Fandom Imagines

I still don’t actually like the plan. It feels skeevey, but it’s also not the worst idea he’s ever had, and this might be like, how he processes things. It’s a global pandemic, after all, and if this is how I keep him quiet...

He walks over to our secondary “camera” (my phone on a tripod), clicks it off. “I can’t wait,” he says. “This is literally gold. It’s worth every penny. This is going to make us so much money.”

“I would like it to make rent,” I say. But then I peer over his shoulder to watch him scrub through the video - an hour of what he’s calling “Fraudulent”. I think he was inspired by, like, “Serial” or “S-Town” or something.

The goal - feed this poor lady everything fake he can, and then, at the end of his budgeted allowance, expose the hell out of her.

He had looked up at me when the idea had hit him and said - what other use is having a dead twin sister?

----

What I didn’t expect is to be weirdly invested. I figured - okay, fine distraction, and besides, it kind of wigs me out knowing there are people out there who are capitalizing on other people’s grief. I think about that place in California a lot, you know, the Winchester House - I went through it once during a combined-family cross-country road trip. Casey had tipped her head back and looked up at one of the forever-long stairs that go nowhere. I was separating my siblings from trying to bite each other. “It’s so creepy in here,” Carl had said. There was that one passage that could only be entered by one direction and exited by another, and I think it triggered his claustrophobia.

“I think it’s sad,” Casey had said. She looked over at me with those blue-green eyes. “She was just trying to get in contact with the people she loved, and she got taken totally advantage of.”

But Sarah was like... Not an evil person in a suit. I mean, probably. Her barely-there 480 webcam was like something from a poorly lit MySpace page. Carl still required our outfits “for posterity” (he thought it would be good TV), and Sarah remained... just a person. She’d ask us questions, talk to us about memories. Sometimes she would say things like “I think your sister is telling me she loved doing that with you”. 

Carl kept feeding false information - his sister’s name had been Ashley, she was 5 years younger than him, they were estranged, she was a vegan, she kept pet crabs, she hated dogs. And Sarah kept gently responding - Ashley is a beautiful name, 5 years is a long time, it’s sad they were estranged, veganism is so difficult to maintain, crabs have nice claws, sorry about the dogs.

But it was difficult to hate her. She was funny, somehow, and kind. For all that Carl was trying to be fake, to make up a sister that didn’t exist, sometimes his voice would crack, just a little, while he said something - “I miss her” - and I’d look over at him, worried, while Sarah would have ... just the most perfect thing to say. 

And it wasn’t just her responses to Carl, either. During the 15 minute breaks, she’d just chat with me while Carl took his sweet time doing whatever else (usually trying out new graphics to overlay). She sometimes mentioned “Ashley” - but mostly she seemed to know I was only here to watch. We talked about our new quiet lives. She said she wasn’t used to being alone, but that it was kind of better this way. She said she missed having people around, that the Zoom call really wasn’t the same. And she listened to me, in this way that made me feel like... you know. Listened to.

At the end of our fifth conversation, Carl blows out the candle and looks over to me. “How do you think that went?”

I don’t know. “She’s nice,” I say instead. “I feel kind of bad.”

“Of course she’s nice.” Carl frowns. “This is her literal job, remember. She deals with people all the time. She knows what to say because she says the same shit to every poor guy looking to revisit his dead... whatever.”

I don’t know how to answer that, either. “It is weirdly nice to like, have something to do, though,” I admit. “Is it weird I like, look forwards to talking to her?”

“You said it’s weird twice, so yeah.” 

So yeah, I guess.

“Besides.” He sniffs as he plugs my phone into his laptop. “What you actually look forwards to is our Netflix deal.”

-----

I guess like, I’m probably in mourning too, even though that feels scandalous and kind of cruel. Carl lost his actual sister. She was my best friend, but he lost his sister. It’s like... different. Even at the funeral, I didn’t really cry too much. I mostly just held up Carl and kept quiet. There were other people more important than me, and I don’t really get to be sad about it in the same way.

There was this one Sunday that she and I were on the porch. We’d just finished watching “The Craft” and, even though we were too old to play pretend, were both talking about starting our own coven.

It was so delicious, to be 17 and standing under a full moon, holding her hand, wind in our hair, promising - I feel magic when I am with you.

--------

He’s editing sessions 6 and 7. The way he’s set it up is that each time he lies, a cool little graphic plays. He likes to do double-takes of her responses with dramatic music.

“I don’t know that it’s working,” I tell him. A lot of her responses are too middle-of-the-road. Not a confirmation or a denial. The one he’s working on plays out over his rig - he asks, Does Ashley still love spiders? She was so strange, you know, loving them, but I loved her for that.

And Sarah’s response just seemed... to be a response. It would be a little strange to love spiders. I could see why you’d be impressed with someone who did. 

“That’s my point,” he says. “This is why she’s a fraud. She can’t even tell me that Casey hated spiders.”

“This isn’t Casey you’re talking about, though, it’s Ashley,” I remind him. 

He looks up at me. “Yeah, I know. Duh.”

For a second, though, on his face, is an emotion I don’t know the meaning of.

“And she didn’t like deep water either,” I say instead. He holds up a finger. 

“Hang on. That’s a good one for next time. I’m adding that to the opposite list.”

On his legal pad - all of the things Casey was not, and Ashley supposedly is.

--------

She and I didn’t always get along, obviously. We’d fight about stupid shit only to cry into each other’s arms and apologize and feed each other baked goods. I always felt weirdly lonely without her. Like, I talked to her every day. 

What’s weird is that I had the hardest time buying her gifts because I knew her so well that everything felt sort of stupid and obvious.

So when I wrote her the book, it was different. Words aren’t, like, my thing. I try really hard but it always feels... stupid. It was supposed to just be a graduation present - we were both done with high school! Hooray! She was the writer usually, so I thought - why not write about her for a change. I gave it to her at her graduation party.

It was just a dumb thing. A fairy tale about a princess who grows up and goes to college but gets to still visit her best friend and they become ruling queens together and enact social justice and trans rights, etc. She took it into her hands and read it and shook really hard and cried. And like said, “This doesn’t mean to me what you think it does.” 

I didn’t know what that meant so I got hurt. I said - sorry I tried I guess. I was just confused. I remember storming into my mother’s car and saying let’s go but my mom, like, wouldn’t. So I stayed there and felt weirdly betrayed and checked my phone a lot, expecting an apology for I-don’t-know-what. 

But then I started thinking about how warm Casey made me feel and how I think about her all the time and how she makes me laugh harder than anyone else and how we spent hours just talking, sprawled in the other person’s lap, how we held hands through horror movies, how it felt to sing at the top of our lungs, entirely off-key. I thought about each beach day and every mountain hike and I particularly thought about that empty without-her feeling and how I was going to have to feel that in college. I ended up writing this long text about how I didn’t mean to make her feel weird (if I did) and I’m sorry for spoiling her party. 

She just wrote back - Already asked your mom, you’re staying over tonight, come upstairs.

When I got to her room, she pulled me in, shut the door, looked like she was going to kill me. All bright red.

I didn’t know what to say. I felt stupid again. “I’m sorry if I overstepped or something, I just -”

And then she grabbed me and kissed me, and I understood how stars feel.

----------

On the morning of the 9th session, Carl has a good idea. “I’m going to start telling her the truth.” 

I look up from where I’m trying to read “Bodily Harm” by Margret Atwood (it’s making me mad, but Casey had liked it).  “Oh?”

“I want to see what she does with like, the real stuff. I feel like we’re not getting any good TV anymore. The candle flickering and the thumping on her end and stuff wasn’t good enough. I need like, real.”

I close the book. “I thought the idea was to show that it’s fake.”

He sniffs. “A little uncertainty makes for a wider audience. Think of BuzzFeed Unsolved.”

Okay. We prepare a list of what has been said. He wants to both add new information and backtrack on some of the early proclamations. That way, we can hopefully “catch” her in a lie. He also has developed a cool musical sting for when this happens, so I feel like he’s desperate at this point.

Lights up, camera on. We start in the usual way - “Jack” talks about his life for a little bit, Sarah listens. Then we move into her gentle questions. Today she’s asking about Jack’s life post-college. This is the tricky bit for both of us, because even though he won’t admit it, Carl hates that Casey isn’t around to see the man he’s becoming. I get it.

Then he starts looping in the real stuff. Ashley actually loved dogs, the bigger the better; Ashley hates spiders; Ashley tried to be vegan once but it didn’t stick - and Sarah starts... saying stuff. 

“I am getting a message... she says ... hmm... something about a malamute? A big white dog.” “She’s sending me... an image... did you stick a spider down her shirt a few times?” “Ah, yes... I sense... she tried in high school but couldn’t keep to it... so she became vegetarian instead...”

Carl doesn’t react, but I do, off-screen. Their family dog had been a malamute mutt. Carl had absolutely tortured Casey with spiders any chance he got. High school had been where the vegetarianism had started. 

Carl just sits up a little straighter. Tries to trap her. “Ashley loved deep water.”

Sarah gives him one of her half-answers. “Swimmers can safe in deep water.”

A real thing - “Ashley couldn’t swim, though.”

“For some reason...” Sarah takes a breath. “I get the feeling she still tried to get on boats, though. Something about treasure hunting.”

Carl looks up at me, grinning. After the session is over, he says, “I’m so glad we caught her.”

I can’t stop shaking.

---------

I didn’t know what to say or do or think or feel. It was like someone had opened a river and deposited the earth’s supply of gold into me. Kissing her was addicting. I felt like if I wasn’t kissing her, I wasn’t breathing. 

We didn’t want to tell anybody. Casey was worried how Carl would feel, and my dad was pretty homophobic, like, casually. Plus, I had no idea how to ask her out. Like, we were already best friends that now kissed feverishly - isn’t that already dating? We’d have to “break up” for college anyway, so we just... kept secretly seeing each other. She made me laugh so much I kept clicking her teeth while trying to kiss her.

But it felt weird to not take her somewhere nice, and since I am bad with words, I figured I’d show her. I didn’t know about the water thing at the time - we had never gone on a boat together.

When I tried to take her on the ferry out to the islands for a “treasure hunt”, she still got on board. She wore a sundress and a hat and shook so bad the whole time that I felt horrible. I kept apologizing. She held my hand and said - no, don’t, I am doing this because I want to.

I had made a picnic. We sat on the little island with no shade and piercing sun and I was positive I’d set up the worst almost-a-date anyone had ever set up. 

Then she bent down and picked up something shiny. Buried in the sand, a plain silver necklace.

“Treasure.” She said. She washed it in the ocean and then I put it around her neck. Then she turned around, kissed me, and I knew I loved her so much that I wanted to explode for it.

Her, and that sundress, and the necklace around her neck while she said - “I feel as free as pirate.”

And I blurted it - “Will you be my girlfriend?”

--------------

On the morning of our 10th session, I’m kind of afraid. 

“You already got dressed?” He yawns through talking to me. “That’s dedication. I think we’re going to do more truth today.”

“Don’t you think it’s weird?” I blurt. 

“What? The dress? Yeah, I guess you don’t need to keep wearing it.”

“What - oh. Okay. But no, I meant - she said stuff that was ...” I fish for the word right but I don’t want to say it.

“A broken clock is right twice a day, kid,” Carl assures me. “I mean, I named myself Jack the Ripper and she still hasn’t caught on to that.”

“Maybe she just thinks it’s obvious enough you’re lying about that?”

He shakes his head. “You’re giving her too much credit. Remember what I said - she makes a living doing this to people. If she didn’t have some skill in cold reads, she’d be out of a job.” He starts making a sandwich. “Besides, who is to say she didn’t just ... like, Google me? I mean, it would be that easy.”

“She’d have to know your name, though.”

He shrugs, applies too much mustard. “Maybe the payment ended up revealing my true identity. It wouldn’t be hard to find me. Reverse Google Image search? IP tracking? Like, it’s the future.” He is disgusting and puts carrots and cucumbers on a mustard sandwich. “That’s why it had to be Casey, you know? So that a Facebook check would say that yeah, I’d lost someone.”

“Gross,” I say about the sandwich. I can’t stop thinking about the boat thing, but I don’t want to tell him about that moment. It’s one of my things with her. Doesn’t belong to anyone else. I guess he’s right, though. Lucky guesses get made.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“You’re the scientist,” he tells me through his food. “Come on.”

--------------

We kept it secret still. It wasn’t weird that we visited each other so often - it was normal. That’s what best friends do. I worked a shitty fast-food job to afford the tickets. It was worth it. We kept the tradition of little treasure hunts - leaving the other person felt less cruel when we gave them little gifts to look for.

In junior year, living off my research grant, I found a ratty little off-campus apartment. She came more often. We were lying on my bed (on the floor, no money for a box spring), and she said - “I read this thing about how the internet is a graveyard.”

I was studying for fluid dynamics, wearing her undergrad shirt, only giving her half my attention. I didn’t know, then, you know, that our time was limited. “Like, people die on it?”

She sat up. “Whenever we write about books, we use the present tense, because even if the book is happening in the past tense, if you open the book, it’s still happening. A book is a collection of time, all at once. Turn a page, go to a new present.” 

I looked up. “Hang on. What?”

“That’s the internet - a bunch of present-tenses that are always, always existing. Somewhere, you at 14 on MySpace exists. And you at 17 on Tumblr exists. And I exist on my mother’s VHS tapes, but I exist, you know, on Twitter.”

“Oh man,” I said. “That’s terrifying. I don’t want that to exist after me.”

“If I die,” she said, laughing, “Please delete my AO3 for me. I can’t have that as my legacy.”

----------------

Carl likes the drama of the slow-burn, so during our 15 minutes break this time, he goes to find something of “Ashley’s”. I don’t turn off the camera like usual. I just keep it on.

Sarah stays. 

“It’s okay,” I say. “You can, like, go if you need to.”

“I’m okay.”

I want to ask her a million things. I feel embarrassed about all of them. None of them are good. All of them are not the scientific reasoning Carl expects out of me. I don’t even have the words for any of them, so what I say surprises even me. “If you can really talk to her... is Ashley, like. Okay? Is she happy?” My voice cracks on the last syllable. I clear my throat discreetly. 

Sarah is quiet. For a second I think the connection has quit, but then she says, “She says she misses everyone, but that she’s happy to see each person she loves getting older and moving on. You’ll meet again, you know. It will be lovely.”

I look at my hands. “I don’t like the idea she’s lonely.”

“She’s not,” Sarah says. “Trust me. She’s happy.”

“I miss her,” I say. I don’t know why I’m still talking. “She... uh. Meant a lot to me.”

“She says... When you get there, she’ll take you treasure hunting.”

Carl comes back. I tell him I feel sick. I have to leave.

I spend the rest of the day in my room, trying to quiet my crying.

------------------

The biggest argument was about the coming out. She’d admitted she was gay to her parents in our college senior year, but the relationship was secret for my benefit, even on the other side of college. I was in a grad program, she was starting her first year teaching.

“I just want to kiss you in your house! I want to take you to Thanksgiving as more than a friend!” She had looked near-tears. “Don’t you get it?”

I wanted it too, but I begged her - can we just wait a little bit? Can I just have a little bit of time? There were so many excuses, each overlapping. I thought at the time - it would be okay. We were still young kids. Her father had gotten sick. My family was complicated. My siblings all had tiny emergencies I kept having to handle for them.

We lived together, mostly. I had a fake “boyfriend.” We had this carefully-constructed not-a-life. And I thought - I could wait for it. I loved her and I wanted to be in the sun with her, but it just had to wait for a bit. That’s all.

I knew on my 22nd birthday. She made me a to-scale model of the planets to put in my room. We laughed and ate cake and followed her treasure hunt and she looked into my eyes and I just ... knew. So I started saving.

And at 25, after a lot of research, I went out and got a ring.

-------------------------

I skip the 11th and 12th sessions, which Carl says doesn’t go well. Her connection had been sort of staticky and the audio wasn’t good enough for the phone to pick up. He doesn’t buy my “doing work” excuse for the 13th, though, because I’m a bad liar anyway. I don’t wear the dress this time.

Carl now has a whole tactic - two truths and a lie. It’s weird to hear him talk about Casey, only to abruptly be talking about “Ashley” instead. I watch him. I honestly can’t tell how much of this is acting. It feels more like he’s just talking about his twin, and missing her, and having someone genuinely kind answer him. He seems.... almost peaceful, in a way he hasn’t been in a long time. I don’t think it’s good TV, if that’s what he’s hunting.

I keep the camera on again for the break. I don’t want to say anything this time. The zoom client spins and threatens to crash. Horrible little thing. I stare at my chewed fingernails. 

“Are you okay?”

I don’t want to answer. “Yeah, I’m feeling better. Sorry about leaving last time.”

“It wasn’t the same without you. I like this change of outfit.”

“Feels better, to not be wearing it,” I admit. Then it feels rude not to ask her anything, so I blurt again. “Does this stuff... ever help people? Like at all?”

She’s quiet for a bit. I see her shifting, think I catch some of her features. She has hair, I think. “I don’t know,” she answers, “Does it?”

Carl comes back. “Thanks for waiting. I wanted to show you this a while ago, but then this asshole got sick, so I held onto it. Maybe it’ll connect with her?”

In his hands, her oversized undergrad shirt. Ratty and overused. Still somewhat smells like her.

I stare at him. “Where the fuck did you get that?”

He looks up at me. “Your room, obviously.” 

Specifically, from inside my pillowcase. “Dude.” I feel the anger in me starting to coil like a snake, “This is such. A fucking violation of privacy.” Inside my brain, seventeen alarms are going off, but all I feel is rage. I rip it out of his hands and hold it against me. “Why the fuck were you in my room - how did you?” A horrible thought occurs to me. “How’d you know it was there?”

He glances at the video camera, then at my phone. “Dude, calm down.”

“This is my fucking apartment! Why were you going through my bed?” I want to actively kill him. Memories of her, curled up inside of her shirt, curled up next to me, wrestling me into bed - each start hitting the back of my throat, spilling into each other to strangle me. “HOW?!”

He holds up his hands. “Ever since you were a kid you hide important shit in your pillow case, jesus, calm down! This isn’t even yours.”

“This is mine!” I feel near tears. I feel like I am going to explode. “She was mine!”

“I mean, she was my sister -”

“I was going to ask her to marry me!” 

He puts his hands down. He stares at me. I slap my hand over my mouth. Start crying. Feel the sobs like they are being exorcised out of me. “You stupid fucking asshole,” I say. I don’t even feel that way. I can’t stop crying. 

“You stupid fucking asshole.” I sit down. The crying just stops, the way it does these days, and I am empty.

Carl gets up. Turns off my phone camera. Walks out of the room. So I fucked that up, I guess. I stare ahead. I want to close the laptop but it feels rude after all that. 

“Sorry,” I say instead. “Sorry you had to see that.”

“You really loved her, huh?” Sarah’s voice, still that gentle calm.

It all comes pouring out of me. “The worst part was that I’d finally told everybody. I kept it a surprise from Casey. I wanted it to be perfect. After that last argument, I’d finally told my father. He hadn’t wanted to talk to me. I waited, you know. I was good at waiting. My siblings helped me. They warmed up everyone in my family until everyone was okay, and everyone was ready. We lost the respect of a couple of aunts and uncles, but who cares anyway. I wanted the right people at the engagement party, and we knew my father would come around if he had enough persuading. It would have been a full house. It would have felt like... I don’t know.”

It would have felt like being 17 under a full moon. It would have felt like finding treasure. I had planned a day-long adventure. It ended at the front door. So she could kiss me in my house, in front of my family. So we could have Thanksgiving dinner. 

Sarah moves ever-so-slightly. At this angle, she might even have a nose. “That must have taken a lot of courage. I am sure she would have loved the gesture. She strikes me as someone who understood how hard it must have been for you, how brave. Even Carl knows it.”

“She got on boats for me,” I say. “I have no idea what took me so long to return the favor.”

“You always did,” Sarah says. “She says you were returning the favor in every moment.”

“I should have just... asked.”

Carl comes back in. I don’t like that it’s clear he’s been crying. He hands me a package. 

“What’s this?” I sniffle. It has Casey’s handwriting.

“Just open it.”

I shake while I do. Inside is a beautifully bound book, and a little velvet box. I feel my breath catch in my throat. I shake it into my palm. 

I know what it is, but when I open the box, the ring is so perfect that I don’t comprehend it. 

“She made me shop for months,” Carl says. “Literally over a few years for this. I have diamond types emblazoned on the back of my eyelids.”

“You knew?”

“I figured you knew that I knew. She told me a month before she.... uh. You know. I thought you just didn’t want to talk about it yet.”

“You were... okay with it?”

“Are you kidding? I was already planning her bachelorette. I couldn’t wait, kid.”

I look at him. He holds out a single silver necklace. I recognize it immediately. I loop her ring onto it. I want to kill him and hug him and ask what the fuck he was thinking. A knot releases in my chest even as new ones bubble to the surface.

“For what it’s worth, I would have said yes.”

I look up. Casey waves a little from the screen, her features blurry, but of course it’s her. I feel my heart slam against my ribs. 

“I knew it was you from the second session. I spent the rest basically proving it to myself.” He looks up at me. “She and I spent the last two sessions just... talking. She’s good where she is. Really. You needed this, too. It was her idea to show you.”

I can’t believe any of this is happening. I feel like crying and weirdly like laughing and my head is spinning. “Why... How...? I...”

“I needed to know.... I needed to see. I am fine, and I am loved where I am, and I am happy. But I need you both to be okay, really.”

“I’m okay,” Carl says. “We miss you and love you but we are okay.”

I look at her. The girl that is my ocean and my treasure both. “I miss you and I love you,” I say, and then I just know, like I knew I loved her, like I knew I’d always love her. I just know. I take a deep breath.

“I am okay. I am going to be okay.” And it’s true.

The zoom app crashes. And it is just us and a candle burning in a dark apartment.

xxx

The link never works again, obviously. I knew, somehow, it wouldn’t. 

I read the book she wrote me. It’s a really wonderful fairy tale. It’s about two treasure-hunting princesses who fall in love. Whenever you open it, it’s still happening. They’re still in the present tense. And they are both ruling the kingdom they created, side by side. Both alive and in love.