She started with design magazines. Whenever Dena visited, Nora left behind copies she’d doctored, circling the ugliest things she could find, like zebra-print wallpaper, chrome furniture shaped like animals, and carpets made to look like grass, with notes saying “perfect” or “must have now.” Dena photographed every page. Then Nora found the worst lamp she’d ever seen at a garage sale, a three-foot pineapple in pink sunglasses with a hula skirt for a shade, and told everyone it was by a famous artist who had died.
Dena spent three weeks tracking down the seller and paid him $800 for a custom six-foot version with real palm fronds. Nora kept going. She painted one basement wall a shade somewhere between hazard cone and baby puke and called it Tuscan sunrise, a discontinued color designers were supposedly hoarding. Dena repainted her entire first floor in it.
For the big finish, Nora showed her a vision board of circus and clown pictures for a meditation room, claiming clowns stood for pure joy in Buddhist philosophy. She invented quotes from design gurus and even produced a fake invoice for a twenty-foot clown statue from Japan. Dena spent $40,000 turning her basement into a circus.
It’s worth noticing how little resistance any of this met. Dena never stopped to ask whether she actually liked anything she was buying, because the question had never mattered to her. Nora, deep in her plan, had stopped asking what it was costing her.
The Holiday Party Nobody Knew How to Look At
Dena invited everyone to a holiday party to show off the basement, and Nora stood at the back with her phone recording. Circus posters covered the walls, red and yellow streamers hung from the ceiling like a big top, and the furniture was painted in primary colors under track lighting. More than a dozen clown paintings hung around the room, including one six feet tall with a tear on its face. Dena swept her arms around, talking about meditation and enlightenment while guests nodded and glanced around as if hunting for hidden cameras. Her friend Catalina stood in front of the crying clown for a long time, wearing the face of someone checking whether it was a joke.
Roy pulled Nora aside by the stairs and thanked her for inspiring Dena, who he said had never been so excited about anything. The statue, he added, would cost $12,000, arrive in a month, and require reinforcing the basement ceiling. He kept repeating the price as though it proved something. Nora felt satisfaction and guilt settle in her stomach together, and it struck her that $12,000 was a lot to waste on a prank, even for someone who deserved a lesson.
At home she played the video for Alex. He laughed at first, then stopped and asked whether she’d taken it too far. She reminded him that he’d spent months telling her to ignore the copying, and he admitted that was true. But he pointed at the six-foot clown on the screen and said this was cruel, not just revenge. Two wrongs, he said, don’t make a right, which made her want to throw her phone.
The next family dinner was miserable. Her mother watched her all evening, her father avoided Dena’s eyes, and in the kitchen her mother simply asked what she’d done. Two days later Catalina called and asked whether Nora had told Dena clowns were a design trend. She’d known Dena for fifteen years and had never heard her mention clowns, and certainly not Buddhism. When she asked outright whether Dena had been copying Nora’s house, Nora wanted to confess everything. She said instead that she and Dena had similar taste, and Catalina clearly didn’t believe it.
The Painter, the Confession, and the Couch
Winter set in, and Dena called in distress. The orange on her first floor looked awful in the gray light, she said, blaming a contractor for mixing the wrong shade, and she needed a painter fast. Nora searched for one with terrible reviews, found a man with a one-star rating and complaints about sloppy work and no-shows, and texted Dena his number. He painted over the orange without primer, left streaks with the old color bleeding through, got paint on the hardwood floors, and quit halfway through the job. Dena called again, in tears.
That evening Alex came home and closed the door in a way that told Nora everything. Dena had phoned him crying, he said, and he asked her directly whether she was responsible. Nora thought about lying and saw no point, so she told him all of it, from the magazines to the fake invoice. Alex listened without interrupting, then said he didn’t recognize this version of her. She slept on the couch.