I’ll Be You by Janelle Brown EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: Janelle Brown
- Language: English
- Genre: Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 5 MB
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- Price: Free
ON A THURSDAY NIGHT in July, 378 days into my latest bout of sobriety, my father
called to tell me that my twin sister had gone AWOL. My sister and I hadn’t
spoken in 379 days, so this came as news to me.
“She told us that she was going to a spa of some kind,” my father
explained. “But she’s been gone a week already, and she’s not answering her
phone. It all seems very strange.”
I found this unlikely. My sister had never done anything strange in her
life. Elli—married to a real estate lawyer, owner of a two-story Spanish
Revival just blocks away from the Santa Barbara beach where we played as
children, a woman who coordinated her purse with her heels—was the very
definition of conventionality. Last time I was at her house I opened a drawer
in the kitchen and found a banana slicer.
As for me: I was living in a near-empty studio apartment in Hollywood,
so close to the boulevard that I woke up most nights to the sounds of people
vomiting in the bushes underneath my window.
I was thirty-two years old
and slept on a futon, still crawling my way back from losing most everything
I owned or loved in the years before. Fortunately, I still had my looks, some
interesting tattoos, and a generous AA sponsor; and with these I’d found
employment at a trendy café popular on social media for its latte art.
From semi-famous child actress to milk-foam Instagram model. That had
been my life trajectory in a nutshell, a downward parabola precipitously
accelerated by the excessive use of intoxicants.
When my father called, I was watching cooking show reruns and eating
day-old green curry straight out of the takeout container. It was nine o’clock
and eighty degrees out, the air in my apartment still flaccid from the day’s
heat. I stood by the air-conditioning unit and ducked my head to let the
whisper of coolant dry the sweat on the back of my neck.
“Let’s be real, Dad. This is Elli. She probably just got a bad facial peel
and is hiding out until her skin heals. Nothing strange about it.”
“That’s what your mom said, too, but I can’t help worrying.” I heard a
familiar note of concern and disdain in my father’s voice, a tone that was
usually reserved for me. I’ll confess, I derived some perverse delight in
drawing that out of my father: that I—I—might be the functional twin for
once.
“What about Chuck? What does he think about all this?”
“Ah, well. He moved out a while back. They’re getting divorced.”
“Divorced?” I stood up abruptly, slamming my head against the edge of
the air conditioner. Something squeezed tight in my chest, compressing my
lungs.
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