The Girl in the Mirror (Sand & Fog #3) (2 page)

When people come to visit me, wanting to be supportive of where I’ve landed myself or just trying to understand how I got into this winner of a place in life, I just say cheerfully, “Extraordinary people are doomed to live stupid lives.”

What I don’t get is why that works. Why everyone just backs off, and then goes away whenever I say it. People—I don’t get them. I never have.

I’m extraordinary like my parents that way.

White wall, white wall, glass wall, white wall, and ceiling. That’s my world now, but inside my head I dance. Five, six, seven, eight. Arm high, shoulder down, extend through the leg, toe pointed—

Searing hot pain blasts upward from my ankle like a flash fire across my flesh. Fuck, I pointed my toe in the real world and not my head.

“Krystal, stay still.” I hear a voice—beloved, but not the one I want. “Don’t move, sunshine. You’re in the hospital. Remember? Your leg is in traction. The doctor said it’s healing well, but don’t try to move. You have to stay still to get better.”

My lids lift, which is a mistake because I don’t want to see this.

Reality—not the one I want. No stage. No audience. No elegant movement of my body before an enthralled crowd. Black eyes stare at me, heart-wrenching with worry, instead of hazel eyes lush with love watching from the wings…
hazel eyes.

I slowly move my gaze around the room.

White wall.

White wall.

Glass wall.

White wall.

My father hovering beside the bed.

My logic rebels.

This image can’t be real. This isn’t how I remember my dad, not at any time since my birth. Alan looks old, frazzled and discomposed in a way that makes him strange and alarming and unfamiliar. No, that’s not my father. It can’t be. It hurts too much to see in his eyes and on his face the truth of me. Knowing I’m the cause of him looking
that
way.

No, this is not reality. This is the nightmare. I, Krystal Harris, do not exist here anymore. I’m only real inside my head so long as I never let myself be here.

Five, six, seven, eight…

“They brought your dinner,” Alan says, moving to retrieve a tray from the table. “You should try to eat, baby girl. It’s what will get you well. You need to start eating so you’ll be strong enough to come home where you belong.”

I belong
?

I close my eyes.

I can’t ever go home again. It would kill me. It’s why I don’t speak. Why I count the walls. Why I don’t eat. I can’t go home knowing you know…

I feel something touch my lip and look up to find my dad holding a spoon and waiting patiently for me to take a bite of that institutional-grade chocolate pudding.

I can’t eat. Not that. I tighten my lips against the spoon.

My dad’s eyes liquefy. “I know it’s not very good, Krystal, but you have to eat what they bring you. Later, you can have what you want. But for now you’ve got to eat every bite of this.”

I look away. Where’s Jacob? I haven’t seen hazel eyes since I got here. I’m pretty sure he was here when I was first brought in. Why haven’t I seen him since? How could he leave me?

I anxiously search the room again, halting to stare at the closed door.

I hear the spoon being set down and my dad pushes the bed table back so he can sit beside me. “There’s no need to worry, Krystal. No one is ever going to harm you again. Graham Carson is right outside the door. Dillon’s at the end of the hallway, and Brayden’s in the lobby. No one is ever going to hurt you again.”

Graham Carson? Dillon? Brayden?

Why isn’t Jacob here?

He’s my bodyguard—everything inside me starts to twirl—no, that’s wrong. He’s more, so much more…

The pain suffusing my heart compels me to speak. I need to know what’s happened to Jacob. I struggle to push out the words. “Where…is—”

“Oh, thank God.” My father’s low, raspy voice gushes over my breathy, near-soundless utterance. His eyes go wide since I haven’t managed to speak before now. His gentle, roughly callused hands close over mine. “Your mother is just down the hall in the waiting room. They only let one of us sit with you at a time. Everyone is here, sweetheart. Your brothers and sisters. Madison. Jack and Linda. The entire family. We’ve all been here, every minute since Graham brought you home to us.”

Graham brought me home?

No, no, no.

Jacob brought me here, Daddy.

Jacob saved me, not Graham.

How could my dad get that wrong?

Terrifying images flash in my head of things I don’t want to remember.

Juarez.

The flight home.

Blood. The panic in the plane. It wasn’t because of me. The blood was Jacob’s. Not mine.

“Do you want me to get your mother?”

I shake my head.

“Can you try to eat?”

I shake my head.

My dad’s features alter with fear. “You’re going to be all right, Krystal. But you have to help us. You have to eat, baby. You can’t come home until you are strong enough for the doctors to release you.”

He grabs the spoon and holds it before me again.

I shake my head.

I don’t want food.

I stare at the door.

If my leg wasn’t trapped in that harness I’d run from the room.

I want to be back in what I never expected to find when I first left Pacific Palisades.

I want hazel eyes and loving smiles, strong arms holding me, nights of tenderness and passion, laughter and Manhattan again.

Is Jacob dead?

Is that what they’re not telling me?

No, no, no.

Shutting out the heart-ripping truth surrounding me, I escape back into my own thoughts where life is how I want it to be. Where I can dance in my dreams with Jacob again.

Pacific Palisades, three years earlier

My cell phone rings, and without preamble I say quickly, “I’m heading out the door, Maddy,” as I rush around my room to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything. “Don’t nag me about always being late. How long until you get to Malibu?”

Madison laughs.

“Just hit Highway 1. No traffic. Maybe forty minutes.”

“See you then. You remember the codes to our beach house so you can get in if you get there first, don’t you? I still haven’t said goodbye to Mom yet. You might reach the house before I do and, heck, I’ve only got a thirty-minute drive.”

A moment of silence and I can see Madison in my head making a face. “Of course I do. It’s my sister’s birthday. I would have thought your dad would have had the security company change the codes by now.”

“My dad. Are you kidding? He’s predictable in his unpredictability where my mother’s concerned.”

“Say hi to Chrissie for me.” Then she adds on a heated rush, “But don’t let her keep you there talking forever.”

“Yes, Aunt Maddy.”

“Don’t call me that,” she says, annoyed. “I hate it when we’re out and you call me that in front of guys.”

“Why? You are my aunt. You’re my mom’s sister. An absolute. Accurate. Why does it annoy you?”

I’m only messing with her.

I know why.

We have a complicated family.

Not the least of which being Madison is younger than I am and the product of my grandfather’s affair with her mother from back in the day before Jack married Linda.

“Fuck you. Just don’t call me that or I’m not staying the full weekend at the beach with you.”

“I’m hanging up now,” I say.

Click.

She’ll stay all three days no matter what I call her.

She’s not fooling me. She loves hanging out with me. Our version of nerd girls gone wild. We always get in the most trouble and have our best times together.

I’m certainly in the mood for both.

I haven’t been out in weeks.

Mom’s been overly suffocating and wanting to spend every minute in mother-daughter time before I head out to New York and Juilliard.

Sweet, but annoying.

I do have a life.

Well, sort of.

Why can’t she sometimes be like Dad? He goes MIA without even saying goodbye to me half the time.

I shove my cell phone into my pocket.

Yep, ready to burn rubber out of here.

Some private girl time whooping it up with Madison.

Exactly what I need before I’m east coast bound.

East coast bound—finally.

Not that I don’t love my parents, because I do.

Not that I don’t love my brothers and sisters, because I do.

But hell, it’s damn near impossible to live how I want to here. Mom is so watchful and Dad, well, he’s always up in everyone’s shit.

They’re really good parents, though.

That’s the problem.

They watch, care, and actually want to know and be part of what we kids do. Why can’t they be like everyone else’s parents, oblivious and hyperfocused on their own lives? It’s not like they don’t have plenty of other things to claim their attention. And they are definitely still hot and heavy for each other.

No mistaking that.

Even if us five kids weren’t quantifiable proof.

But Chrissie and Alan somehow see and know everything—

Well, almost everything.

I grab my bag and head into the hallway, shaking my head to clear my thoughts. Pretty soon whatever my parents see—or don’t see—won’t matter, and maybe I can relax and stop worrying all the time.

Four days and counting until freedom and a new life.

Juilliard, my own apartment and living alone in the Big Apple.

Finally, maybe now I’ll have an existence where I don’t hear on a daily basis: “You’re Jackson Parker’s granddaughter”; “Isn’t your mother Christian Parker?”; “Isn’t your father Alan Manzone?” or “Aren’t you Kaley Rowan’s sister?”

I shudder. That last one is the worst of the worst because all through school at Pacific Palisades Academy the teachers had an annoying tendency to call me
Mini-Kaley
and I’d make myself smile like I thought it funny, only I didn’t.

I love my sister, but let’s be frank here, her reputation is one no one would want to be burdened with and we couldn’t be less alike. My big sister definitely had some hell-raising teenage years—Pacific Palisades Academy won’t soon forget her senior year—though now she’s this ubersuccessful independent filmmaker and Internet sensation, and somehow that makes it all right for everyone that she was a massive pain in the butt at eighteen. My teachers’ continued need to draw a comparison between us was not only insensitively illogical but it made me feel invisible.

It’s worth moving three thousand miles away never to hear
Mini-Kaley
again. I know lots of people dream of being part of the fast lane in Southern California, to live a life like they see on those dumb reality TV shows, but I would argue that’s only because they haven’t lived it.

My childhood has been like the ultimate reality TV show. It’s not a great thing being defined sight unseen, and you spend pretty much every minute of your life stuck in sort of an insurmountable quicksand of all your relatives’ successes and mistakes.

Yep, that’s how it’s felt—stuck in quicksand—and as if scrambling out is only way not to drown.

I don’t doubt if anyone could hear my thoughts they’d think me petty, spoiled, and ungrateful. It would definitely make Mom and Dad butt-hurt, which is why I never tell anyone how I really feel about anything, but that doesn’t mean I’m not past ready to be out from under their shadow, being only Krystal for once in my life.

Even my success in my dance company never totally felt my own, because you’re never just an ordinary girl when your parents are Chrissie and Alan. It makes it impossible to be confident why you achieve anything and paradoxically you work twice as hard every minute to disprove whatever wrong thing everyone is thinking.

True, I can’t be certain it would have been any different in my dance company if my parents hadn’t been famous and rich. The ballet community is a highly competitive, petty, and close-knit environment.

Harsh reminders rise sharply in my memory.

The hateful rumors.

The frequent acts of sabotage.

The cruel accusations that every principal role I got was only because of who my parents are, and worse, the suspicion that they donated to the company to ensure my success.

Wrong. People would know that if they knew my mom and dad.

But it still hurt—the cattiness and spiteful words of my fellow dancers. And I know it’s not my parents’ fault, how it’s been trying to climb the ranks to become an elite dancer, but I can’t change how I feel or the stark reality that I won’t ever be who I want to be unless I get out of here.

It’s like being a hamster trapped on a wheel. Run, run, run. Only you never get out from under other people’s opinions of you—they follow you wherever you go, no matter how fast you run, unless you jump off the wheel.

That’s what Juilliard is for me: jumping off the wheel. If there’s a God in heaven, hopefully the other students at school won’t figure out who my parents are.

I remind myself it’s not likely. When given a choice, I didn’t change my name from Harris—the name on my birth certificate and legacy from Mom’s husband number two—when all the other kids legally changed their surname to Manzone.

One family.

That’s what my parents wanted.

I just couldn’t do it.

Couldn’t completely erase Jesse Harris because he’d been a good dad until he died, and I loved him.

Alan had been cool about it—it was his idea, not Mom’s, for us kids to be allowed to choose which surname we kept after we found out Alan was our dad—and whether he believed my explanation at the time, that I didn’t need to change my name to love him, is anyone’s guess.

But Dad never tried to change my decision.

Neither of my parents did.

Now where’s my mom?

The house is quiet—it’s never quiet. Maybe everyone is gone.

I pass my brother’s open bedroom door and spot my younger brother, Ethan, lying on his bed, reading a book.

I poke my head in. “Where’s Mom?”

He looks up. “Studio. You heading out?”

I nod. “Which? Recording or dance studio?”

“Dance,” is all he says.

I continue on through the house.