Page 32 of Beyond the Bright Lights

She raises a brow. “Maybe I’ll call you Brat instead.”

I close the distance between us and lean down into her personal space. She freezes, struggling with the decision to either step back or hold my heated stare.

“Do it. See what happens.”

She narrows her eyes, not even affected by my threat. Her defiance is suffocating, and I crave more.

“Fine . . . Mylan.”

“Good girl.”

The way her pupils dance tells me she liked my praise. She’d never admit that so instead, she rolls her eyes and attempts to hide a smile, but I caught it before she turned away from me.

Lana finds a paint bucket and turns it over to sit. She opens her box and cringes at the creepy dolls inside, quickly closing it and pushing it to the side. She points at it with disgust.

“That'll be the ‘for sale’ pile.”

Lana stands up and selects two more boxes, one for me and one for her. She kicks another paint bucket over to me, and I place it right next to hers. Sitting, I open my box’s flaps and find it full of old shoe boxes with loose pictures inside.

I pick up a stack and begin shuffling through them, as if I know any of the people in them. It’s still fascinating. Nowadays, photos are mainly digital. Growing up, my parents had few physical pictures of me—only ones that were professionally taken like headshots or photos from set.

I don’t even have pictures of my parents. Not that I’d want to see my abusive father’s face. But my mother . . . I hate to admit that sometimes I forget what she looks like. Entirely my fault since my visits with her are becoming few and far between.

The quality of the shoebox pictures isn’t the best, but it makes it all that more interesting. Every smiling face is genuine. These candid moments frozen in time. Real moments—a man and a woman posing beside a now-classic car, children wearing bathing suits, dripping head to toe as they run out of a lake, a family huddled together at a campsite.

A family.

Something I don’t have. Both of my parents were only children and their parents died before I was born.

“My grandparents like you.”

Lana’s voice pulls my attention away from the captured memories, and I set the stack of pictures down to grab another. I have to clear my throat to chase away that tightening feeling that comes when I let my depressing life rattle me.

“Didn’t your grandfather threaten to shoot me?”

Lana laughs. Her beautiful laugh—loud and melodic. Almost as if she never laughs and forgets the sound of it, only to be surprised when something amuses her.

“That’s how we greet people here in the south.”

“It’s definitely not but okay.”

She pulls a book from her box and opens it, pretending to read but I see her peeking over the top at me. “What was your deal back there, anyway? It was like you grew a whole ‘nother personality around them.”

I shrug while flipping through pictures. “I’m not used to being around grandparents. Or parents. Or family. I was out of my element. I wasn’t sure how to act or behave around them.”

“Isn’t the whole point of you being an actor is to . . . I don’t know, pretend?”

I tilt my head. “You do realize actors have lives separate from movie sets, right? I may play pretend on the big screen but I'm a real human being with real human emotions and real human trauma.”

Lana scrunches her nose, regretting her words. “You’re right. Sorry. That was a bitchy thing to say.”

She goes back to sorting through the books and magazines in her box.

I should be used to talking about myself. I do it all the time with interviews on television and the red carpet, but this is different. Personal. I only give the public a glimpse into my personal life, but with Lana, I want her to know everything.

“I didn’t have much of a family growing up. I was basically left to fend for myself. My manager was more of a parent to me than my own father, and my mother, she . . .” I shake my head. “Yeah, so, it’s strange to see a family happy together, interacting, offering love and support . . . to see what it could have been like for me. I don’t know. I’m messed up.”

Lana frowns. “I’m so sorry, Mylan. I had no idea.”

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