dahlia starling/capitol

Her name isn't Dahlia Starling.

It's not the one she was born with at least, it's just the one that they gave her when she signed her first contract. They thought that her birth name was a little too on the nose, that it didn't flow quite right, so they weaved it into something bigger and grander and that's what she became.

Dahlia had always thought herself pretty and she was, naturally so. There were all these tiny little imperfections that made her beautiful, features that she shared with her mother, things that linked them so uniquely that there was never any doubt whom she belonged to.

But all of those things had been erased over the years by her mother's own insecurities. The appointments had been as regular as the auditions she was dragged to when she was little. Read a part for a commercial, go get her chin shaved down when the call back never came. Second round of auditions for a stage play, eyelid surgery when she was cut off mid-monologue. Turned down for a photoshoot, gifted a nose job for her thirteenth birthday.

Every failure was taken personally by her mother, as if she had created something wretched when she gave birth to her daughter. There was always something to fix. "But I like how I look, mom" she'd argued, even as they mapped her face for the next thing, "Don't you?"

There'd been no answer though. Just a sad, pitying smile.

But Dahlia had never liked pity, not even back then.

She knew they didn't have the money for it anyway, that the casting directors could probably smell it on them, the desperation that comes with the fear of not knowing. So many things that you don't know when you live week to week, sometimes dinner was just a cup of rice with oats and honey mixed in to fill her stomach. Sometimes it was nothing.

An eviction notice got taped to their door every other month. One time it was so close that Dahlia got home from school to their furniture in the hallway and the neighbours picking through their things. She'd had to run down to the rental office in the basement and beg for just two more days. They didn't have the money but they would, please.

"I have used myself up for you!" her mother liked to scream at her on the days when Dahlia couldn't find a way to get out of bed, even at that age. When she should have been on the playground with the other kids, she was wrapped up in gauze or standing in a lineup, until told she was unworthy.

"I never asked you to," she always wanted to scream back, "I never asked to be born." She never did though, just got herself up and recited monologues until she knew them back to front or her voice gave out.

If Dahlia ever loved the idea of being on the screen, that flame died before she could even recognise it. There were other things she wanted. She loved the stars and the sway of the trees in the park near the apartment building when it was windy and clear at night. She liked the books other people left in the lobby to take and the smell of coffee from the roasters up the street.

She liked the stray cat that apartment hopped in the winter, so much so that she always left her window open a crack in case it wanted in when she wasn't home. She loved the relief of six hours at school, away from her mother and the pressure but as she got older, her mother let her spend less and less time there.

The world became greyer. Everything started taking more energy, she stopped going out on clear nights and the cat didn't come to visit anymore. She realised she was fourteen when the nurses sang her happy birthday before putting her under for work on her cheekbones.

Her mother registered her for homeschool and then never bought the textbooks she needed to learn from. During the day, when her mother was working and her face was still sore, when she was supposed to be reading a script for a small part in a soap opera, Dahlia stared at the stucco on the ceiling instead and found patterns in it.

She thought, fleetingly, I wish I could have just been born pretty.

Then she sat up.

It felt like there was a knife in her stomach, it felt like someone had just turned it.

She didn't write a note, when she left. Just packed her schoolbag with some clothes and left before her mother got home. Pulled a cap down low over her bruised face and used the money she'd taken from under her mother's mattress to get a room for a week in a an old house shared by four other families.

She spent months washing dishes in a hole in the wall at the sketchy end of style street. It took time but the swelling went down. It took more time but her room started to feel like a home. A lot of stuff was just things other people didn't want. She got an old chair from the end of a driveway, a broken frame she glued back together from an alley and then a coworker gave her flowers one day as a gift. She hung them upside down and when they were dry, she made small bouquets.

A year passed.

One afternoon as she was headed to work, a car stopped dead in the street beside her and the window rolled down.

An agent Dahlia had crossed paths with a few times with her mom in the past leaned out the window and looked her over in the same open fashion a wolf stares down a sheep. There was no recognition in her eyes.

Dahlia stared back at her, unflinching.

"Hey kid, ever wanted to be in the movies?"

No.

But she was sixteen years old. She didn't want to wash dishes either. She didn't want to wake up to an eviction notice on her door one day or her things out in the hall, being picked over like carrion.

She wanted a home that was all hers. She wanted a library of things to read. She wanted a cat to come home to and a door that locked and food overflowing in her cupboards.

The agent pushed the car door open and beckoned from within, acrylic nails sharpened and painted into long, glittering coffins.

Three months later her first magazine shoot hit the counters. By the end of that week her agent was already booking her for work six months in advance.

But she'd been trained all her life for this. She gave demure little smiles, blue kisses and waved, walked lightly and laughed delicately in public with a hand over her mouth to hide her teeth. Dahlia thanked her fans at every opportunity. They started calling her The Capitol's Darling and so she became theirs, a doll on their shelves with arms that bent and a little button on her shoulder blade to make her talk.

They wanted her to sound like old money and how could anyone know that the very last Starling had passed on earlier that year? Nobody questioned it, if they did then her managers dealt with it. They forged a birth certificate eventually, deposited assets in her account that felt like loose change to them but was a lifetime of fortune for her.

She thought about wiring some of it to her mother.

Then she'd felt the faded surgeon's scar on the underside of her jaw and didn't think of it again. She couldn't recognise the girl in the mirror anymore. It was ironic really, that she'd finally become the embodiment of what her mother wanted in a daughter but had to become a stranger to do it.

For a long while, Dahlia wondered when she was going to show up on her doorstep. It never felt like an if, it was always when. She used to dream about it, what she would say to her mother when she saw her again, if she would forgive her or not, if she even could.

Mom, it's not what you think it all is. It's nice in the sun but when it sets, everything's so much darker. Mom, there's things I've done now that help me understand your pain better. Mom, I miss you. Mom, I hate you.

But time passed and she never came. Even after the ten page spread a magazine did on Starling mansion.

A few years passed and Dahlia stopped thinking of her. Then one day, she was walking down style street, this time arm in arm with another actress.

There was her mother, walking the opposite way. Dahlia saw her first.

She felt the knife in her stomach, twisting slowly.

Their eyes met, briefly, then her mother's gaze slid away again in disinterest. There was no spark of knowing, no break in her stride, no turn of her head, no tearful embrace.

Her mother couldn't recognise her.



Star.

That's what her name was, what her mother had called her.

"Because you're going to be one."