Gaslighter

25

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

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2022

          My early twenties had been filled with moments of realization—realizing I'd never be what I wanted to be, realizing I would always be living in the shadow of my mother, realizing that being beautiful was the only thing I had going on for me.

          If I were to be honest with myself for once in my life, I wasn't sure what dreams I was chasing. Film school kept me entertained enough in the way that I was studying something I liked, but at that point in my life, senior year and almost twenty-three, I found myself wondering how much of that had been my own decision and what had been pushed by my parents. It was no wonder I'd ended up there, living with film and movie superstars all my life, just like it wasn't shocking to anyone to see me ruin everything.

          My mother would look at me, remind me of how proud of me she was as she secured the back of my dress into place with safety pins, and I'd stand there mortified, terrified of what she would do and how she would feel if she were to ever find out about everything I'd never told her. The frat party, the trial before sophomore year, Chase. Where had her little girl run off to?

         Now that the party was over and all the glamour had been flushed down the sink, along with the glitter that had gotten stuck in my hair hours before, I felt the littlest like myself. There was someone else standing in front of me, locked behind the glass, and we both stared at each other in silence. When I moved, she mimicked my actions, too perfectly, too attentive to detail to be an entirely new person, but I couldn't afford to believe we were separate.

         I'd found myself at a crossroad. This girl couldn't be me, but I didn't want her not to be me, either. I wasn't sure where that left me and where I could go from here, but I knew I had to find a solution; identity crises weren't ever manageable when they were mine, and I didn't need yet another thing to stress out over. I had enough on my plate as is, crumbling under self-imposed pressure and that placed on my shoulders by everyone around me, and I doubted I could break into any more minuscule pieces and be able to build myself back together again.

          I felt like a stained-glass window, colorful and beautiful from a distance, but so transparent, so obviously mangled that people could see right through my cracks and my tricks. 

          My lies were falling flat, I was certain of it, and I no longer had the energy to dedicate proper effort into making them sound believable, but I'd promised Chase I would never stop trying to protect him—to protect us, to protect what we had. It was the sole thing I could honor, the sole thing I could do relatively well, and I owed it to him.

          Tonight, I'd found myself in the spotlight against my will, a jewel my parents wanted to show off to their friends. Now that there wasn't much time left before graduation—the only thing serving as my light at the end of the tunnel, the only thing I consistently found myself working towards—it was time to start preparing my future in the real world and in the industry. They wanted to use their connections to help me out, to give me a head start in a world that was so cutthroat barely anyone made it; it was relatively easy to get in, but it didn't necessarily come with money, fame, and success.

          I already had my family's money and had yet to do something so offensive to justify them cutting me off, so I wasn't concerned about that part, but I also wanted to have my own accolades, to be known for something that wasn't connected to my last name. The privileged position I was in had been mine since birth, putting me at an advantage in comparison to my peers, and opportunities would come to me without much effort, but I wanted to feel worthy of them. I wanted to be good enough on my own, but I'd never felt that way in my life; in fact, my mediocrity had reached record breaking high levels during the past few months.