amelia wilde. capitol.

My first word was "aesthetic".

Most kids learn to point out their parents, identify their body parts, maybe motion towards a family pet. The usual firsts. I learned colours and shades, shapes and feelings, quickly realising as a young girl that being raised by Mortimer Wilde is not a normal upbringing - even in the Capitol.

And I didn't have a care in the world. Most children found my home scary, a mountainside castle painted all black that looked straight out of a frightening movie. But I didn't find it scary at all. I thought it was charming. My father told me from an early age that if you're going to decide on an aesthetic you have to be committed to it, and committed he was - so committed I was.

My second word was "pink" and my third, "princess".

Doe-eyed girl, the daughter of the most beautiful woman in the world and a genius. I loved pink, so pink I became. Princess in her tower bedroom up on the castle in the mountainside, I never felt trapped there. I was free to be myself and go about the world authentically, as long as I was proud and unashamed to like what I liked and be who I was to be. Not many friends but that didn't matter - I got lonely hardly ever, I suppose. But looking back my life without Grimsby was the most awfully lonely existence. I just didn't know it then.

We didn't get off to the best start, Grimsby and I. Fourteen and so thrilled to meet him I didn't sleep a wink the night before. I only have Omen, you see, and we are so different that sometimes I forget we are siblings. Such a big house, hardly any friends my age, I had always wanted an older brother. Not than an Avox is a sibling, but I so desperately wanted another brother that I willed away any notion of him being a full-time servant. You see, my soul wasn't made to be a big sister. At least I don't think, anyway. I am too much. Always too much, and in a coffee-fueled bout of excitement and glee I went to hug Grimsby and thought nothing of it.

He shoved me away and I sobbed for two weeks.

But don't worry! We're the best of friends now, me and Grimsby. I know that Pa doesn't particularly care for our friendship but he doesn't say anything, not to me at least. Things got much better when Grimsby found me on the windowsill with a picture of Ma in my hands. She was the most beautiful woman in the world, I'm sure of it. I don't remember her but I like to think she was kind and good, Pa doesn't speak much of her. I do remember Omen's mother scowling at me when I called her Mom, told me to go look at some photos instead. They never usually make me cry, but this day I was feeling particularly dreadful.

He didn't scowl at me that day, didn't shove me away. He just stood there, and I got to telling him all about my Mom even though I was terribly embarrassed and sad and upset about the whole wide universe. I find that talking about her makes her more real, even if she is just a dream in my head, just sheets of film Pa took long ago that I play on repeat in my bedroom. And that day it felt like she was there, and Grimsby smiled at me a little, and I knew everything was going to be okay.

And oh boy, it was! We talk all the time now. I sneak him ice cream, he loves strawberry just like I do! And I learned a few tricks. We've got signals for hungry and sad and tired, happy and lovely and home. Movie and work and Pa, cats and dessert and laundry.

He brought home a cat once, we kept it hidden away until Pa found out. I tried to tell Pa it was mine but he saw right through me, transparent girl. The cat was gone next morning and Grimsby was devastated so I went to the shops after school and bought the fluffiest, softest plush cat I could find and put a pink bow on her.

"It's not the same, I know," I said with a smile, thinking of my mother and my photographs, "but I hope you like it anyway."

And then I fluttered away, spinning in a pink dress down the hall from his quarters and thinking me a terribly good friend.

I didn't want to be an actress at first. Pa was always so obsessed with cameras and the way things looked on screen. Even I, to a point. I was free to be myself, but I also had to make sure who I was on the inside matched the outside. Back then I was just Amelia Wilde, pink girl in her dark tower. But then I found Ma's footage tucked away in the attic and drank up every character she ever played.

And I wept, because there she was. A million versions of the woman who looked like my mother. A million different people, all with the same face and the same person underneath it all. And I couldn't even tell you which one she was most like.

After that I found Grimsby and we ate cheesecake until I felt sick, mushing it up for him with a fork on china plates I got for my seventeenth birthday.

I was furious at the world, at my father, and at my mother most of all for not allowing me to know her. The real her. Grimsby and I spoke, my words a great deal more than his, about how death wasn't her fault. It wasn't anyone's, really. That she couldn't have known she wouldn't live long enough to imprint a memory of her in my brain. It was logical, but I'm much more of a storyteller. There's no room for reason when my emotions get the better of me.

Eventually I understood why she decided to act. Or at least I think I understand. In Mortimer Wilde's world, sometimes you are who you are and are only allowed to be that. But on a stage I can lose myself for a little while. I can be me, but I can also be a hundred other people. I am given permission to try them all on for size, feel their emotions and experience their lives and play make-believe with who they were before the first scene and who they are after the curtain drops.

I'd been fabricating stories for eighteen years when it came to who my mother truly was. How hard could it be pretending to be other people myself?

I left Amelia Wilde in the tower in the castle on the cliff and became Lola Wilde for a while.

The more I acted, the more joy I found in it. Lola Wilde was an escape, and as I returned home to Amelia I wondered if my mother felt trapped in this house, the very same one I had felt so free in? If she felt like Grimsby without the ability to really, truly speak. It's different with Pa and I, because I'm allowed to speak my mind even if he pays it none of his own. Because I'm his daughter. His first born. I'm all he has left with Ma, and I think her death pains him a lot more than he lets on - even after all of these years.

But I save my grief for the screen. It's my outlet. I wonder what Pa's is, throwing himself into his work and his art. I worry about him, too. Worry about his grief. His rage. His joy and his heartache. The more I was required to show on screen, the easier I found it opening up to Grimsby. But Pa, he's just as dismissive as the day Grimsby shoved me away from an embrace.

To tell you a secret, I'm just as worried about Pa as I am about Grimsby. It's why I'm twenty-two and refuse to move out of home, despite my colleagues thinking me daft for it. I worry what they'll do to each-other without me there. What they'll do to themselves.

Grimsby's already tried to run away a handful of times and it breaks me open when he does. I don't understand why he'd want to leave me, but maybe one day he'll tell me. We're different, I know that, but I also feel like we're kindred spirits. He's Pa's, not mine, even though I've asked to sign him over every birthday since I've turned eighteen and still Pa won't budge. If I leave, Grimsby has to stay. So I stay, for him. For Pa. For me, too. I love them both, far too much to leave them. I won't go like my Ma did. I simply refuse to allow death to take me.

Death owes me one anyway. And I think, just quietly, death is far too scared to enter this house. I would be too, if I saw it from the outside looking in.

Maybe it's why Grimsby keeps running away.

Or maybe it's why he always comes back.