The Silver Bracelet

Chapter 14 —the IG Live session

"We want —" Marcy paused again. "We want, Miss Thorne, for one of you to publicly state that the relationship was not what the footage suggests. We want, in particular, for one of you to publicly state that the other was not at fault. The cleanest way to do this —"

"Is for me to take responsibility," Vera said.

The room, which had been holding its breath, went very still. Phoenix, at the window, turned fully. His face, in the gray morning light, was white.

"Vera —" he began.

"Mr. Rayne." Vera did not look at him. She looked at Marcy. "I will do an i********: Live, from my personal account, at nine o'clock this morning. I will state, on camera, that I had a one-sided crush on Mr. Rayne. I will state that I requested the private coaching session. I will state that Mr. Rayne, in the session, behaved entirely professionally. I will state that I am, as of this morning, withdrawing from Screen Star. I will not, in the Live, name anyone else. I will not, in the Live, mention Cecilia Ashford. I will not, in the Live, mention the gate siege. I will take full responsibility for the appearance of impropriety, and I will withdraw."

"Vera, no —" Phoenix, from the window, had taken a step forward. His voice was raw. "You can't — you didn't do anything —"

"Phoenix." Vera, for the first time, looked at him. "You have been in this industry for eighteen years. You have, in those eighteen years, built something I do not have. I have been in this industry for three weeks. I have, in those three weeks, built nothing I cannot walk away from. If we do not act, the show will be canceled, your career will be destroyed, and the contestants who have, in those three weeks, become my friends will lose the only chance most of them will ever have. I will not allow that. I will not, in particular, allow it to happen because a man was kind to me in a rehearsal room."

"Vera —"

"Phoenix." Her voice, when she said his name the second time, was very quiet. "You told me, on Thursday, that I reminded you of someone you used to be. Let me — let me be that person. Let me do this. Please."

He did not, for a long moment, speak. Then, very quietly: "You are not responsible for me."

"I know," she said. "I am, however, responsible for what I do next. And what I do next is this."

She turned to Marcy. "Nine o'clock. i********: Live. From my account. I will write the statement myself. I will not, in the statement, mention Mr. Rayne by name except to clear him. I will not, in the statement, mention the show except to withdraw. I will not, in the statement, mention anyone else. Am I clear."

Marcy, gray-faced, nodded once. Evan Hamilton, at the back of the room, looked at her for a long, evaluating moment. Then, very quietly, he said: "Miss Thorne."

"Yes."

"After the Live. Come to my office. I have something I would like to discuss with you."

She did not, in that moment, know what Evan Hamilton wanted to discuss. She did not, in that moment, care. She simply nodded once, turned, and walked out of the Green Room. She took the elevator back up to Room 612. She sat on the edge of her narrow bed, in the gray morning light, with her silver bracelet in her hand, and she wrote, on the small lined notepad the hotel provided, the statement she was about to give.

She did not, in the writing, cry. She did not, in the writing, hesitate. She simply wrote, in the small, careful handwriting she had been taught at the group home, the things she was about to say. She wrote them in five minutes. She read them once. She put the notepad on the bedside table. She picked up her phone.

She opened i********:. She had, at that moment, fourteen thousand followers — a number that had, in the previous twelve hours, doubled. She tapped the camera icon in the upper right corner. She tapped Live. She set the phone on the small desk, propped against the lamp. She sat down in front of it, in her black t-shirt, with her silver bracelet on her right wrist and the gray morning light behind her, and she waited for the red dot to start.

At nine o'clock, Eastern Pacific time, the red dot started. The viewer count, in the first ten seconds, jumped from zero to eleven thousand. In the first thirty seconds, it jumped to fifty thousand. In the first minute, it jumped to two hundred thousand. Vera, in the gray morning light of Room 612, looked at the camera. She did not smile. She did not, for a long moment, speak. Then, in the same small, even voice she had used at the back gate of the soundstage on Tuesday, she began:

"My name is Vera Thorne. I am a contestant on Screen Star. I am recording this Live because, in the last twelve hours, a video has been published about me that is not accurate. I want to set the record straight."

She took a breath. "The video, as it has been edited, suggests that my mentor, Mr. Phoenix Rayne, had an inappropriate relationship with me. This is not true. Mr. Rayne has, in the three weeks I have known him, behaved toward me with complete professionalism. He has, on one occasion, met with me alone in a rehearsal room at the soundstage, at my request, to help me with a monologue. The session was professional. The session was brief. The session was the kindest thing anyone has done for me in a very long time."

She paused. "I want to be clear about what happened. I had a one-sided — a one-sided attachment to Mr. Rayne. I admired him. I asked him to meet with me. He did not seek me out. He did not, in any way, encourage me. He simply, in the rehearsal room, asked me a question that helped me find the answer to a problem I had been working on. That is all that happened. I want to be clear about this because Mr. Rayne is, in my experience, the most honorable man I have ever worked with, and I will not allow his reputation to be damaged on my account."

She took another breath. "I am, as of this morning, withdrawing from Screen Star. I am doing this because I do not want my presence on the show to be a distraction. I am doing this because I do not want the other contestants, who have become my friends, to be punished for something that is not their fault. I am doing this because I am, at twenty years old, a person who has been in the public eye for three weeks, and I have, in those three weeks, learned that I do not, in fact, want to be in the public eye. I want to be — I want to be in a room. I want to be in a room with a person I trust, and I want to do good work, and I do not want to be looked at by eleven million people who do not know me."

She looked, for a long moment, directly at the camera. "I want to say, finally, that the people who have been kind to me in the last three weeks — Mr. Rayne, my fellow contestant Nina Reyes, the showrunner Marcy Klein, and a person I will not name who, three weeks ago, told me that I had a face the camera would love and a stillness the camera would not know what to do with — those people are the only people in this industry who have been kind to me. I am withdrawing because I do not want them to be hurt. I am not withdrawing because I have done anything wrong. I have not done anything wrong. I have, in fact, for the first time in my life, done something right. I am, for the first time in my life, certain of that."

She did not, for a long moment, speak. Then, very quietly: "Thank you. That is all."

She tapped the screen. The Live ended. The room was silent.

She sat for a long moment at the small desk, in the gray morning light, with her silver bracelet in her hand. She did not, in that moment, feel relief. She felt the small, exhausted clarity of a person who has, for the first time in her life, taken responsibility for something, and who has done so publicly, and who knows that the public record will, from this moment on, remember her as the woman who took responsibility for something she did not do.

She did not, in that moment, regret it. She did not, in that moment, have the strength to regret it. She simply sat, and outside the window the December morning went on without her, and somewhere three thousand miles east a man she did not yet know how to think about was watching his ants.