Free My Double Life by Janette Rallison

sunglasses anytime you’re out. Second, pictures vary, even taken of the same person at the same event. Kari’s friends would just assume the picture was a little off. Third, the big magazines have photo shoots for their covers, and tabloids usually run pictures of celebrities who do something interesting—so don’t shave your head, lose or gain a lot of weight, get divorced, or have another celebrity’s baby. Do you think you can manage that while we’re out today?”
    I nodded.
    “If someone takes your picture, at worst it will end up on the Internet with the other hundreds of pictures people took of celebrities this week. Nothing to worry about.”
    I leaned back in my seat, trying to appear as at ease as Maren was.
    “I’ve hired a bodyguard,” she said as we neared the store. “Nikolay is waiting for us at the boutique. You needn’t worry about making small talk with him because his English is limited. Still, he has excellent references. He’s ex-KGB.”
    “The Russian secret police?”
    “Right.” She smiled like this was a good thing, but it only made me more nervous. I couldn’t shake images of some burly guy interrogating people in dimly lit rooms.
    When we pulled up, I recognized him right away. It would have been hard to miss the six-foot-three-inch guy in a gray suit who stood guarding a parking spot for us. The car stopped, and he opened the door for me. He didn’t smile, just scanned the street as I got out. Then he followed Maren and me inside, stood against one wall, and scrutinized the store.
    It was a shop that Kari didn’t usually frequent, so the staff didn’t know her. As we walked toward the clothes, Maren whispered, “Stand up straight, shoulders back, and show a little superstar attitude.”
    Superstar attitude , I told myself. I’m not Alexia. I’m Kari Kingsley. I sparkle when I’m onstage. The salesclerk, a woman toting more jewelry on one arm than I’d ever worn on my entire body, smiled and told me what a fan she was then brought over clothes for my consideration.
    I did okay being Kari. All right, I admit that I gasped the first time the salesclerk handed me a shirt and I saw the price tag dangling from the sleeve. For two hundred and fifty dollars, Tommy Hilfiger himself had better come to my house and iron it. But after that, I stopped gaping at the price tags and pretended it was normal to try on a pair of eight-hundred-dollar shoes.
    I put on things that I never would have tried back home. They were too bright, too flashy, and yet when I looked in the mirror they worked. I saw Kari’s body and not my own. I stared at myself, turning side to side, while the clerks hovered by the dressing room telling me how chic and beautiful I looked. I did feel beautiful—and not the sort of beautiful your mother tells you that you are when she’s cheering you up. I felt powerfully beautiful, like I could walk out the door, swish my hair around, and the world would give me whatever I wanted.
    This was Kari’s normal life—this attention, this pampering. And I could have had it all along if I’d grown up as Alex Kingsley’s daughter.
    It was a thought I hadn’t expected to have, not with such resentful force anyway, but it wouldn’t leave, and seemed to get stronger every time I posed in front of the mirror.
    I could have lived here in California, and no one would have ever sneered at me because I was poor. I would have grown up with Kari, had famous friends, been given all sorts of things—who knows, maybe I would have been a rock star too.
    The feeling grew and swelled until I didn’t want to play this charade just to get to know Kari, meet my father, and then go back to West Virginia. I wanted to know what it would feel like to live a Beverly Hills life. Maybe it wasn’t too late to have it. Maybe this person in the mirror with a thousand-dollar outfit hugging my figure was the real me.
    As soon as this idea came to me, I remembered Abuela’s instructions not to change