The Hollow Girl Read Online Free PDF

Hollow Girl, or of Sloane herself after 2002. Oh, there were clippings from the New Haven and Yale papers about some great performances in small roles by Siobhan Bracken, “an actress to watch,” but very little else. There was a thing in
Variety
about a pilot for a sitcom that was an updated version of the old show
Hazel
. Siobhan Bracken, née Sloane Cantor, “who first came into the public eye as the Internet’s Hollow Girl, is slated to play the lead.” That, too, came to nothing. Either the pilot was never made, or, if it was, the show wasn’t picked up.
    After my brief session of playing catch-up, I decided I’d watch a few old, random postings to get a feel for what the Hollow Girl’s more typical diary entries were like. When I finally looked up from my computer screen, it was 1:42 A.M. I had been totally sucked in for hours. I could not stop watching her. Sloane Cantor was a compelling presence onscreen. She had a knack for turning the mundane details that make up all of our lives into joy and heartbreak. It was no wonder to me that she had attracted a huge following. I think if I would have known about her, I would have followed her, too.
    I wasn’t quite finished. I did a search for Siobhan Bracken. I wanted to see if there was anything remarkable about her under that name, or anything about going missing. If there were any police reports that had leaked into the public domain, or if some enterprising TV reporter or entertainment reporter had picked anything up. Nothing. I shut down my computer, my mind wandering back to earlier in the day to my thoughts on darkness and lies. Though I was well-versed in darkness, I got the feeling I would need help navigating through the minefield of lies that had already been told to me, and the ones laying in wait.

CHAPTER SIX
    In spite of the sun’s 9:00 A.M. position in the sky ahead of me, I wanted a drink. There wasn’t anything particularly novel in that desire. Since Pam’s death, thirst for alcohol had been my baseline state of being. But it hadn’t just happened. There wasn’t any genetic predisposition toward alcoholism in my family. The only things the previous generation of Pragers were predisposed to were abject pessimism and failure. For the most part, Aaron, Miriam, and I had managed to steer a pretty solid course away from those things. Then why could I hear my late mother’s voice in my head? She whispered, It’s never too late for things to fall apart. It’s never too late. Disappointment is always just a breath away. When my downward spiral had begun, there was a determined willfulness in my drinking that had morphed into something else, something disconnected from my will.
    I’d made the drive east toward Long Island hundreds, if not thousands, of times. Our third and most profitable store—Red, White, and You—was located in an obnoxiously fancy shopping center on the cusp of the Gold Coast. We opened the store at the end of the 1980s, but little had changed about the store or its setting in nearly two and a half decades. The parking lot was always so full of Porsches, Jags, Beemers, Mercedes, Bentleys, and Maseratis that it felt more like an ultra high-end auto mall than a parking lot. Around these parts, driving a Cadillac meant you were either an iconoclast or your portfolio was underperforming. The population had churned, but not changed, really. Whereas the old Gold Coast had been populated by the Vanderbilts and Astors, its current incarnation smelled of new money. Our customers at Red, White, and You tended to equate price with quality, so was it any wonder that it was our most profitable store, or why it was my least favorite?
    Nancy Lustig lived off Route 107, less than a mile away from the store. And when I pulled down the driveway, I saw that she hadn’t lied about everything: The address remained the same, but the house no longer remotely resembled the one that had sat on the property thirty-five years earlier. The old house