My Parents Raised My Twin Rich and Me Poor for the Cameras

I stood at the restaurant's back door, staring at my phone, my fingers going cold bit by bit.

Prism was an invite-only streaming platform.

Its viewers were rich people who liked to treat other people's lives as entertainment.

And I, of all people, had been the platform's number-one show for six straight years.

In the replay, twelve-year-old me walked into that basement for the first time.

Grant told me he and Rachel had divorced, and his investments had gone under.

From that day on, he started drinking and gambling.

I was just a kid, but I sneaked out to work under the table, all to pay off his debts.

The camera cut away. Rachel was showing Lily her new bedroom.

A pink bed, a wall-to-wall closet, and a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the garden.

Between the two feeds ran a line of big text.

[The Twin Experiment, Day 1.]

So it was never a divorce.

Never a bankruptcy.

They just needed one child to live in a basement, and picked the other to live in a mansion.

It was so absurd I laughed, and laughed, until the tears came.

Lily sent two more messages.

[Too bad you're the one who didn't get picked, sis.]

[Watching you go hungry every day, I feel a little guilty living in this big house.]

She said she felt guilty, then added a smiley face to the second message.

"Emma!"

The manager poked his head out of the kitchen.

"Table seven's still waiting. You want the customers to wipe it down themselves?"

I shut off my phone and went back to bussing tables.

This was my job every day after school.

After Grant lost money gambling, he rarely gave me anything to live on.

When he occasionally won, he'd toss me twenty dollars and tell me to make it last.

I used to think he was at least trying.

Now I knew that on the nights he didn't come home, he was staying at the mansion in Alpine.

At ten that night, I got back to the basement.

There was no air conditioning.

The heat steamed the mildew smell out of the corners; it hit my nose the moment I walked in.

The living room light flickered twice and stayed dead.

I felt my way to the table in the dark and opened the stream again.

On the left side of the screen, a girl had just pushed the door open and stepped inside.

She wore the same restaurant uniform as me and carried the same old backpack.

I stopped.

The girl on the screen stopped too.

I slowly raised my head.

Next to the smoke detector glowed a red dot the size of a pinprick.

There was one in a gap on the bookshelf.

Another behind the kitchen vent.

In six years, I could count on one hand the days Grant actually spent with me.

The only things that had truly watched me eat, sleep, and face debt collectors at the door every day were those cameras.

On the right side of the stream, Rachel was fastening a diamond necklace around Lily's neck.

Grant stood behind them, smiling at the camera.

"When the experiment ends, we'll make up for everything we owe Emma."

I saved that clip.

Then I muted the sound and lowered my head, pretending not to see the red dot still blinking.

They thought I still knew nothing.