attempt to feed the dying cells with blood.
Kendall recoiled.
She didn't just pull back; she threw her body backward against the concrete wall of her cubicle, her hands flying to her mouth, her chest heaving in violent, dry hitches that sounded like an animal choking on a dry bone.
"Oh, God," she choked out through her fingers. "Oh, God, Claire... what did she do to you? What did she do to you?"
"She did what she’s been doing since nineteen-ninety-four, Kenny," I said. My voice was level, quiet, steady as a plumb line. "She took something that belonged to Dad, she mixed it with poison, and she gave it to you to carry because she knew you wouldn't look at the label as long as there was a camera pointing at your teeth."
"I didn't know," she wailed. "Claire, please... please tell the DA. They're talking about seven years. Seven years in Framingham! I can't go to Framingham, Claire! The women there... they'll kill me!"
"You're not going to Framingham for seven years, Kenny," I said.
She stopped weeping. Her hands lowered from her face, her eyes narrowing with that tiny, pathetic spark of hope that had always been her undoing—the belief that the bill would always be paid by someone else, that the overdraft would be covered, that the family would find a way to settle the account before the bailiff arrived.
"You're... you're dropping the charges?" she whispered.
"No," I said.
I pulled a four-page legal document from my coat pocket and pressed it flat against the wire-reinforced glass.
"This is a plea agreement prepared by the District Attorney’s office this morning," I told her. "Count One—the aggravated battery—is reduced to reckless endangerment with a suspended sentence of three years’ supervised probation. Count Two—the conspiracy charge—is dropped entirely."
Her breath came out in a long, shuddering gasp. "Oh, thank God... thank God, Claire—"
"Read the conditions, Kenny."
She blinked, squinting through her tears at the small, eight-point type on the third page:
Condition Four: Complete, unconditional surrender of all corporate assets, digital domains, social media accounts, and intellectual property associated with Ever After Media, LLC, to the Vance Family Restitution Trust.
Condition Five: A permanent, lifetime injunction barring the defendant, Kendall Vance Reed, from establishing, operating, monetizing, or appearing on any commercial digital platform, video-sharing service, or broadcast medium within the United States.
Condition Six: Two thousand hours of community service, to be performed exclusively at the North Shore Burn and Trauma Rehabilitation Center in Lynn, Massachusetts.
Condition Seven: A complete, sworn, videotaped deposition regarding the financial and logistical actions of Beverly Vance between October fourteenth, twenty-twenty-two, and September twenty-eighth, twenty-twenty-four, to be delivered to the grand jury within forty-eight hours.
Kendall stared at the page.
Her jaw began to shake, her small teeth chattering as if she had just been dragged out of the harbor in February.
"No internet?" she whispered.
She didn't ask about the community service. She didn't ask about the burn unit.
She asked about the wire.
"You're thirty-three years old, Kenny," I said, my voice cutting through her panic like a cold chisel through soft copper. "You have sixty credits toward an associate degree in early childhood education from North Shore Community College that you abandoned eight years ago because someone told you that taking pictures of your lunch was a career."
I tapped the paper.
"You sign the plea," I said, "and you take the bus to Lynn every morning at seven AM. You clean bedpans. You empty grease traps. You wash the bandages of children whose faces have actually been burned by fire, until you understand that skin is not content, that pain is not a hashtag, and that when you throw something into another human being's eyes, it doesn't wash off when the director yells cut."
"And if I don't sign?" she choked out.
I stood up from the metal stool.
I put my sunglasses back on, hiding the milky circle of my left eye behind the dark polarized glass.
"If you don't sign by five o'clock," I said, "Douglas Hall files the federal admiralty claim on behalf of the trust. We attach Tyler’s wages. We attach your mother’s house. And I sit in the front row of the superior court in Salem on the fourteenth of November and I let twelve men and women from this county watch sixty frames per second of you smiling into that microphone while my skin melts into the floorboards."
I turned toward the heavy steel door.
"Claire!" she screamed, her hands slamming against the security glass with a flat, hollow thwack. "Claire, please! What am I supposed to be if I'm not Kendall Ever After?"
I stopped at the threshold.
May you like
I didn't turn around. I looked at the gray granite blocks of the wall, cold, solid, laid down by Irish stonemasons a century ago to keep the sea out of the streets.
"You can be Kenny," I told her. "The girl who used to wear rubber boots to the beach and knew how to hold a flashlight for her father."
