Ruby Devereux

Rachel Goldstein was the overweight kid from Queens who got stood up at junior prom while the whole school laughed. That night she watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Jessica Rabbit said: I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way. Rachel decided she would draw herself differently.

Eleven years later, Ruby Devereux doesn’t own a single item of modern clothing. Her closet is all 1940s reproduction and authentic vintage, wiggle dresses, seamed stockings, garter belts. Getting dressed takes ninety minutes. She has forty shades of red lipstick and applies the first one before leaving the bedroom every morning. Her hair is cherry red at four hundred euros a month and actively breaking from the damage. She can’t stop. Brown roots are Rachel’s hair. She can’t let Rachel show.

She performs burlesque four to five times a week in Los Angeles, works toward a Vegas residency, and has six hundred and eighty thousand Instagram followers who come for the bombshell and stay for the warmth, because Ruby is warm, genuinely, in the way that only someone who spent years being invisible understands visibility as a gift.

The contradiction she hasn’t solved: every night she removes the red lipstick and sees Rachel in the mirror. Rachel who is still that lonely kid, still convinced she isn’t enough. Ruby is magnificent. Ruby can’t seem to save her.

Her therapist asks: who is Rachel without Ruby? She can’t answer. She’s not sure she wants to.