“I spent the majority of my teenage years alone on a film set, so don’t tell me what I’ve wanted for,” I say, trying to be calm but hearing something in my tone that I can’t control. Fighting with her is like muscle memory. The smallest thing used to set us off and we would spar back and forth, neither of us really caring what the other one said until suddenly we did. We say a lot of stuff that means nothing, but it’s like a coin-pusher game in an arcade, each insult edging us a little closer to the edge until all hell breaks loose.

“If you have something to say, then just say it,” my mom says, narrowing her eyes at me, but I look away, ignoring the adrenaline that is now coursing through my body. She shakes her head. “You had everything.”

“And I would still swap places with you in a heartbeat,” I say, and then we both realize what I’ve said, how small her life is because she had to accommodate mine, and how much more she would have given up for even one-tenth of what I have.

“You’ve always been selfish, Grace. It’s nice to see you haven’t changed,” she says.

“You know, I don’t expect you to give me any special treatment, but I thought you could at least pretend to like me,” I say quietly. “I already said I would apologize.”

We sit there for a few moments before she stands up. I think she’s going to leave but she starts to speak again with her hand on the door, her gaze unflinching.

“Do you want to know the truth, Grace?”

I shrug, because she’s going to enlighten me either way.

“I don’t think you’re a good person for your sister to be around right now.”

And there it is. Can you hear it? That’s the sound of coins clattering into the gutter. I stand up, suddenly needing to be anywhere on earth but here.

“Gosh, I have no idea how that could have happened,” I say as I drop the Polaroid I’m holding onto the bed. The photo was taken at Disneyland when I was twelve, just before our lives were transformed. My dad and I are grinning on either side of a life-size Pluto. My sister is holding my dad’s hand, shyly peeking around him to squint into the camera. My mom is on the other side of me, her arm around my shoulders and a pair of sequined Mickey Mouse ears on her head. I wonder now whether her dislike for me crept up on her so slowly that she couldn’t see it happen or whether it happened all at once, like an earthquake.

“You know, you never asked me why I came back,” I say, and then I push past her, walking out of my bedroom, out the front door of the pink house, down the porch steps, until once again I am under the endless blue sky, racing past miles and miles of stucco bungalows flanked by 4x4s on one side and rippling American flags on the other.

CHAPTER FIVE

When I was thirteen, a casting director came to my school in London to find an unknown actress for a trilogy about a trio of teen assassins at an international spy school. We all put our names down to audition for the part, and the other girls giggled and rehearsed all morning, arguing over who deserved to be in the film the most. I ignored them, and the casting director’s appraising eye, instead staring down at a well-worn copy of The Catcher in the Rye that I carried around because I thought it made me seem complicated. I had long, glossy cinnamon-colored hair, one blue eye and one green, and dimples, all of which meant I was already popular so I could afford to be pretentious. Dimples are the kind of thing that matter in a state school in London, and everywhere else, it turns out.

For the first thirteen years of my life, our basement apartment in Islington was filled with my parents’ friends, the only obvious grounds for an invitation being that my mom found the person interesting in some small way. The adults drank a lot and had loud, unruly debates about everything from Princess Diana to Marxism, and although my dad was engaging enough in a hardworking, salt-of-the-earth kind of way, even then I understood that mom was the reason people kept coming back. She could be searingly funny, due to a combination of her razor-sharp perceptions and occasional callousness, and she was also beautiful, with thick auburn hair and eyes the color of a swimming pool under a thin layer of ice.

As I got older, people would say I was her doppelg?nger, and I knew they said it because I sort of looked like her, but mostly because I worked hard at it, copying the way she laughed, the arch tone of her voice, so that people would know not only that we were the same, but also that we were better than everyone else. When my sister was born, I was surprised to find that even though it didn’t seem like she should be a threat to me, pale and solemn as she was, it didn’t stop my mother from loving her more. It turned out they’d been trying for another baby for a while, and Esme was the grand prize.

When the lunchtime audition came around, I stood on the stage in our main hall next to the other girls, embarrassed by my sameness and disguising it as boredom. The other girls were bouncing on their toes, excitement distorting their voices when they said their lines as they tried not to laugh at their friends who were pulling faces and waving at them manically from the seats.

When it was my turn, I completely blanked. Of course I hadn’t rehearsed anything, had just expected to deliver it all seamlessly and walk off, maybe stick my middle finger up to make the other girls laugh. I stood onstage, trying not to piss myself because I knew that even I would never live that down, and I realized that I had never wanted anything as much as I wanted this, and the futility of realizing it at exactly the moment I was ensuring it would never happen made me burst into tears. Everyone around me froze, because I was too old to be crying that way, so shamelessly. When I finally managed to get the line out, it was through heavy, juddering sobs and barely intelligible. That same night, the producers called my parents to ask if I could be flown out to LA to screen-test. The way my parents looked at me changed from that moment on, and, for the first time since my sister was born, I figured out how to hold on to their attention.

Looking back, I feel ashamed of how much I wanted it all.

CHAPTER SIX

When Disney offered me a lifetime pass for shooting a movie with them, I didn’t imagine I’d use it even once, let alone once a week for the entire year I’ve been back in Anaheim. Every week, however, I leave my parents’ house in the morning and walk to the resort hotel we stayed in when we first visited California, before we ever imagined we’d be moving here. Even though I know it’s weird, sometimes just being somewhere so entirely engineered to make you believe in something makes me feel better. It would be embarrassingly reductive to say it reminds me of a simpler time, so let’s just say I go there for the buffet and the Mickey Mouse waffles.

Disneyland is also the only place I can get away with wearing pajamas and a pair of Converse at eleven a.m. on a Thursday, and, after being seated at a small table near the kitchen of the Storytellers Café, I join the line for the buffet. I fill my plate with the usual: three Mickey Mouse waffles, two pieces of green melon and a cup of black coffee that I already know will taste so ashy I’ll actually look for a cigarette butt floating in it. I sit back down at the polished table and watch the kids tripping on maple syrup around me. They’re standing on chairs and howling or they’re barreling through the gaps between the tables, knocking glasses and milk jugs as they weave, physically vibrating with adrenaline. When I watch them I can almost remember what it was like to know I was happy at the exact moment I felt it, as opposed to only after the moment has passed.

I’ve eaten two of my waffles when Sleeping Beauty walks into the restaurant and, after pausing at the entrance to scan the room, sits down in the chair opposite me. I’m surprised because I have been coming here for a year, always wearing my sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled over my bleached hair, and, until today, nobody has either recognized or wanted to talk to me.

“Are you okay, honey?” Sleeping Beauty asks in a high voice. She has a hint of a southern accent, and I try not to stare at the cakey foundation caught in the corners of her mouth.

“I’m fine, thank you.” I smile at her politely and then turn back to my waffles, hoping she’ll move on to another table. There is a prepubescent boy at the table next to us gazing intently at her.

“Wow, I didn’t realize you were British,” she says, blinking heavily under the weight of her false eyelashes. “I’ve seen you in here before. I like your movies.”

“Oh. Thanks. I like your . . . movie too,” I say, unsure of what the Disneyland rules are for adults, whether I might offend her if I don’t play along.

“Oh, you’re sweet for lying,” she says, and I wonder if that’s something you start to care about when you do her job. My last movie was a biopic about a sex worker who murdered seven of her former clients, and I think I would still experience a visceral reaction if someone criticized her right now. It always surprises me how willing we are to forgive someone once we think we understand them.

“If my only friends were a bunch of vermin and three senile bitches, then I’d kill the person who bothered to wake me up,” Sleeping Beauty says as she adjusts her wig slightly. Her hair is dark underneath the synthetic spun gold.

“It’s itchy,” she tells me. “So do you want a photo?”