I woke up and, like I did every morning, instantly reached for my phone. It wasn't even a thought anymore, it was an instinct that was tied to the bleary-eyed sensation of waking up. I unplugged it and opened the browser. The first thing I did, every morning, was type my eldest daughter's name, Keira Karapetyan, into the search bar. I held my breath as I did so. The Wi-Fi in my shitty two-room apartment was terrible. But what could you expect in a basement apartment? So I felt the familiar fluttering in my stomach and the tension in my muscles as I waited for the screen to load up. I set the phone in my lap and crossed my arms in front of my breasts, like I was hugging myself. Finally, the google search of my daughter's name came up.
Nothing new.
I cursed under my breath. The top hits were still her personal social media accounts. I clicked over to the "news" tab to narrow my search, but it wasn't any better. The last story was a tabloid blog story from almost three weeks ago. I'd basically already memorized that story. Keira Karapetyan gets into altercation with Zayn Malik's entourage. Actually, it didn't say her name in the headline, or even if in the first few lines of the story. That would have made it worth it. Instead, it called her a "drunken fan," before identifying her as an "alleged socialite" in the third paragraph. How can that be "alleged"? You either are or you aren't. I ran my hands through my hair. I wouldn't even bother to check the Alexa score of Keira's website. It could only have gotten worse.
Now that I was thoroughly depressed, I googled my younger daughter Kacy and my son Tommy. I didn't really hold out a lot of hope there, I knew they'd both stayed in the night before. But it was more than that, I knew that if something was going to break it was going to break for Keira first. Their sites and the aging, low-profile stories about them came up, confirming my suspicion. I shook my head slowly and sat up quietly in bed. I looked around the room, where my worthless family lay sleeping, searching for Keira.
She was lying on her inflatable mattress, underneath the small window that was on the sidewalk-level above us. I hadn't heard her come in the night before, but I went to sleep at 3, so it must've been pretty late. She was still dressed like had been when she'd gone out, her skin-tight dress still clinging to her ample curves. I sighed when I looked at her.
My daughter Keira was a sexy woman. There was no question in anyone's mind about that. She was short at around 5'3, but she had an incredible figure. Large, D-cup breasts (that I'd gotten her when she turned 18), a very narrow waist (that I had fought to give her with morning calisthenics for the better part of a decade), and a wide, firm ass (from countless hours doing squats at the gym), a thin muscular legs. Her curves were almost over-proportioned, giving her the look of a pin-up drawing come to life. But that wasn't all; I mean she had a pretty face as well with large, very dark almost shaped eyes, a thin nose (paid for in installments) and thick, pouty lips. She had a sort of deceitful innocence about her face that sort of drew a person in. Although, now, it was sort smeared with old mascara and lipstick. She was snoring like she was still drunk and didn't look quite as good as she was capable of looking.
She'd apparently gone all out again, taking free drinks from guys and dancing with whoever asked. Like she thought that she was sent to the party to have fun or something. Christ I hated it when she forgot that she was supposed to be doing work. She looked like a goddamn trainwreck when she went beyond three drinks, her eyes getting watery and her dress hiking up...My god the unflattering pictures that people could find online if they were looking...
Of course, a couple of drunk photographs could be a good thing every once in a while; if there was anything else going on. If Keira was hawking a stylish brand of Vodka or something, she (meaning I) could make a funny joke about it on Twitter and then there would be a whole cascading set of consequences that would solidify her brand. But just drunken photos of a hot nobody...what did that do for me?
It sure as hell wasn't my fault that she was a nobody, that is for goddamn sure. I felt my lips purse and my shoulders tremble as I looked down at my daughter sleeping on the floor. Every time I thought about all the effort I'd made in the last ten years, I felt my blood boil. In fact, it was getting worse and worse all the time. Because no matter what I did, I couldn't seem to get any traction. And so my impotent rage was growing deeper and deeper with each passing day.
I'd know ever since Keira was little that she had a ...spark. There was just something about her that drew people towards her. A kind of natural charisma. Everyone could tell. She was always so popular and well-liked. She got bad grades but teachers loved her. She dated the best looking boys in school, always older than her. She just...had it. Even if you couldn't say what "it" is.
But through most of her life it was just that a part of her personality. It is just who she was and I didn't have any second thoughts about it or anything. But when my husband died around the time Keira turned 18...we were hard up. I'm not ashamed to say that. I had to look around at my assets and figure out what I had that I could use to feed my family. I didn't have any credentials or marketable skills. I'd worked while my husband went to school, but I stayed at home after that. No degree, big gap in my job history. Don't get me wrong, I know what the fuck I am doing. But knowing what you're doing and getting other people to fucking recognize it are two completely different things. It just seemed to me to be a waste of my talents, and my daughter's talents, for us to sit around in Missouri getting fat and old. Keira had...something and I knew that it could make money.
Okay, I'll level.
If I am being honest, the plan had started a lot earlier than my husband's death and well before my daughter grew up. I mean, like I said, I could tell from the beginning. I have a keen sense for these kinds of things. A business sense for opportunity. I'd been trying to convince my stolid husband about it for years. I knew how we could be rich. How we could leave behind the shitty little town that he'd buried us in and make something of ourselves. It was our daughter. She was our meal ticket. And it would be good for her as well. I didn't want her growing up in a place like that. But he'd always fought me on it. He thought I was crass or something. But you can't eat dignity. And you can't buy a mansion with small town respect. In a way...his passing was a blessing to our family. As soon as there wasn't anything keeping us in Missouri, I moved us all out to California to turn my daughter's charisma into money.
And I had tried just about fucking everything I could think of to do it. I started with acting lessons, spending my husband's life insurance money on getting the absolute best people. Only to learn that she was wooden, had a poor memory, and often got flustered by direction. So I pulled her out and got her singing lessons. Apparently her voice was nasally and crackly. We barely got in the door for modelling lessons before I was told that she was much, much too short and her curves were too extreme. They wanted clothes hangers with a pulse and my daughter was a sex toy. It was about five years after we moved to California that I came to the unhappy realization that my daughter was sexy but she was stupid and she didn't have a half-an-ounce of talent.
At first I was a little discouraged, but within a week I realized that, actually, it was good. That realization opened up new vistas for my ambitions. I was no longer boxed in, trying to make Keira a "legitimate" celebrity. What good did starring in movies end up doing for Lindsay Lohan? It didn't matter why my daughter got rich and famous, so long as it happened. So long as we could build her brand. The problem was, getting started so that we didn't just have to rely on her good looks. If she was a brand, then it would be my talent, not hers, that we'd be relying on. She'd be the looks, I'd be the curator. After that, it was just a matter of figuring out the plan. What would be our hook? What was the outrageous thing that we could do to push Keira's face up towards the cameras? What would get the eyes of the nation on her sexy body?
Once again, I tried everything. Stunts, events, happenings. Whatever you could think of. I would sign onto my daughter's social media accounts and pick fights with celebrities, hoping they'd engage with me. She crashed parties and got into altercations with DJs. We actually bought a cheap car once and my daughter "accidentally" crashed it into a movie star's Ferrari. Unfortunately, he was very charming and forgiving about it and we didn't get any traction out of it. I think Keira ended up blowing him afterwards. She told me that it was because she thought it might help to have a celebrity boyfriend. I told her that blowing someone doesn't make you famous unless he's already married. I told her to call the papers when she sucked the president's dick. It's like she doesn't understand how to calibrate her actions to get the results she wants. She just acted on her impulses...idiot.
