1 The Northwood High acceptance letter trembled in my hand—not from excitement, but the familiar weakness of years underfed. I rushed to the rotary phone in our rundown farmhouse, heart pounding as I called my "construction worker" parents in the city. Only a hollow dial tone answered. I just wanted to tell them I'd gotten into the county's best school. To ask if they'd come home for Christmas. Then translucent text flickered before my eyes: 【God, the irony. Her parents are taking her brother to Disneyland】 【Her dad's "Cross Construction" just landed the West End contract】 【Brother gets new iPhones while she uses this relic】 【The "grandma" who calls her worthless? A $2k/month actress】 Sixteen years abandoned with a woman who hated me— All of it, A lie. I hung up the phone and walked back into the yard like a puppet with its strings cut. The woman I called Grandma was perched on a rickety old stool, snapping beans. She saw me and her cloudy eyes narrowed into slits. "On that phone again? How many times do I have to tell you, long distance costs a fortune! Your parents are out there breaking their backs on some construction site, and you're just throwing their money away!" I stared at her harsh, wrinkled face, my own lips trembling uncontrollably. The words from the pop-up echoed in my head, and I had to ask. "Grandma," I began, my voice barely a whisper. "You're... you're not really my grandmother, are you?" Her hands froze mid-snap. A second later, she hurled a handful of wilted bean ends at me. "What nonsense are you spouting now, Lia? Are you crazy? Of course I'm your grandmother, you stupid girl!" She struggled to her feet, jabbing a bony finger at my face. "I swear, all that reading has turned your brain to mush! Always lost in your own stupid fantasies! Now get your ass over there and slop the pigs!" I didn't move. I just held her gaze, watching the flicker of panic that flashed in her eyes before she could hide it. The comments appeared again. 【She's rattled. Look, she can't even meet your eyes.】 【Keep it up, lady. The Academy owes you an Oscar for that performance.】 Wordlessly, I turned and walked toward the pigpen. The acrid stench hit me in a wave, and I fought back the urge to gag. Could the pop-ups be telling the truth? But what were they? And why could I see them? That night, I lay on my lumpy mattress, the thin wood planks digging into my back as I tossed and turned. From the next room, I heard the faint, furtive sounds of my "grandmother." Holding my breath, I slipped out of bed and pressed my ear against the cold, damp wall. "Hello? Sean? It's me." "It's Lia... she was acting strange today." "She asked me straight up if I was her real grandma. I shut her down, of course, but the girl's sharp. I'm worried she's onto us." "Yeah, you and Reina should probably come down tomorrow." "And remember... dress the part. You know. Don't blow our cover." BOOM. The last thread holding my world together snapped. It was all real. My parents were rich. All these years, leaving me here... it was all part of a script they had written for me. A twisted play, and I was the unwilling star. I crawled back into bed, pulling the musty, patched-up blanket over my head as silent, hot tears streamed down my face. I remembered the winters so cold my hands and feet were covered in frostbite that itched and burned, while she kept the only coal brazier in her own room. I remembered the other kids in their new clothes, while I wore stained hand-me-downs my mother mailed me, the sleeves inches too short, earning me a semester's worth of mockery. I remembered the time I had a fever so high I couldn't lift my head off the desk, and she'd just glanced at me and said, "Drink some hot water, you'll be fine." All this time, I thought we were poor. But my suffering wasn't born of poverty. It was born of cruelty. They were living a life of luxury with my brother in the city, while I was abandoned in this desolate place, "raised" by a stranger paid to keep me miserable. What a sick, twisted joke. My eyes ached from crying, and my heart turned to a block of ice, bit by bit. Tomorrow. When they came back. I would tear down this disgusting, sixteen-year-long charade with my own two hands. 2 The next day, with the sun high in the sky, the squeal of tires on the gravel road announced their arrival. A shiny black sedan, polished to a mirror gleam, sat awkwardly at the end of our muddy dirt path. The driver's door opened and my father, Sean, stepped out, followed by my mother, Reina. They were dressed in faded, worn-out work clothes, their faces artfully smeared with dirt and their hair a mess. They looked every bit the part of weathered, downtrodden laborers. Last, my brother, Theo, slid out of the backseat. He took one step, and his pristine white sneakers sank into a patch of mud. He wrinkled his nose in disgust, his voice just loud enough for me to hear. "Seriously, Mom, Dad? This is where she lives? It's a total dump. A dog wouldn't even live here!" His words were a dagger to my heart. A place a dog wouldn't live in. I had lived there for sixteen years. I studied my parents, their performance flawless. But I could see the truth beneath the costume. The hands that signed contracts and held fountain pens, even smudged with dirt, were too soft. Their fingernails were clean, the skin on their necks smooth. These were not the hands and bodies of people who did hard labor for a living. "Lia!" my mother, Reina, cried out, quickly clamping a hand over Theo's mouth. Her face was a mask of weary love and guilt. "Oh, honey, we've missed you so much! Let me look at you, you're all skin and bones!" She opened her arms for a hug, but I instinctively took a step back. Her embrace hung, empty, in the air between us. My gaze drifted past them, fixating on the offensively clean, expensive car. "Mom, Dad," I said, my voice hoarse. "You… you have money now? You bought a car?" I pressed on, my voice pleading. "Can you take me to the city for high school?" My father's smile faltered for a fraction of a second before he replaced it with a folksy grin. "Don't be silly! Dad just borrowed this from his boss at the construction site. He heard you got into Northwood and wanted to show you off a bit." "Besides," he continued, falling back into the old, tired script, "the city's expensive, Lia. And your brother's schooling costs a lot. You just stay here for now…" Always the same excuses. I lowered my eyes, hiding the bitter sarcasm I felt. Borrowed. Right. At lunch, my "grandmother" served a chicken stew, a rare treat. Theo stared at the chipped enamel bowls and the patches on my clothes, his lip curled in a permanent sneer. He refused to sit next to me. "Mom, I don't wanna sit next to her," he whined. "She stinks. I bet she has fleas." A flash of embarrassment crossed my parents' faces. Reina quickly pulled Theo between her and my dad. "Theo, that's enough! That's your sister!" After the meal, my mother pulled a thick wad of cash from her pocket and pressed it into the old woman's hand. "Mom, here's two thousand. Thanks for all your hard work this month." She gestured toward me. "Lia's starting high school, so she'll need more things. Make sure you get her some good food, don't let her go without." I watched the exchange, a cold laugh bubbling in my chest. This was her salary. The payment for her acting services. And I knew that of that $2,000, I wouldn't see a tenth of it. For years, I'd done whatever I could to scrape together money for tuition and books. I’d foraged for herbs in the mountains, washed dishes at the diner in town, and even hauled bricks at a real construction site one summer under the blistering sun. My hands were a permanent mess of blisters that burst and reformed, over and over. Every time I'd called to ask for money, they’d tell me their pay was late, or that Theo was sick again, or that life in the city was even harder than life in the country. Eventually, I just stopped asking. I thought they were truly struggling. But now I understood. They weren't giving me a life of hardship; they were giving me a carefully calculated performance of it. My eyes fell to Theo's feet. The white sneakers had a bold, red swoosh on the side. I recognized it instantly. The richest kid in my class had the exact same pair. He'd bragged to everyone that his parents had paid a fortune for them, a special order from the city. They were called Nikes. And they cost two thousand dollars. Two thousand dollars. That was more than my entire living allowance for two years. My two years of suffering were worth less than a single pair of his shoes. My hand clenched around my enamel bowl, the chip in the rim digging painfully into my palm. I couldn't take it anymore. I snapped my head up, my eyes red-rimmed and blazing as I stared them down. "You're rich, aren't you?" My voice was choked with tears. "You left me here to suffer on purpose, didn't you?" Sean’s face darkened, and he slammed his hand on the table. "Lia! What has gotten into you?" Reina shot up, pointing at me. "Have you lost your mind? We're out there working like dogs to pay for your education, and this is the thanks we get? You stand there spouting ungrateful nonsense! When have we ever done you wrong?" "Done me wrong?" A broken, hysterical laugh escaped my lips. I pointed a trembling finger at Theo's shoes. "His shoes cost two thousand dollars! I haven't even had that much to live on for the past two years! And you call that treating me right?" My parents froze. For a moment, they were speechless. Then my father's composure returned. His face was a cold mask. "They were a hand-me-down from my boss's son. He was going to throw them out. You don't know anything, so stop making things up." My mother caught on instantly, secretly pinching Theo's arm. He immediately put on a pitiful expression. "Yeah, sis! You have no idea what I had to go through just to get these old things!" I watched the three of them, a family of actors, and a cold certainty settled in my stomach. It didn't matter what I said. They would never, ever admit the truth. 3 That afternoon, my parents announced they had to get back to the "busy construction site in the city." As they were leaving, a wild, desperate idea took root in my mind. I was going to see this "construction site" and this "hard life" for myself. I remembered watching my father stuff a sack of farm-fresh produce into the trunk before he left. He had opened it. "My stomach hurts," I mumbled, clutching my abdomen and dashing for the outhouse behind the main building. The moment I was out of sight, I moved, silent and swift as a shadow. The trunk wasn't fully latched. With every ounce of my strength, I pried it open just enough to squeeze through the gap, pulling it shut behind me. Through a tiny crack, I saw the old woman waving goodbye from the doorway, a tender expression on her face, as if she were sending off her own beloved children. I curled into a ball in the darkness, my heart pounding against my ribs. The engine rumbled to life. In the car, my family finally dropped their masks. "That was too close," my mother, Reina, said, her voice shaky with relief. "That damn girl's eyes… it was like she wanted to eat us alive." "I think she knows," my father, Sean, grumbled, a note of irritation in his voice. "We almost blew our cover." "Thank God I thought of that excuse about my boss's son," he continued. "Otherwise, we would've been screwed." "This is all your fault!" Reina snapped. "I told you not to let him wear those Nikes! I told you, when we come here to play our parts, we have to go all in!" "Mom, how is this my fault?" Theo whined, his voice dripping with entitlement. "This whole place is disgusting! There isn't even a decent road! I'm throwing these shoes out the second we get home. They're contaminated with poor-people germs!" He paused, then added, "Dad, Mom, why don't we just… bring her to the city? It's not like we can't afford it. We've got plenty of empty rooms in the villa." My breath caught in my throat. A flicker of hope? "Absolutely not!" My father's voice was sharp, cold, and utterly devoid of warmth. "Have you forgotten what the psychic in Sedona told us? That girl, Lia, she's a jinx, born to drain our fortune. Her life force is too strong. We have to keep her poor, keep her miserable, to channel all the bad luck onto her and away from us. The moment she gets a taste of our wealth, our luck will turn, and we'll lose everything!" My mother quickly chimed in. "He's right, Theo, don't you get soft on us now. Don't you remember when you were little? Every time she got a fever, your father's business would take a hit? The psychic was clear: Lia is our curse. She has to suffer in the countryside to absorb the bad karma for our family!" Curled in the suffocating darkness, a chill colder than any winter wind washed over me. So that's what I was. Not a daughter, not a sister. I was a sacrifice. A human shield to be kept in squalor to ensure their prosperity. "Oh, I get it," Theo said, a note of dawning understanding in his voice. "Well, I definitely don't want to go back to being poor." He sealed my fate with a casual, thoughtless finality. "So, for my sake… for our family's sake… I guess it's better if she just stays miserable out there." His words were as light as a feather, but they crushed my heart into dust. I bit down hard on the back of my hand, stifling the sob that clawed its way up my throat. Superstition. I’d learned about it in school, a relic of a bygone era. I never imagined my own family, my own flesh and blood, would condemn me to a living hell for something so meaningless. An eternity later, the car stopped. I peered through a crack in the trunk, and the sight that greeted me stole the air from my lungs. This wasn't some worksite dorm. It was a three-story mansion with a manicured lawn and a sprawling fountain. I watched the three of them get out, casually punch a code into a keypad, and wait as an ornate iron gate swung open. This was their home. I waited a few minutes, giving them time to get inside, before I pushed open the trunk, slipped out, and darted through the gate just before it closed. The inside was even more opulent than I could have imagined. Crystal chandeliers, marble floors, a sweeping spiral staircase. A housekeeper in a crisp uniform was polishing the floor. "Welcome home, Mr. and Mrs. Cross, Master Theo," she said respectfully. I scrambled for cover, diving under a massive, formal dining table draped with a long tablecloth that concealed me completely. "Hey, Maria, get me a Coke!" Theo demanded, tossing his backpack onto a plush sofa and flopping down like he owned the world. The coffee table was littered with colorful bags of imported snacks, their foreign labels a language I couldn't comprehend. I thought of the moldy bread I'd eaten to save money, of the bitter wild greens I'd dug up just to have something in my stomach. I watched as my mother, Reina, shed her shabby work clothes for an elegant silk dress, spritzing herself with expensive perfume. "I have an appointment with Mrs. Chen for facials. I won't be back for dinner." My father, Sean, disappeared into a walk-in closet and emerged moments later in a tailored suit, his hair slicked back. "I have to go back to the office. I've got a major contract to sign tonight." So this was their "construction site." This was their "hard life." Just then, my father's phone rang. He answered it, and his calm, confident expression vanished. "What?!" he yelled, his voice cracking. "Lia's gone?! You've searched the whole village?!" "You don't think she... she followed us to the city, do you?" My mother and Theo's faces went white with panic. "Quick! Check the car! The trunk!" They spun around, ready to bolt for the door. And in that moment, I slowly, deliberately, crawled out from under the table. I brushed the dust from my patched clothes, my voice a dry rasp. "No need to look."
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