Though Charlie didn’t do great in school and had been long ago sorted into the group of kids who were never going to college, she read a lot and she paid attention. She was smart.
But smart kids can still be plenty stupid.
Charlie decided that since she couldn’t find anything on Travis, she’d create evidence. She made a new Facebook page with his name and picture, then started flirting with women. Soon that became texting on a burner phone. Managing being Travis part of the time and Alonso the rest of the time was exhausting. It was playing pretend on steroids.
But rather than getting tired of it, she found herself frustrated by all the time she had to spend as Charlie Hall, who was still a kid with a lot of math homework. She looked forward to improvisation, when it seemed like all the right words came out of a part of her that she didn’t even know was there.
Even though she was able to fake up evidence, she wasn’t sure it would be enough to convince her mother. She enlisted Posey to manipulate their environment. To flash lights in rooms on the other side of the apartment, turn on the stove, and leave little things where their mother could find them. To show off Alonso’s power. They reinvented the Victorian spiritualism movement from first principles.
Charlie had stumbled into one of the headiest delusions that existed—Alonso told Mom that she was important, special, chosen. He was vague on the details, but the details didn’t matter.
It wasn’t long before Mom was on the hook. In fact, sometimes it seemed to Charlie that her mother was more interested in Alonso than in her, more excited to spend time with him than with her kid. Sometimes Charlie felt like the most important thing about her was being a vessel.
After a bad night where Travis yelled at Charlie to clean up her room and, when she didn’t do it to his satisfaction, ripped her copy of Howl’s Moving Castle in half, she decided it was time. Three days later, Alonso told Mom to look in the glove compartment of Travis’s car, where Posey had already planted the burner phone.
After that, things started moving very fast.
Mom looked through the messages on the phone and saw the promises “Travis” had made to these women and the awful stuff he’d told them about her. Travis denied it all, becoming more and more furious when he wasn’t believed.
Sucks to be you, Charlie thought with satisfaction, remembering how many times her mother had believed him instead of them.
Charlie was glad when they moved out, gladder still when her mother filed for divorce, thrilled to be moving into their small new apartment, even if money was tighter than ever. But Charlie was a little afraid of what she had done. It was a heavy weight to know that she had committed a betrayal so big that if her mother found out, Charlie might never be forgiven.
And she was in no way ready for her mother to introduce Alonso to her friends. Charlie refused to go. She cried and insisted that she didn’t want to, that she didn’t like letting him talk through her anymore.
She was teetering on the cusp of adulthood. Three-quarters child, one-quarter yearning. Her dreams were confused kaleidoscopes of swanning through the sets of TV shows, drinking cocktails that looked like vodka martinis and tasted like Sprite, wearing lipstick and pumps covered in red craft glitter, and marrying someone who was half pop star and half stuffed animal.
She knew she had to stop pretending to be Alonso before she got caught, but she didn’t know how to stop without disappointing her mother.
Just let him come through. This will be the last time. I promise, honey.
Her mother convinced her to talk to the friends once, and then a second time. By the third visit, Charlie could tell that some of them had grown skeptical. Rand, a portly man with a beautifully waxed mustache, tried to trip her up with historical questions, and Charlie panicked. She talked too much. On the car ride back, she could feel her mother’s gaze on her, disheartened and on the verge of disillusionment. Charlie’s whole body felt as heavy as lead.
The third time, she didn’t protest going, although her mother seemed conflicted. Still, Charlie had looked up historical facts, and between those and Alonso’s probable ignorance about things like antibiotics and gravity, she thought she could push through one more time.
More important, Charlie had remembered what worked on her mother. Charlie didn’t need to convince them of anything.
She needed to make them want to believe.
And so instead of answering their questions, she spun a jagged-edged fantasy. She knew all her mother’s friends well enough to guess who hoped her sculptures would be featured in a magazine, who wanted love, who wanted her children to move closer.