a To apologize for making their day longer, Molly bought lunch for the entire crew. According to Nix, she also told the assembled cast and crew (that included a dancer named Irene Davis), “I am so sorry. I promise I wouldn’t waste your time like this if it wasn’t a matter of extreme importance. Not life or death, but with similar stakes.”
b In my interview with Nix, she maintained that she didn’t remember when, exactly, the sexual element of her relationship with Taer began. “But that’s how Caitlin is,” Nix said. “Once you start fucking her it’s like you’ve always been fucking her. At least, that’s how she treats you. You’ve always been fucking her and you will always be fucking her.” When I asked her what she meant, Nix said: “Oh, you know, she annexes you. She claims you as a territory. You know what I mean.” Nope, I do not. — CD
c Unknowable, even if Nix had been more forthcoming with me about the details of her romantic relationship with Taer.
Chapter 4
On January 24, two weeks after Molly disappeared, three days after Taer and Nix found Molly Metropolis’s notebook, and three days before Taer finally broke down and called Berliner, Nix asked Taer if she could move into her living room temporarily. Taer and her roommate needed help with the rent, so despite the possible romantic complications, Taer agreed. Nix told her mother she was going to stay with a friend in the city, packed some winter clothes in a large suitcase, and proceeded to make camp on Taer’s couch. Occasionally, Nix slept with Taer in her bed, but more often she retreated to the living room after their nighttime trysts. Nix and Taer both enjoyed sleeping alone, and the couch reminded her of narrow tour bus bunks and unfamiliar hotel beds. After months of living on tour with Molly Metropolis, Nix had come to enjoy living like a nomad — just as Molly had enjoyed it.
Though the on-the-road lifestyle suited them both, Nix and Molly grew up with completely different temperaments. Where Molly was bombastic, Nix was reticent. Nix had spent much of her childhood quietly watching Bulls and White Sox games with her father. Victor Nix taught his daughter to value healthy competition, good sportsmanship, and even tempers. His favorite athletes were calm, collected, and professional; he loved Scottie Pippen and hated Dennis Rodman for everything except his rebounding record. Nix easily adopted her father’s favorite characteristics. Prone to moodiness as a child, she learned to carefully control and conceal her emotions from both of her parents, pursuing her passions without ever acting passionately.
Molly, even in college, was the absolute opposite. She was a dramatic personality, a theater nerd who expressed herself aggressively. Molly befriended Nix not because they were opposites but because they were both performing. Nix performed the lack of emotion. Molly performed the excess.
Under Molly’s influence, Nix loosened up. “I changed after college, when I started working for Molly, I know that,” Nix said. “I enjoyed myself more. It helped that I didn’t have anything to live up to, not a team or a GPA, nothing like that. I started painting my nails a lot even though I kept them short.”
Nix worked for Molly during the majority of the pop star’s short career. Her job went from a twenty-hour-per-week, minimum impact position to an eighty-hour-per-week, intense scramble to keep up with Molly’s rising profile. When Molly’s first tour, the Célèbrety Ball, was in full swing, Nix worked about twelve hours a day, every day, with only non-performance days off. The non-performance days were few and far between. Nix was unfazed by the increased hours. Her compensation had swelled accordingly, and with the record label covering most of her expenses while on tour, she managed to save a nice amount of money, a financial cushion that made her father proud. Furthermore, although a professional distance always existed between them, Nix became one of Molly’s friends and confidants.
Nix was unaware of the extent to which Molly hid things from her, because Molly always made it seem like Nix knew all her secrets. They gossiped about the dancers; while she was getting her hair done, Molly told Nix detail-laden stories about her tumultuous romance with her first producer, Davin Karl; in the evenings, they drank wine together and talked about the purpose of art, sometimes just the two of them.
When Molly disappeared, Nix slipped into a depression. Still unwilling to exhibit deep emotions in front of her parents, and without an apartment of her own to run to, Nix escaped to Taer’s. From the moment she moved in, she did nothing to hide the depths of her melancholy. She slept for twelve hours a day, and stayed up half the night. She sometimes paced the short, carpeted hallways in Taer’s apartment, picking at the chipping white paint on the walls. She pulled Taer’s books off her IKEA shelves, read ten pages, then left them on the coffee table. She sat on the couch for hours, scrolling through Tumblr, absorbing nothing but a constant wash of bright colors. In the middle of a conversation, she would stop talking mid-sentence, stand up, and walk away. Bundled in sweatpants and a flannel button-down pajama top, swaddled in a gray fleece blanket with a pattern of yellow ducks, she spent the night staring at the ceiling.
For the first week and a half after Nix moved in, Taer tried to help. She bought Nix presents, like a chocolate bar or a used DVD of Love and Basketball. She cooked Nix meals and brought home bags of bar pretzels from Rainbo. She tried very hard to be good to Nix, becoming more like a girlfriend every day, but according to Nix, Taer got irritated easily over the small annoyances of sharing space with another person. Taer snipped at Nix over leaving towels on the ground or crumbs on the kitchen counter, then got angry because Nix’s apologies seemed forced. They would both snap back and forth, raising the stakes with each rejoinder, until the little bitch sessions turned into proper fights.
When they fought, Taer screamed at Nix, opened the door, and demanded that Nix move out, take the train back to Flossmoor. Nix would try to talk Taer down or, if she was feeling particularly frustrated, she would ice Taer out, refusing to speak to or acknowledge her.
These fights ended when Taer apologized, cranked up the heater, and crawled under Nix’s blanket. “Even though she got mad fast she’d forget about it even faster,” Nix said. “Cait doesn’t hold grudges. Like, fifteen minutes later we could be talking about music or watching Netflix like she’d never been pissed.”
While Berliner certainly experienced fewer of Taer’s mood swings, he was more blunt in his discussions of Taer’s relationship with Nix. He said, “Nix always said, all Taer needed to forget she was upset was a back rub and a blow job.”
While Nix wallowed in depression, Taer descended into her own crushing obsession with Molly Metropolis and her notebook, a fixation that demanded more of her focus every day and sometimes took precedence over Nix’s emotional well-being. Even though Taer could see that Nix was falling apart, she prodded her for details about Molly’s day-to-day life, her hobbies, her proclivities, anything that could give Taer a clearer picture of what might’ve happened to Molly. Nix gritted her teeth and obliged. She also tolerated Taer’s compulsive listening and re-listening to Molly Metropolis’s posthumous album.
The day after Nix moved into Taer’s apartment, SDFC released Molly’s last album, Cause Apocalyptic. The album debuted at number one, while all eight songs battled over the top spot on iTunes’ digital singles chart. SDFC sent a complimentary copy of the CD to Nix, who gave it to Taer. Taer played Cause Apocalyptic dozens of times while she read Molly’s notebook.