A propulsive psychological thriller that follows an aspiring model down a social media-fuelled rabbit hole of obsession, narcissism and self-destruction. Intrigued? Well read on to discover an excerpt from Hayley Phelan’s Like Me, which is out now!
For nineteen-year-old Mickey, Instagram offers a tantalizing portal into the world she wishes she inhabited. Though beautiful, cunning and privileged, Mickey finds herself with a stalled modelling career, an escalating drinking problem, few friends and next to nothing in the bank. To numb her growing despair, she spends her days frantically refreshing her Instagram feed, obsessively tracking the movements of Insta-famous model Gemma Anton.
Gemma is a perfected version of Mickey, living a seemingly perfect life: a skyrocketing career, a famous photographer boyfriend and adoring followers–the life Mickey wants more than anything for herself. She studies every detail Gemma offers through the window of her phone, trying to absorb, learn, mimic, become the object of her growing fascination.
Then, a chance encounter thrusts Mickey into a world of opportunity, and she is met with surprising, and immediate, success. But as her online persona begins to take over her life, Mickey finds it increasingly difficult to separate reality from the façade of Instagram.
Engrossing, sharp and astute, Like Me is a shimmering portrait of infatuation, disconnection and identity in the digital age–and a dazzling introduction to a brilliant new voice in contemporary literature.
I had a few hours to kill before I had to meet my mother, so I took off the yoga gear and put on Brandy Melville Molly Denim Shorts in Faded Blue, a vintage T-shirt I’d stolen from Julia that said The Specials on it, Topshop Porto Buckle Sandals in Tan, and Thomas James LA Tiny Hexagonal Furious Sunglasses in Gold. The man was still there on the broken-up cardboard, his hands resting on his thighs, palms up. I got a coffee, black, at Think Coffee, even though Dunkin’ Donuts was closer and cheaper. I couldn’t be seen walking around with a Dunkin’ Donuts cup. Then I went to the Duane Reade on the corner, my favorite place to float.
When I was growing up, my mom and I always went shopping together. It was “our thing.” My mom said it was like sports, but for women. We’d drive back from the city at dusk, the back seat heavy with shopping bags and a sense of accomplishment. My mother really blossomed when she shopped. Around the house, she was like a nervous ghost, constantly walking up and down the halls but never really doing or saying anything. She had few friends in Barrington but all of the salesgirls at Neiman’s knew her and loved her. Walking in with her was like walking in with a celebrity. Now she avoids the place like the plague. Even though she can still afford to buy some of the cheaper brands in there, she can’t show her face. It’s not like she’d be recognized by other shoppers or something, but the salesladies-they know. We tried window-shopping in New York a few times after I moved, but I could tell it depressed her. So now we just do lunch.
Walking through the automatic doors of Duane Reade immediately calmed me: the bright lights, the antiseptic white floors, the shelves and shelves of colorfully packaged products, the frisson of possibility. It’s the only place I can really afford to shop, so I go every so often just to relax. I wandered through the hair aisle. Gemma washed her hair every other day. She used an all-natural brand, and a shampoo for dandruff. I ran my fingers over the bottles, smooth as pearls. Inside, the goo would be pearly, too, white and uniform. Gemma doesn’t really wear makeup, but once, when she put up a picture of herself from the bathroom, I zoomed in and looked at all the labels on the bottles. I couldn’t afford any of them, but after some research, I found out that l’Oreal makes a pretty good dupe of the Cle de Peau she uses. Almost everything has a dupe nowadays, thank god: if a product is popular enough, it’s bound to get knocked off. The developers at other beauty brands can just buy it right in the store, distill it down to its most essential components, then repackage and sell it. Two bottles of foundation, under two different labels and with a fifty-dollar price differential, can look nothing alike from the outside, but inside they’re exactly the same. There was some thing about this that I found poignant and beautiful. When I found the foundation I was looking for in the makeup aisle, I squatted down, furtively unscrewed the cap, and squirted some of it into my hand. It smelled like baby powder. I closed my eyes and spread it over my skin. Still squatting, I looked all around. Then I slipped it into my purse.
On my way out, a pimply girl standing in the acne aisle, wearing a Brandy Melville dress I had tried on and rejected, looked at me forlornly. I knew she envied me, as I envied Gemma. Life is sometimes too funny and too cruel.
When I got to The Coffee Shop, my mom was already waiting for me, as I knew she would be, sitting in a tucked-away booth at the back, examining her nail beds. She was wearing a lightweight camel coat, even though it was eighty degrees out, and her hair was blonder, almost platinum, and frizzy in the heat, puffing out around her shoulders like cauliflower florets. Her face lit up when she saw me. I leaned in to kiss her on the cheek, and she put her hand around my neck and clutched me there. I had to wrench myself away before sliding in.
“Oh, honey, you look beautiful.”
“Thanks.”
“Is that a new shirt?” It was the threadbare vintage band T-shirt I’d stolen from Julia. Neither of us knew who the band was.
“It’s Julia’s.”
Her brows furrowed. “Who?”
“Friend.” She should have known who Julia was. She should have remembered that.
“I went blonder,” she said, as if it were a major disclosure.
“I see.”
She waited.
“It looks really good,” I said.
“You think?” She touched the ends self-consciously. “It’s not too blond?”
“No. I like it.”
“Single process. Upkeep is easier.”
“How’s Alison doing?” Alison was my mother’s longtime hair colorist and stylist. My father, who as nominally an Irish Catholic and liked to remind us of it every once in a while, as if to claim some moral high ground, called Alison my mother’s priest and confessor. Mom countered that she had nothing to confess, and the sad thing was, I didn’t think she did. What she and Ali mostly talked about, I suspected, was other people. Other people were my mother’s favorite topic. When I got old enough I started seeing Alison too ($250 for a teenager’s highlights, thank you very much), though we never became close, and I sensed that secretly pleased my mother. She had so few true friends, I think she wanted Alison all to herself All throughout my father’s never-ending court proceedings, my mom never once missed her monthly appointment.
”Actually, I didn’t go to Alison.”
I pulled a face. “Why?”
“I thought it was time for a change,” she said breezily, suddenly becoming fascinated by the menu. “Oh! The omelet looks good!”
“Who’d you go to then?”
”Actually, I did it myself,” she said nonchalantly. “It was easy! There’s this new company that makes salon-quality dye-you order it online. It’s better for the environment, too. And it only took fifteen minutes! Which is crazy when you think of how many hours I’d spent in that chair, not that I regret it-” My mother prattled on, but I was so depressed by the image of her bending over the sink in her pink bathrobe and those awful plastic gloves, biting her lip while the perox ide stung her scalp, that I could hardly follow her. I know it’s difficult to pity her. Hadn’t she gotten what she deserved? When people began showing up outside our house-it was a mansion, really-in the North Shore, carrying signs like PONZI SCHEME FRAUD! and The 99% Say: Guilty, they sometimes yelled things at my mother. Once, when we were inching out of our driveway, reporters and photographers crowding around our car-my mother refused to honk; she thought it was undignified-a man with mad-scientist hair and a rumpled business suit yelled at her to “Get a job.” But what could she do? She wasn’t qualified for any kind of job, and who would hire her-wife of the famous P. T. Heffernan-anyhow? Even if she somehow managed to get one, the truth is my mother couldn’t work a job. She wouldn’t know how. It’d be like asking a monkey to drive a car.
I realized my mother was looking at me pointedly.
“Huh?” I asked.
“What are you going to get?”
“Oh, um-” I looked at the menu and said the first thing my eyes set on. “The fruit salad, I think.”
“That’s it?”
“I’m not that hungry.”
“I think you should get the omelet. I don’t want you to get too thin.”
“I’m not too thin.”
“It doesn’t look good, you know, to be that thin. I know. I was really thin when I was younger-everyone was always telling me how thin I was and yet I was always trying to lose weight. You’re the perfect weight right now. What are you, one-twenty? That’s what I used to weigh.”
“Somewhere around there.” I was 117.
“Don’t try to lose any more.”
“I’m not, Mom.”
“I just want you to be healthy.”
When the waiter finally arrived, I ordered the omelet with home fries just to get her to shut up. My mother got the fruit salad. “I need to watch my weight,” she said, though she spent most of the meal spearing various bits on my plate and ferrying them to her mouth quickly as if I wouldn’t notice. Eventually, talk turned to my father, as I knew it would.
“You should call him,” my mother said. I was busy mashing the remaining potatoes with my fork and didn’t answer. She went on: “We’ve filed another appeal. Saul has a good feeling about this one.”
I put my fork down. “Why keep trying? Everyone knows he did it.”
“Don’t say that!” she shout-whispered, looking over her shoulder.
I rolled my eyes. “No one’s listening.”
“You don’t know that.” She clasped her collar together against her throat. In a whisper she continued: “People are looking for any excuse … You saw what happened. Making a big deal out of everything.”
“A big deal? He defrauded people of hundreds of thousands of dollars! Families lost their homes! Kids can’t go to college!”
She waved that away-the fact of his conviction, his crimes-as if it were all a misunderstanding. “It was an accounting strategy,” she said. “He was always going to pay it back, he just needed to move the money around first. It would have been in everybody’s best interest if they’d just let him continue-”
“Mom! Let him continue? He was stealing.”
She sighed. “It’s not so cut-and-dry, Mick. These things are complicated.”
“Jesus, Mom, when will you stop believing his lies?”
“He’s your father, Michaela.”
“I know. I have no choice in the matter. You do.”
“What do you mean?”
“You should divorce him!” I hadn’t meant to yell it. She looked stricken.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Oh, honey.” She covered my hand with hers. She still wore her wedding ring: an obese diamond, haloed by chubby children and set on a thick platinum band. If I looked closely, I could see the outline of tender pale-white skin underneath the band. Otherwise her hands looked like those of someone much older: blue veins crisscrossed them like highways, and age spots had appeared as constellations sometime over the past few years. Her knuckles, too, had swollen. It occurred to me that perhaps she wasn’t able to slide the ring off anymore. She said: “I couldn’t do that to him.”
I stared at her. I still remembered the time he gave her a black eye so big she had to get new sunglasses the size of flying saucers (Chanel). I still remembered when, shortly after his mother died of a sudden stroke, he’d absconded for a week away in the Caribbean for “some alone time to recover.” Only we found out later he’d gone to Atlantic City instead, returning bleary-eyed, ten grand poorer, and with a case of crabs. I knew all these things and more. I was like a spy in my own house. My favorite place to sit when I was little had been a window seat tucked into the corner of our living room. And though it was comfortable and had a view of the garden, what I really liked was that when I sat in it, I felt like I disappeared into the walls of the room. It wasn’t just my imagination. Because of the large drapes on either side, it was easy to miss the small person with her knees tucked up to her chin, sucking on a piece of her hair, staring dreamily out the window. My parents often did.
I don’t remember the first fight I saw- the violence and anger between them was always there, had always been there to my knowledge, so that it took on the constant hum of white noise-but I am pretty sure it happened in that room. Anyway, many more were to come. At first, I sat motionless out of shame; I didn’t want them to see me because for some reason I felt embarrassed, as if what they were doing wasn’t wrong until I witnessed it. But then I stayed because I wanted to know; I wanted to know what the fights were about, what made my father spit things from his mouth I had thought unimag inable, what made his hand shoot out like a whip and slap my mother across the face, what made my mother collapse into herself, lips trembling. I don’t know why they thought it okay to fight in front of me like that-for surely, they saw me eventually. I guess they thought I wouldn’t understand. But I did. I made a point to. I saw the violence that roiled my father and mistook it for power. “He’s who you inherited your rage from, isn’t he?” the court-appointed therapist asks me now. Yes, it’s true, I learned the language of violence from him. But back then, I never had an outlet for it. Learning, knowing, that was the only power I had.
Still, I somehow managed to miss the nature of my father’s dealings, a crucial element of our lives, the genesis of our wealth. Friends used to ask, But didn’t you know? Didn’t you guess? I honestly didn’t. That’s the thing about money. It insulates you from certain truths. If ignorance is bliss, then it’s also the greatest luxury money can buy.
The week after my father got arrested, I went back to that window seat. Our house was surrounded by a thick stone wall, and behind it was a semicircular lawn my mother had just that summer planted with roses: showy pink, white, and red blooms. There had been a big oak tree in the corner of the lawn that I’d played on as a child, but it’d died the year before-we never figured out why-and my mother had used its removal as an excuse to get the whole lawn redone. Hence the roses. If you looked closely, you could see a large circle of grass just a shade brighter and more uneven where the oak had been ripped out. It reminded me of a poorly concealed zit. Beyond the wall, and through the gate, I could see the crowds of photographers, reporters, protestors with their signs. Watching from my half-concealed perch at the window, I was transfixed. It all seemed to have nothing to do with me. I had to remind myself: this house, that oak tree, those roses, the very hair on my mother’s highlighted head, all of it had been bought and paid for with those people’s money, and now that money was gone. Poof I may not have personally done anything wrong, but my entire life, my very existence, had been built on the back of others’ sufferings. And that made me complicit. It is immoral to be rich; if being rich means having more money than you need, more money than you know what to do with, who do you think is paying that price? The epiphany hung around until I was broke. Yes, it’s immoral to be rich, but it’s worse being poor.
I put my hand on top of my mother’s and we held each other there for a few moments, each lost in our own galaxy of thought, until she, looking down, said, “I like that nail polish. Is it Essie?”
“OPI.” It was pale gray, and called Take No Prisoners.
Excerpted from Like Me by Hayley Phelan with permission from the publisher, Lake Union Publishing. Copyright © 2022 by Hayley Phelan. All rights reserved.
