It will be a documentary or a Lifetime movie or a multipart series on HBO. It doesn’t matter what they do or how they would do it or who the “they” in question would be; whatever they do would make her body into their commodity, like Tyler was going to do with her heart, and Carey didn’t want that. She wanted to own that commodity on her own terms.

And she had labored for so long.

She deserved to have what she wanted.

So did I.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Two

The next morning, it was very easy to strip the pink from my hair—six or seven washes with baby shampoo took it right out—and the Sally Beauty in the strip mall had everything else. A Savers down the block was an easy place to find a little turban-like hat, a pair of black heels, and cat’s-eye sunglasses, and after a stop at Home Depot, I was done. My hair took the toner right away—and then I was an ashy-gray dirty blonde, just like her.

She had freckles. They were very easy to replicate with a little brown pencil.

After an hour in the bathroom with the shower on hot, the white dress and leopard coat from her studio steamed out very nicely. I painted my fingernails bright red—lips too—and zipped up the cream-colored sheath. I slid my arms into the silk lining of the leopard-print coat, set the sunglasses on my nose, pinned the little turban firmly to my hair, slid my feet into the heels, and it was—it was eerie.

Setting up the cameras took a lot longer. I had no clue what I was doing, and was exhausted from the sleepless night spent at Jes’s computer, hardwired to the internet, googling how to load a 35mm camera and how to connect reels and how to tell one vintage film stock from another.

Fake concrete was impossible, so I filled a quick-dry concrete bag with silver grout. It wouldn’t harden but would still look realistic going in the boot.

I wrestled with the tripods in the water but they refused to be stable, so I set them up on the grass, one angled in each direction so that there would be a very wide shot.

It was ninety-eight degrees that afternoon with 90 percent humidity.

First I had to bring the manual shutters to where the boots and cement bag were, exactly between the sight lines of the two cameras and right at the edge of the water, and then I had to stand still and hit one with each hand. I moved very stiffly—what I hoped was deliberately—trying not to betray anything so that I didn’t betray the wrong thing.