Selena Richter looked nothing like my sister. She was voluptuous and busty, while Alison’s body was boyish and athletic. Her portrayal of Alison featured an entire register of all-wrong sounds: squeals of delight, giggling fits, the occasional deployment of a pouty-lipped baby voice. She had none of Alison’s bristle, no flash of intelligence in her swimming-pool-blue eyes. I appeared in a few scenes, though for some reason I was called Katie. I was played by an angelic child with golden ringlets and rosebud lips. When Alison’s body was found, Katie cried harrowing, captivating tears, and I felt like some failed version of what Alison’s sister should have been.

According to Dying for Fun, my sister was a sheltered girl lured to her death by tactics only a total na?f would fall for. For simplicity’s sake, I assume, Clive Richardson and Edwin Hastie had been streamlined into a single character named Apollo, with dreadlocks and a gold hoop earring.

“I’ve never done a body shot before. Won’t you show me how?” Alison implores Apollo in an early scene.

“First ya must be lickin’ da salt wit ya tongue,” Apollo says.

Alison gets down on her knees and licks a line of salt from his muscled abdomen. She looks up at him with guileless eyes and giggles.

In this version, my sister lies bathed in moonlight on a beach that appears made of stardust and allows Apollo to unzip her dress.

“Relax,” he says with blatantly evil eyes. (The acting is uniformly one-note and overblown.)

“I want you to be my first,” she whispers into his ear. She flushes and pants as if shocked by her own arousal; she is a pale pink peony, poised on the edge of blooming. “Don’t you dare be gentle with me.”

He presses his hands over my sister’s nose and mouth. She struggles. He thrusts. The whole thing slouches to its terrible conclusion as a thousand housewives squeeze their pillows.

“I gon’ be ya last.”

I COULDN’T sleep that night. I kept replaying the final moments from the movie in my head. Only instead of Apollo, I imagined Clive Richardson, as I had seen him earlier that evening, transposed into each scene—laying her in the sand, unzipping her dress, smothering her with the same hands he’d used to wipe the stew from his lips. Could he have done it? Could he have played a part? Apollo was an obvious cliché, not a person but simply a murderer. But the man I had observed earlier that night evinced no coldness or cruelty at all, and this chilled me to the bone. Yes, of course he could have done it. You see a mug shot on TV and think, Him? But he has such a kind face. But his eyes are so gentle. Nannies drown children they cared for lovingly for years. Perfect couples become a husband who shot a wife. We see so little of people. We forget how much submerged darkness there is around us at every moment. We forget until we are forced to remember.

OVER THE week that followed, I watched the remaining seven episodes of the Dying for Fun series. I had felt guilty for ignoring the other girls. But I admit I also watched at least partly for the same reason anybody else would, for the trashy, low-fi, comically dated pleasure of it. I’d been aware of their stories to varying degrees when they happened. Perhaps you remember them, too. Maggie Donohue (Thailand, Ecstasy, a dalliance with an Aussie on his gap year). Kristin Broekner (Mykonos, an entanglement with the scion of a Russian oil baron). Flora Salter’s story captured the American imagination for a few weeks’ time, owing to its tragic outcomes—the apartment set ablaze in Montmartre, the suicide of that handsome young tennis phenom. Flora. Maggie. Kristin. Flora. Alicia (whose name was pronounced like satin ribbon—A-lee-see-a). What is the appeal of such stories? You know the kind I’m talking about. All the pretty dead white girls. The one backpacking in Eastern Europe and the one at the full moon festival in Bali and the blossom-cheeked blonde in Aruba. You see their photographs on the evening news. They wear graduation caps or prom dresses or a peasant blouse and a wreath of white flowers—it’s Halloween and they’re the darnedest little hippie you ever did see. You hear the eyewitness interviews. “I saw her get on the back of his motorbike.” “I think she was on something.” “She always had to be the life of the party.” You think how stupid it was of them, whatever they did to end up as they did. You feel a bit indignant, actually. You see their honey-blond hair, their red ringlets, their auburn ponytail frozen mid-swish in the photographs, their blue, green, caramel eyes, and always, a smile so blunt it’s like they don’t have even the faintest notion that anything bad could ever happen to them. You find them na?ve and smug. Maybe they are. Maybe Alison was.

DURING THIS same period, I walked to the Little Sweet every evening. Now that I had found Clive, it was simply not possible to stay away. He was always there, and he always sat at the same table, in the corner beside the potted palm. I would watch him from the shadow beneath the awning of the grocery across the street for as long as I felt I could without becoming conspicuous. Then I would loop the block a few times, slowing my pace as I passed the Little Sweet. I would duck into one of the nearby stores. Browse the GED prep guides at the bookstore as if they held genuine relevance for me. Peruse the unfamiliar produce in the grocery store—cassava, turmeric root, dasheen—and smile periodically at the elderly Korean couple behind the counter, purchasing a pack of gum on my way out to justify my presence.

Over these nights of observation, my inchoate need to keep tabs on Clive Richardson, to bear witness to his presence, coalesced and sharpened into a sort of plan. I would uncover everything I could about Alison, searching for clues with which to build a portrait of my sister—her emotions and relationships, the dramas and preoccupations of her life, anything that might help me to understand the kinds of dangers to which she might have been vulnerable at the time of our vacation. And I would continue to surveil Clive, watching and waiting for even the smallest detail, the tiniest slip of evidence that might point me toward the truth about the kind of man he was and the role he might have played in my sister’s death. What this evidence might look like I didn’t know, but I had to believe that a person couldn’t take a life and simply melt back into the human crowd—such an act must leave traces, scars, and if I was vigilant, if I could attune myself to this man, I would find them.

I shared none of this with my parents. I told myself I was protecting them. But looking back, I think the real reason I didn’t tell them is because I knew that if I did, they would make me promise not to seek Clive out anymore, for my own safety, and I would do as they asked because I always did as they asked, and because it still would have been possible for me to loosen my grip on him then, in the fall, in a way it no longer would be by the time winter came. I would be relieved, their concern just the permission I needed to leave it alone, to go back and continue living my life as if Clive Richardson were not living his just a few blocks east. I could no longer abide such cowardice in myself. I saw clearly now that cowardice is what it was, what it always had been—our nice family life, so remarkably functional, so totally cut off from the depths of our own pain. It fell to me. If my parents could not, would not, then I must inhabit the depths alone to uncover the truth, no matter what.

What a mindfuck. In high school I get treated like shit because I’m Shelly the theater kid, Shelly the freak. Then I show up in Hollywood, change my name to Selena, and I get treated like shit all over again, but now it’s because I’m just a pretty face. I’m a weird girl, then I’m an “it” girl, and five seconds later I’m “overexposed.”

I leave the house in some shit my stylist put together for me, I’m fake. I leave the house in sweatpants with greasy hair, I’m trying too hard to look like I’m not trying.

I just love how Selena Richter doesn’t conform to what Hollywood wants her to be.

Ugh, Selena Richter, I just hate how self-righteously nonconformist she is.

I’m obsessed with how minimalist her acting is.

Why do people keep casting that fucking block of wood and expecting her to carry a film?

I slouch and bite my nails during an interview, where’s my poise? I focus on my posture, where’s my personality? I point fucking any of this out and, Boo hoo poor Selena Richter, it must be so hard being rich and famous. I am not saying it is harder than being a bricklayer, fucking straw-man idiots. I am saying our society is sick with a poison of its own making.

If you need proof, here is a list of just some of the shit that happened to me with my first actual role bigger than a Gushers commercial:

1.??When I’m offered the part of Alison Thomas, I tell my agent I’m not sure I want to take it because it creeps me out to play a real-life dead girl. He says to me, “This is not your last dead girl, Selena. Plus, it’s network, so you don’t have to get naked.”