"To you, everything's funny—you've got nothing to regret. I'd give all I have, honey, if you could stay like that."
—Never Grow Up, Taylor Swift
It's generally known that Merri-Lee Marvil is a celebrity, and she knows what that means. It means flashing lights and faked smiles, false perky voices and gossip circulating at the speed of sound. She's thankful that she's just the host of a talk show, something that comes naturally, and involves more dishing the gossip than receiving it. Sometimes the things she talks about are actually serious, not about how who broke up with who, or who cheated on who, because otherwise her hair would be in clumps on her carpet and she'd snap her vocal cords.
She knows all of one person who doesn't know what celebrity means, and that's her daughter.
Dylan crawls into bed, a teddy bear tucked under her arm as her mother turns on her favorite night light. It's a kaleidoscope of soft, blurry colors shifting back and forth, casting shadows on the wall, and her mother reads her a fairy tale.
"Mama," her daughter says, looking up at her when she finishes. "Fairy tales don't really exist, do they?"
She almost chokes and wonders when her daughter became disillusioned. "Of course they do."
And then she almost starts crying when Dylan grins and nods. "I knew it. They said fairy tales are lies, but you wouldn't lie." She hugs her mother before falling back onto the bed, her eyelids fluttering shut, and Merri-Lee can't help but feel shaken.
She loves her daughter more than anything else in the world, but unfortunately, like all people, Dylan grows up. Somewhere along the line, she swaps teddy bears for makeup and friendship necklaces for pearls, and one day, she comes home complaining that someone didn't know who her mother was.
It's with each passing day that Merri-Lee grows more bitter toward the world, and somewhere along the line, she stops loving her daughter. She can't love a creature who sees Hollywood as some sort of paradise—she's walking straight into Hell.
One day, she receives a message in the voicemail and assumes it's from a reporter. She deletes it.
The next day, another message comes from the same person. It's titled your daughter's autopsy.
She stands with shaking hands under her umbrella at her daughter's funeral. Her daughter. Revulsion worms its way down her throat and comes back up in a puddle of vomit as everyone listens to the preacher's monotonous speech about how much everyone's going to miss Dylan.
Why didn't I see the signs? she asks herself once she's back in her apartment, a sob hitching in her throat. She flings open the door of Dylan's bedroom and finds nothing but size zero jeans and a photo of a smiling girl with arms and legs as thin as sticks.
This is a girl who's grown up, she thinks, and she collapses onto the bed and cries.