Wallflower In Bloom (15 page)

In a way, the social media revolution was a great equalizer. Now we all had a number. Whether you wanted to buy into it or not, in this day and age our personal power was measured by our Web reach. There was no secret or mystery to this number; it was simple arithmetic. Just add your Facebook friends and fans to your Twitter followers to your blog followers to your website newsletter list. The number you got might trigger flashbacks to high school popularity indexes, but in many ways it was much kinder. In high school, it was almost impossible to increase your cool quotient. Today, you can build your Web reach with steady, hard work.

I knew, because that’s what I’d done for Tag. His number was well up in the hundreds of thousands and growing rapidly. And still, almost all the people connected to his online hubs felt a personal connection to him. Fans completely believed they were in Tag’s inner circle, that they were really his “friends.” And right now they were all
checking and rechecking for a message from Tag thanking them for voting his sister onto
Dancing With the Stars
and giving them the inside scoop on what would happen next.

The funny thing was that in social media, waiting can be a good thing. The biggest mistake most people make is to tweet too much, to overpost on Facebook, to send out an e-newsletter weekly or even daily. It doesn’t take long till it all becomes noise and your new friends tune you out and ultimately break up with you.

I’d learned to alternate periods of silence with flurries of activity, varying the patterns to break the rhythm and keep everyone on their toes. In a way social networking is like any other relationship: We all want the ones we can’t quite predict, the ones we can’t control.

But all of that effort had always been for Tag. My own sphere of influence could be listed on the palm of one hand, without writing on any fingers. And most of those people weren’t even talking to me anymore.

I knew what I had to do. I wasn’t sure who in the family might be watching Tag’s Facebook page, so I didn’t dare pretend to be Tag and send an e-blast congratulating me yet, but I could at least make a quick, subversive start on my own virtual life.

First I set up my own Twitter account. Then I wrote a new tweet for Tag’s account.

Stay tuned to cheer my fav sister Dee on DWTS! All follow @DeeCanDance and spread word to universe. Peace in, peace out. Tag.

But instead of posting it publicly, I instructed my auto-reply app to send the message to Tag’s new followers in the form of a DM, or direct message.

Next I instructed my auto-follower app to have Tag follow anyone in the world who’d tweeted anything about
Dancing With the Stars
or
DWTS
. Almost without exception, they’d be thrilled out of their minds to be followed by Tag. So they’d follow him back and get his DM telling them to follow me.

Total genius, if I did say so myself. Maybe I should have felt more guilty, but there was barely a twinge. By the time I got myself settled on the left coast, I’d have thousands of my own Twitter followers. And because the message went out only to new followers, I had virtually no chance of getting caught. I mean, Tag was a narcissist, but even he couldn’t follow himself. And the good news was that even though my brother texted and talked on his iPhone all day long, he was basically computer illiterate.

Wendy dropped me off at the water shuttle terminal, while Blythe got both sets of kids off to school. They’d even packed me a breakfast sandwich to eat on the ferry ride across Boston Harbor to the airport. If worse came to worst and I was out of a job when I came back, maybe they’d let me do their marketing after all. We could always change the name of the company from Afterwife to Afterwife and No Life.

I couldn’t wait to get on the plane and up in the air. I knew Tag and my parents’ flight wasn’t due in for hours yet. I’d even double-checked their itinerary to make absolutely sure. But as I surged with the crowd through the maze of corridors at Logan Airport, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was about to run right into them.

I found my gate and took a seat in a faux leather chair. I moved my carry-on in front of my feet to camouflage them. I tapped the toes of one foot and then the other, trying to see if I remembered anything at all from my last dance class, decades ago. I moved on to a kick ball change and then I upped it to a shuffle. Sitting safely in a padded
vinyl airport terminal chair, I could shuffle with my right foot, but my left was a bit sluggish. The good news was I could still shuffle. But could I Shuffle Off to Buffalo? That had been the trickiest beginning tap step of them all, the one that I’d practiced over and over on the linoleum kitchen floor so I’d be able to keep up with the big kids.

But the truth was, even if I could somehow manage to Shuffle Off to Buffalo, shuffling off to Hollywood was another thing entirely.

What made me think I could pull this off? Maybe it wouldn’t be so horrible after all if Tag and my parents found me before my flight took off. I mean, if you weighed family confrontation against international humiliation, the embarrassment quotient might be slightly lower on the family side. And with luck my family’s outburst wouldn’t last an entire season.

Plus, I could practically write the script for that one. “How could you?” Tag would say. “How could you destroy everything I’ve worked my entire life to build?” He’d raise his palms to the heavens, exposing just the right amount of forearm. “Not just for me, but for all of us.”

“Easy, tiger,” my father would say. He’d stretch himself up to his full height so he could get an arm around Tag’s shoulders. “I’m sure your sister didn’t mean anything by it, did you, Dee-Dee? Just give her a chance to explain.”

My mother would cut in. “Five p.m. Tag’s house. We’ll all sit down and discuss it like civilized human beings, and then those of us who haven’t been disowned will have a nice family dinner.”

A voice cut into my reverie, but it was only the announcement that first class was boarding. I stood and stretched and looked over my shoulder for a last-second stay of execution. Then I took a deep breath, found my boarding pass, and yanked the handle on my carry-on to extend it.

I walked the ramp to the plane that would take me to Hollywood as if I were walking the plank on a pirate ship in the middle of a storm-tossed, shark-infested ocean.

When in doubt, eat. When in eat, doubt
.

I
slept most of the way to LAX. First class wasn’t what it used to be, but it was still a whole bunch better than coach. The way it worked in our family was that Tag always flew first class. My parents didn’t believe in it politically, so they always flew coach. I split the difference, flying first class with Tag and coach alone. This was the first time I’d ever been in first class by myself, so I took a moment to let it register. I knew just enough about sports to realize that today was the first inning of a whole new ball game.

I ignored the man sitting next to me, as well as his briefcase. I’d planned on starving myself today so I’d look a little better when I got to L.A., but the smell of warm first-class chocolate chip cookies reached my nose before the plane even took off. Since I’d already eaten a breakfast sandwich anyway, I decided I might as well go for the cookies and then stop eating for the rest of the day. I washed them down with a glass of milk. What’s the point of chocolate chip cookies without a little milk to dunk them in?

I crumpled my napkin and pressed it into the empty cup. When I handed over my trash, the flight attendant gave me a big smile. Flight attendants tended to ignore me unless I was with Tag, so I wondered if this one was just being friendly because I was sitting in first class.

For the first time, it occurred to me that an actual photo of me might be circulating on the Internet. Wait, maybe even on television—the morning shows, and even
Extra
and
Access Hollywood
. I hoped they hadn’t gotten their hands on my high school class picture with the frizzy hair and that soulful gaze I’d attempted, which only ended up making me look bug-eyed. I’d spent most of my adult life dodging cameras, so maybe they’d just show a shadowy female figure stamped with a question mark. At least that would buy me some time to seek professional help. I’d heard those Hollywood stylists could make anyone look good.

The endless line of coach passengers was still boarding, so I turned on my cell phone and tapped the Firefox icon. It opened to a news page. The headline was some political scandal.

I scrolled down. Right under the first story was a tiny photo of Tag in one of his white tunics, standing with some floozy. Perfect. Maybe the media would keep using my more photogenic brother’s photo and let me dance in peace.

I looked at the photo again. On my cell screen, it was the tiniest of thumbnails. I squinted. Then I opened the link.

I was the floozy. Actually,
floozy
would have been kind.
Frumpy
was more accurate. I was handing Tag his rock star wireless headset, so finely constructed that all you could see from a distance was a tiny flesh-colored foam-padded microphone that photographed like a beauty mark. My arms were up and my blouse had followed them, exposing about three inches of flabby flesh. My jeans were bagging out in all the wrong places, and I appeared to have a slight wedgy. My roots needed a serious touch-up, and it looked like my hair hadn’t been brushed in a month.

Just. Shoot. Me. Now.

I smelled coffee, and realized the flight attendant was standing over my shoulder. “I thought that was you,” she said. “How exciting.”

“That’s one way of looking at it.” I pressed the Off button on my phone.

The flight attendant lowered her voice and leaned closer. “Just wondering, is Tag seeing anyone right now?”

“Just wondering,” I said. “Do you think I could have another cookie?”

Her face hardened, but she took the hint and left to fetch me my second snack.

I ate my new cookie, pretty much without tasting it. And the whole time I was eating it I was wishing that I wasn’t. But as soon as I finished it, I wanted another one, because as awful as I felt while I was eating it, I felt even worse when it was gone.

It was the story of my eating life:
When in doubt, eat. When in eat, doubt
. I ate when I was anxious about something. But as soon as the food was in my mouth, I realized I didn’t really want it, so I didn’t even enjoy it. Or sometimes even taste it. Maybe I should just start carrying a spittoon with me wherever I went.

I curled up with my tiny white pillow and snuggled under my thin blue blanket. When we reached cruising altitude, I reclined my leather seat back as far as it would go and conked out.

I woke up just in time for lunch, a pretty decent chicken Caesar salad wrap and a half-melted mini–hot fudge sundae. I ate all of it, figuring I needed to keep up my strength for whatever awaited me on the other side of this flight. I drank some water, made a quick trip to the bathroom, then dozed off a second time.

When I opened my eyes again, we were landing. I stretched and rooted around in my bag for a piece of gum. As soon as our wheels touched the ground, I turned on my phone again. A fleet of missed calls and messages came in for a landing. I ignored them all.

My phone rang and I jumped. I checked the caller ID to make sure it was safe to answer. It wasn’t a number I recognized, so I knew it wasn’t Tag or my parents.

“Hello,” I said timidly.

“Welcome to Los Angeles,” Karen the producer said.

“Wow. You’re good. What, did you watch my plane land?”

She made a sound that was almost a laugh. “You’ve got the rental car confirmation and the directions to your apartment. I’ll e-mail you tomorrow’s itinerary once I’ve got everything confirmed. You’ll start the day with a seven a.m. physical with the show physician—”

“Oh, that’s okay,” I said. “I’m—”

“Policy. It’s in your contract. I’ll meet you in the lobby and go with you to the exam room. Practice studio locations are confidential, so please do not share any details with the general public or with members of the media.”

“Ha,” I said. “I’ll do my best, but those paparazzi are all over me.”

I didn’t realize that the flight attendant was listening to my end of the conversation until she rolled her eyes.

Karen the producer didn’t laugh either. Did they not realize I was joking? “There’s also a confidentiality clause in your contract. The contract, by the way, will be on its way to your brother’s agent tomorrow, and we’re hoping to have it fully executed by midweek.”