And. Evie aims.
"Yes!" Ellis yells from the pantry. "Yes, do it, big guy! Give it to me! Shoot it!"
Evie squints down the barrel.
"Now!" Ellis is yelling. "Shoot it right in my mouth!"
Brandy smiles.
And I do nothing.
And Evie shoots Brandy Alexander right in the heart.
CHAPTER THIRTY
My life," Brandy says. "I'm dying, and I'm supposed to see my whole life."
Nobody's dying here. Give me denial.
Evie's shot her wad, dropped the rifle, and gone outside.
The police and paramedics are on their way, and the rest of the wedding guests are outside fighting over the wedding gifts, who gave what and who now has the right to take it back. All of it good messy fun.
Blood is pretty much all over Brandy Alexander, and she says, "I want to see my life."
From some back room, Ellis says, "You have the right to remain silent.”
Jump to me, I let go from holding Brandy's hand, my hand warm red with blood-born pathogens, I write on the burning wallpaper.
Your Name Is Shane McFarland.
You Were Born Twenty-Four Years Ago.
You Have A Sister, One Year Younger.
The fire's already eating my top line.
You Got Gonorrhea From A Special Contract Vice Operative And Your Family Threw You Out.
You Met Three Drag Queens Who Paid You To Start A Sex Change Because You Couldn't Think Of Anything You Wanted Less.
The fire's already eating my second line.
You Met Me.
I Am Your Sister, Shannon McFarland.
Me writing the truth in blood just minutes ahead of the fire eating it.
You Loved Me Because Even If You Didn't Recognize Me, You Knew I Was Your Sister. On Some Level, You Knew Right Away So You Loved Me.
We traveled all over the West and grew up together again.
I've hated you for as long as I can remember.
And You Are Not Going To Die.
I could've saved you.
And you are not going to die.
The fire and my writing are now neck and neck.
Jump to Brandy half-bled on the floor, most of her blood wiped up by me to write with, Brandy squints to read as the fire eats our whole family history, line by line. The line And You Are Not Going To Die is almost at the floor, right in Brandy's face.
"Honey," Brandy says, "Shannon, sweetness, I knew all that. It was Miss Evie's doing. She told me about you being in the hospital. About your accident."
Such a hand model I am already. And such a rube.
"Now," Brandy says. "Tell me everything."
I write: I've Been Feeding Ellis Island Female Hormones For The Past Eight Months.
And Brandy laughs blood. "Me too!" she says.
How can I not laugh?
"Now," Brandy says, "quick, before I die, what else?"
I write: Everybody Just Loved You More After The Hairspray
Accident.
And:
And I Did Not Make That Hairspray Can Explode.
Brandy says, "I know. I did it. I was so miserable being a normal average child. I wanted something to save me. I wanted the opposite of a miracle."
From some other room, Ellis says, "Anything you say can and may be used against you in a court of law." And on the baseboard, I write:
The Truth Is I Shot Myself In The Face.
There's no more room to write, no more blood to write with, and nothing left to say, and Brandy says, "You shot your own face off?"
I nod.
"That," says Brandy, "that, I didn't know.”
CHAPTER THIRTY -ONE
Jump to this one time, nowhere special, just Brandy almost dead on the floor and me kneeling over her -with my hands covered in her Princess Alexander partytime blood.
Brandy yells, "Evie!"
And Evie's burned-up head sticks back in through the front doorway. "Brandy, sugar," Evie says, "This all's been the best disaster you've ever pulled off!"
To me, Evie runs up and kisses me with her nasty melted lipstick and says, "Shannon, I just can't thank you enough for spicing up my boring old home life."
"Miss Evie," Brandy says, "you can act like anything, but, girl, you just totally missed shooting the bulletproof part of my vest."
Jump to the truth. I'm the stupid one.
Jump to the truth. I shot myself. I let Evie think it was Manus and Manus think it was Evie. Probably it was their suspicion of each other that drove them apart. It drove Evie to keep a loaded rifle around in case Manus came after her. The same fear made Manus carry a butcher knife the night he came over to confront her.
The truth is nobody here is as stupid or evil as I let on. Except me. The truth is I drove out away from the city on the day of the accident. With my driver's side window rolled halfway up, I got out and I shot through the glass. On the way back into town, on the freeway, I got in the exit lane for Growden Avenue, the exit for La Paloma Memorial Hospital.
The truth is I was addicted to being beautiful, and that's not something you just walk away from. Being addicted to all that attention, I had to quit cold turkey. I could shave my head, but hair grows back. Even bald, I might still look too good. Bald, I might get even more attention. There was the option of getting fat or drinking out of control to ruin my looks, but I wanted to be ugly, and I wanted my health. Wrinkles and aging looked too far off. There had to be some way to get ugly in a flash. I had to deal with my looks in a fast, permanent way or I'd always be tempted to go back.
You know how you look at ugly hunchback girls, and they are so lucky. Nobody drags them out at night so they can't finish their doctorate thesis papers. They don't get yelled at by fashion photographers if they get infected ingrown bikini hairs. You look at burn victims and think how much time they save not looking in mirrors to check their skin for sun damage.
I wanted the everyday reassurance of being mutilated. The way a crippled deformed birth-defected disfigured girl can drive her car with the windows open and not care how the wind makes her hair look, that's the kind of freedom I was after.
I was tired of staying a lower life form just because of my looks. Trading on them. Cheating. Never getting anything real accomplished, but getting the attention and recognition anyway. Trapped in a beauty ghetto is how I felt. Stereotyped. Robbed of my motivation.
In this way, Shane, we are very much brother and sister. This is the biggest mistake I could think would save me. I wanted to give up the idea I had any control. Shake things up. To be saved by chaos. To see if I could cope, I wanted to force myself to grow again. To explode my comfort zone.
I slowed down for the exit and pulled over onto the shoulder, what they call the breakdown lane. I remember thinking, how apropos. I remember thinking, this is going to be so exciting. My makeover. Here was my life about to start all over again. I could be a great brain surgeon this time around. Or I could be an artist. Nobody would care how I'd look. People would just see my art, what I made instead of just how I looked, and people would love me.
What I thought last was, at last I'll be growing again, mutating, adapting, evolving. I'll be physically challenged.
I couldn't wait. I got the gun from the glove compartment. I wore a glove against powder burns, and held the gun at arm's length out my broken window. It wasn't even like aiming with the gun only about two feet away. I might've killed myself that way, but by now that idea didn't seem very tragic.