The Lies She Sold by Kyla Sharp

Author:Kyla Sharp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kyla Sharp

Chapter 25

The house was dark around me, filled with the silhouettes of She-Aura boxes.

Belinda’s voice rang in my ears: you bring too much negativity.

I didn’t want to turn on the lights because it was so clear to me now. I wondered if I had always known it, and if I had, I hated myself even more. What had I done? And why was I here? And I still had killed Mary Sue. Hadn’t I?

Just like I’d killed my mother.

I stormed into the hallway, knocking my parents’ trinkets onto the tile, where some of them smashed, and others clinked and bounced. Cheap plastic.

I looked into the lounge room, my cave of horrors, the nest I’d made for myself among a mess of regret and drinks and hairbows. I grabbed the nearest box and pulled it toward me, ripping each piece out of its plastic, putting it on my head. A tiger-print clip. A sky-blue headband. A pair of matching beige, soft and springy elastics. I looped them around and around my stringy strands. I pulled out a satin scarf, and I tied it around my neck. Was my head warming, tingling, or was I imagining it?

I stood up, nearly fell over, steadied myself. I grabbed a bottle of whiskey, took a huge gulp. It hurt going down, which I figured was good.

I tore into the kitchen, where I knocked the pictures off the wall, threw a chair. I screamed again, but it was more like an animal’s angry growl, a roar. Something had been set loose in me with that confrontation with Nate, with Belinda’s rejection of me.

Belinda was right. If She-Aura was a pyramid scheme, I was more toward the top than the bottom. I wasn’t a victim. I was the villain of this story. The serial killer. The—what had she called Sheila?—modern-day robber baron. I grabbed my She-Aura credit card and tried to rip it, the plastic only bending slightly in my grip. This made me even angrier.

I pulled open drawers and couldn’t find scissors. I raked through old spoons, butter knives, rubber bands. No scissors. (Probably better, in my frenzied state, intent on self-harm.)

So I put a frying pan on the stove, lit the burner, and tossed in my She-Aura card. It took a minute to heat up, during which I caught my breath, realizing I was breathing heavily, my chest heaving up and down.

The card started to melt, and it felt like relief. I thought of my five thousand Facebook friends. How many dozens of my “friends” had just taken out She-Aura lines of credit to get the starter kit, and how many of them would be encouraged to keep buying more product like Belinda, going into debt? Told that someday they would be successful, they would make money? That the only way to keep moving up levels was to keep investing?

The card smelled awful, the burning plastic scratching at my nostrils. I left it on the stove to turn into liquid, to bubble and burn. I had bigger, more important ways to burn this all down.

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