Page 32

And there it is.

The books. The spreadsheets. The tidy little lie I told the whole world to explain all this money, and my sister has just pressed a chipped mug of pinot into my hand and asked me to actually, literally do it.

I open my mouth with genuinely no idea what's going to come out.

"Sure," I hear myself say, because it’s all I can mutter. "Let’s… let's talk about it."

So we drink cheap wine out of coffee mugs, and Birdie spins color stories and intention-infused whatever, and I nod and laugh in all the right places, three feet from the CamALot page open on my laptop, on a couch with a nine-dollar slip crammed under the cushion my sister is cheerfully sitting on.

Both of my lives, in one room, splitting a bottle of pinot.

Here's the problem, on top of all my other problems. I don't do books. I can barely do the math on the loan that started this whole mess. And Birdie is the single worst secret-keeper the good Lord ever made. This is a woman who announced to a full Thanksgiving table that I'd gotten my first period, seventh grade, with the gravy boat in her hand.

So I've bought myself a week. Maybe two. And then she's going to show up with a shoebox of candle receipts, and I'm going to have to explain why the bookkeeper can't keep books.

I refill her mug. I refill mine.

I smile like a woman who has every last piece of this handled.

I do not have one single piece of it handled.

My world breaks open over our second mug of wine, which is exactly when I should have known it would, because nothing good has ever happened to me over a second mug of anything.

"Okay, show me," Birdie says, bouncing on the couch cushion, the one with Diablo's slip crammed underneath it. "Show me the bookkeeping thing! Do mine. I've got all the candle numbers in my phone, supplier costs, all of it. Make a little spreadsheet. I want to watch my sister be a genius."

"Birdie, it’s late and besides, it doesn't really work like that." I'm stalling, and I can hear myself stalling. "There's software. It's boring. You'd hate it."

"I love watching people be good at things I don't understand. Come on. One spreadsheet. It’s not that late." She's already thrusting her phone at me, a screen full of numbers. "Rows and columns, baby. Make the little cells do their thing. Where’s your laptop?" Her head swivels around, looking for it.

And here's the moment. I could open a blank sheet and fake my way through it, buy myself another week. I have faked harder things than this, in worse lighting, for money.

But it's Birdie. And I'm tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep. I have been lying to every single person in my life for weeks, to Sal, to the men, to the whole building, to my own face in a cropped camera frame, and the one person I have never really lied to is sitting on my couch with a phone full of candle business, asking me to be the woman I invented specifically to keep her from worrying about me.

"Bird." My voice comes out wrong. "I don't do bookkeeping."

She laughs. Then she stops, because she's looking at my face, and my sister is a lot of things, but she has never been slow.

“Huh?”

"I don't do spreadsheets. I don't do books. I never did." The words are coming now, and I can't stop them, and some self-destructive part of me doesn't want to. "The money isn't from bookkeeping. It isn't from a rich boyfriend. It isn't from anything I could print on a Christmas card."

Birdie sets her mug down slowly. "Agnes." Quiet, for once. "Where is the money coming from?"

And I look at my little sister, the beautiful human disaster I cosigned my whole life away for, and I tell her the truth.

"I have a webcam," I say, "and a fake name, and a red lipstick that is currently in your purse. Several nights a week, I take my clothes off on the internet for strangers, and they pay me a genuinely stupid amount of money, and that is how your loan is getting paid."

Silence. The single longest silence Birdie has produced in her life.

And then her whole face does something. It lights up like a slot machine.

"You're a CAMGIRL?" It comes out of her like a firework going off indoors. "Agnes. AGNES. That is the most iconic thing you have ever done in your entire life. I have to sit down. Wait, I am sitting down.” She looks down to make sure. “My beige little rule-follower big sister is a smokeshow internet entrepreneur and she did not TELL me? I am so proud I could be sick. Is that why you have red lipstick? Is your camgirl name incredible? It's incredible, isn't it, I can tell by your face it's⁠—"

"Birdie."

"It's SO incredible⁠—"

"Birdie." And something in my voice finally sticks, because she shuts up. "Look at me. You tell no one. Not a friend, not a barista, nobody, not ever. Swear it to me. If this gets out, I don't lose a fun little secret. I lose my job, Birdie. I lose everything. This is what ends a person."