Selfie Read Free Page A

out.”
    “Right.” She shook her head and continued to browse. After a moment, she sighed. “You let your porn subscription lapse.”
    I made a hurt sound, and she looked back at my computer like it held the secrets of the universe.
    “And you’ve been looking at this file with Vinnie every fucking day.”
    I stopped searching for clothes without holes and grabbed some boxer briefs, yoga pants, and a T-shirt and threw them on haphazardly. The T-shirt was a basic cotton tourist T—we’d gotten it on a trip to the Grand Canyon two years ago. For a while, we’d fought over it, playfully, because we never let ourselves get photographed in the personal shit, and if one of us woke up and put on that shirt, it meant he was staying inside all day and hopefully not alone.
    “What do you want me to say?” I was working so hard on leeching the tears out of my voice that it came out flat, no affect, dead.
    “I want you to say you want to live!” she half laughed. But she was looking at me soberly, and real concern showed, even through the trowel-thick mascara and the psychotropic contacts.
    “Jillian . . .” I didn’t know what to say.
    She shook her head and waved her hands in uncharacteristic agitation. I hadn’t seen her do that since the day we got back from Vinnie’s funeral. I’d asked her if she wanted to come inside—basic courtesy, really, I hadn’t expected her to take me up on it. The place had been . . . Well, I’d needed to find a different maid service after that week.
    She’d helped me clean up the broken glass and the ripped-down curtains, all without a word. I’d apologized, humbly, feeling like a spoiled child, as she’d sat me down with some delivered pizza and a glass of soda, and she’d done . . .
    That. Held her hands up, palms toward me, waving them back and forth as she’d tried not to see . . . me. My pain. The thing she couldn’t fix.
    She did that to me now, and then glared, her eyes watering. “This here is an intervention,” she said briskly, and we both ignored the way her voice got thick. “Connor, you need to work again. You need to see people again. You need a fucking goal, even if it’s just to know your line and hit your mark and look into the goddamned camera. You want to see how bad it is? You showed the world how bad it is.”
    And with that she shifted aside so I could see the computer. Then she hit Play on the Washington Monument of selfies.
    I watched dumbly for a moment as the camera came on, the lens showing a fish-eye view from the mantel in the living room. The furniture was there, fabric couches, matching throw pillows, complementing love seat and recliner, as well as the little conversation pit, and, against the far wall, the 116” flat-screen TV.
    Some bozo in board shorts and a tank top was blocking the view, but he backed up like he’d been trained with cameras, and knew about how far he needed to go to be seen in the whole frame.
    I stared at my image for a moment. Jillian was right. I look like hell. My hair was usually sort of a sandy blond, but I highlighted it because it was Hollywood. You could see about three months of growth between my part and the blond, and there was some silver in that, even visible in the grainy, badly colored shot.
    You could see my ribs. Yeah, sure, there were lumps of muscle, but you could see my ribs .
    I had a sort of long face, with a bold nose and a full mouth—when I was full blond I was an Aryan wet dream, really—and really nice cheekbones, sharp and distinctive. It had been the cheekbones that had convinced me I could make it in Hollywood when my parents insisted that if I wasn’t following my father into farming I would pretty much only succeed as a computer technician or an auto mechanic and nothing else.
    I’d seen myself in the mirror, stared longingly at my heroes on the screen, and thought, Look at that. We have the same faces. We can be the same.
    In the video I appeared . . . rodent-like, almost, and