ST4.09 | "The Other Jenny"

SEPTEMBER 2026
I HATE TO SPOIL THE END OF CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S CINEMATIC MASTERPIECE, THE PRESTIGE, BUT . . .
This month, we’re wading in to the gene pool and pulling out duplicates. Twins. Whether fraternal, identical, or straight up haunted doppelgängers, twins and doubles have been an indelible part of noir going back to the beginning, and now, we want your take. Give us something sly, something mysterious, something we’re not actually sure we’re seeing. And remember, at STONE’S THROW, even if it looks exactly the same, it’s never actually what it appears to be.

THE OTHER JENNY

by Lisa Robertson

By the time my sister finally got around to dying, the Internet had already decided she’d been the death of my acting career.

I starred in a supernatural soap opera called Wicked Hollow back in the day. Six seasons and one very poorly conceived Christmas special. I played Jade Mercer, a psychic teenage orphan with a tragic back story and an alarming number of crop tops. It wasn’t a huge hit when it originally aired, but fast forward 15 years and every whack job with a Reddit account and a Roku started binge-watching the shit out of it.

The conspiracy theories were better than Wicked Hollow ever was—more convincing, too. Some girl on TikTok stitched together a clip package titled JENNY ≠ JADE, and the Internet lost its damn mind.

People with usernames like @HollowHead and @TrueBrieliever posted hour-long breakdowns about body language, line delivery, and disappearing scars.

All this scrutiny might have been flattering if they weren’t absolutely convinced that the performance everyone loved—the one that got me slimed on the 2009 Kids’ Choice Awards—wasn’t actually me.

According to Internet chatter, sometime around season four, I was secretly replaced by my twin sister, Brie.

For the record, I called bullshit.

For the also-record, the studio called last week. They want a reboot.

***

Here’s the version of the story everyone agreed to back then: I was the talented one. The star.

When we were babies, we were both on camera. We started out playing a precocious toddler on a sitcom. Sitcoms love twins. If one kid cries, they bring in the other one. Stretch a workday, avoid a meltdown.

But that can’t last forever. At some point, one of those precocious toddlers must become THE precocious toddler.

I kept acting, and Brie became . . . the other one.

Then, when Wicked Hollow started dangling me off bell towers and setting me on fire, they cast Brie as my stunt double. It made sense. Same height. Same eyes. Same bone structure. Why hire a stranger when my sister could throw herself through sugar glass for scale?

At first, it was just the stunts.

Then things got complicated.

I got complicated.

You can lose a lot in Hollywood. Your dignity. Your appetite. Your ability to sleep without chemical intervention. Men routinely lose all three and still get development deals. But if you’re an ingenue with an eating disorder and a nose for cocaine, people start looking for Plan B.

For the Wicked Hollow showrunners, Brie was a very effective Plan B.

She could hit a mark. She could sob under moonlight and make overwrought dialogue about cursed bloodlines sound Shakespearean. Meanwhile, I’d gotten so thin that wardrobe stopped putting me in crop tops.

The crew loved Brie. The directors trusted Brie. Somewhere around season four, I became less of a lead actress and more of a liability.

And with Brie, the show got better.

At the season five premiere, a photographer asked Brie to step out of my shot. She waited for me to correct him. I didn’t.

By the time the producers pitched an evil twin storyline for the final season—Jade’s feral, abandoned sister crawling out of the woods with a vendetta and booty shorts—I knew exactly what they were doing. They wanted Brie on camera, and me out of the way.

Fuck that.

I didn’t want to shut Brie out, but I didn’t want her to be better than me either. We knew our roles. I was the star. She was the spare.

But then the coke caught up to me. Mugshots, meltdowns—the whole nine yards. They shipped me off to rehab and Brie finished the last season as Jade. Sure, there were rumors, but it all sounded so far-fetched. And by that point the show had run its course—the ratings tanked, and the network quietly cancelled us.

I got the hell out of Hollywood and never looked back. Got clean. Married well. Divorced even better.

Brie stayed exactly where I left her—just outside Hesperia, in the stucco shithole we grew up in. We didn’t talk much after that. When we did, she said she was staying close to the work.

That’s how she phrased it. Close to the work.

Like proximity counted. Like she hadn’t already been written out of the sequel.

***

I got the call just after midnight. There’s a version of this story where I tell you I knew something was wrong the second I heard the ringtone. Some kind of twin telepathy thing. But that would have played better on Wicked Hollow. The truth is you can go years without thinking about someone who used to be the center of your life.

Now Brie was storming right back in, demanding equal billing in whatever drama this turned out to be.

The detective said her car had been found abandoned in the desert. “We believe it’s a suicide. There’s a note.”

We both waited for the other to say something. He blinked first. “It’s addressed to you.”

***

I pull into the same cracked driveway, beside the same sun-bleached stucco, the same smattering of scrub and the same gravel posing as a front yard.

The front door is unlocked. I half expect to find some kind of hoarder hellhole, but it’s not that bad. Brie was never neat. Not as a kid, not as an adult, not at any point in between. She lived in piles—scripts half-read, clothes half-folded, life half-lived.

There’s a giant corkboard on the wall where our family portrait used to hang. It’s covered in index cards. Episode ideas. Scene outlines. Lines of dialogue written out, crossed through, written again.

It’s . . . good. Better than I would have done.

I guess that’s the point.

The card dead center has a line, underlined twice: Jade reborn. Jenny removed.

That’s a little too on the nose—even for her. I step away before it manages to fulfill its destiny. That’s when I see the envelope addressed to me on the mantle, beside a picture of us on set—the star and the stunt double.

Brie’s suicide note is confusing, infuriating and very, very on brand. J—You always said there was no reason to come back. Now you have one.

“You always were a drama queen, Brie.”

I hear it then. A shuffling of feet, a rustling of curtains. A whisper. For a second I think it’s oozing out of the walls. But no. It’s right behind me. Right where that voice and its owner have always been, squarely in my shadow.

“You never were enough of one, Jenny.”

***

The line sounds rehearsed. Which—knowing Brie—it probably was. I don’t turn around right away. If this was Wicked Hollow, I’d pivot, demand an explanation, act surprised. But it’s not.

“You faked it,” I say instead, looking at the picture on the mantle. The two of us frozen in time. Me being Jade. Brie being me.

“It was the easiest way to get you here.”

I turn to face her. She’s different now. We both are. I’ve gotten softer in the middle. She’s gotten harder around the edges.

“Looks like you’ve been busy,” I say, nodding toward the corkboard. “What’s all this?”

“I’ve been watching Wicked Hollow again.” Brie crosses to the corkboard. “They’re bringing it back, you know.”

“There’s no Wicked Hollow without me, and I’m not doing it. That show almost killed me.”

Brie removes one of the cards and turns it facedown. “It still might.”

***

Acting’s all about choices. If I was playing Jade, I would take a step back, clock the threat and react accordingly. But that version probably lives in a different genre. “Don’t be so dramatic.”

She smiles at that, like now I’m in on the joke. “You really should watch it again,” she says. “Start at season four. That’s when Jade comes into her power.”

“I lived it.”

“Did you?”

She turns the television on. Static fills the screen, followed by the flicker of a forest at night. Jade Mercer stumbles between the trees, one hand pressed to a bleeding wound.

Season four, episode nine. I know the scene.

I remember the cold. The fake rain. The director screaming at me because I kept missing the light. On-screen, Jade turns toward the camera. There’s a small scar beneath her chin.

It’s Brie’s scar. A fall from a teeter totter split her chin open when we were six.

The screen flickers and then the scar is gone.

“You think they want you,” she says. “But what they really want is Jade. And we both know who that role belongs to.”

“Is that what this is about? Would it make you happy if I said you were better than me for the 15 minutes you played her?”

“I want you to admit which one of us played Jade all those years.”

“I did.”

“Did you?”

Brie gives me a sad smile, and I feel the doubt creep in. There are gaps. Weeks I can’t recall. Scenes I remember watching, not living. Bruises that belonged to Brie. Applause I took home. But it was my life. My show. I was the star.

“It was me. It was almost always me.” Even though I say it like a fact, somehow it feels like a question.

“But you won’t do the reboot.”

“Absolutely not.”

“That’s probably for the best.”

That lands wrong. “The best?”

“It keeps things simple.”

“You aren’t making any sense.”

“I don’t have to make sense. I just have to be you.”

“That’s what you want? For me to step aside so you can play Jade, so you can pretend to be me?”

“Do you really think I faked my own death and brought you here to ask permission?”

If I was still acting, there’s a version of this where a writer crafts the perfect line, where I say something profound and clever and dripping in irony and regret. Maybe even something that buys me some time. But I go in a different direction.

“You brought me here to kill me.”

“Hell of a plot twist, right?”

***

Behind Brie, the television flickers. Jade lost in the woods in that damn crop top, tears glistening in manufactured moonlight. I lean against the fireplace to steady myself. Brie closes the distance between us, and I see it. The hatred in her eyes. The knife in her hand.

I reach for the picture frame behind me and swing. The corner catches Brie across her cheek. The glass breaks and blood follows.

Brie’s hand goes to her cheek, and she stares first at the blood and then me. “You’re so fucking stupid, Jenny. Never aim for the talent’s face. Always go for the gut.”

The knife goes in just below my ribs. I gasp and grab her wrist, but Brie is already pulling it free. She was always better at this part. Faster. Stronger. The one with the good instincts, the one who paid attention when they taught us how to fight and make it look real.

She comes at me again, but her foot catches on the broken frame. She stumbles and falls—the knife ends up right at my feet.

She may have always been better, but I’ve always been luckier.

After that, everything happened so fast.

For a few seconds, I wait for her to move.

She never does.

I press a hand against my side. It comes away bloody. Not Brie bloody, which is a very good sign, but I’m going to need stitches. For a second I wish I had a director to tell me what to do or a writer to tell me what to say. But, for once, I don’t think I need all that.

I crawl to my phone and dial 9-1-1.

***

Whenever I tell this story, I always say I don’t remember stabbing her. That it’s all a blur. That I did what I had to do. That I wish it would have ended differently.

That's the thing about acting. Once you know the story—once you commit to it—it almost becomes the truth.

LISA ROBERTSON (on Facebook @LisaPooh23) is a Texas-based magazine editor and features writer. Her work has appeared in Rock and a Hard Place, WestWord, Elegant Literature, Writer's Playground and Stone’s Throw, among others. She loves baking and reality television shows and reality television shows about baking.