Chapter Two
Reality

I did have to admit that the worst part about my ‘escape’ to Maddie’s dorm was the fact that, eventually, I did have to leave and go back to my own mansion.  I suppose the fact that it was a mansion and not an ordinary house would make anyone jealous, but the wide halls and spacious rooms could only hide so much.  Penny and Phoebe were still always able to find me, no matter how many places I’d try to hide.  And there were countless places to hide in that house.  It was remarkable how much they actually paid attention.  When I was younger, I held out hope that I’d find a place where they’d eventually give up looking for me.  As I grew older, I have up that hope.

But still, since Mom knew where I was, I wasn’t exactly in a rush to get back home.  I felt like I could afford to simply hang out with my best friend, something I had, in fact, failed to do in quite a while, despite the fact that we saw each other nearly every day.  I felt rater antisocial about it – I complained about not having enough friends, but I didn’t spend nearly enough time with the one friend I did have.  She was the only one who never cared who my father was, at least not in the sense of his name.  I mean, at five and six, it wasn’t exactly like she knew who Nik Karalis was, although I’m positive her parents did.  But over the years, even they had become desensitized to the name.

Not completely, of course.  Papa had a way of causing just about any ‘commoner’, as my sisters like to call them, to completely freeze up and lose the ability to communicate properly.  Neither of them minded talking to Mom, since she always seemed more approachable.  Papa wasn’t really any different than she was, but the mere fact that he was Nik Karalis…well, I had seen the effects on people first hand, and it was sort of ridiculous.

Maddie generally didn’t react like normal people did, having grown up spending time with him on occasion.  To her, he was just her best friend’s father, and really nothing more.  Papa enjoyed Maddie’s company, since he claimed it was a breath of fresh air to have someone treat him normally rather than as a celebrity.

I doubted Maddie would have treated him like that regardless of when she met me.  Sure, there would be the precursory fright the first few meetings, but as she got used to him, she’d start treating him with respect rather than fear.  That’s just how Maddie was.

Penny and Phoebe liked to joke that it took a special sort of person to become friends with me, and while I knew they were talking in a nasty way, I couldn’t help but agree with them.  And Maddie was special in her own way.  Just not in the way my sisters were referring.

Take, for example, the way she knew that I didn’t want to go home right away, so she kept finding ways to keep me in the room with her.  At first it was just for homework purposes – she claimed she wanted to get a jump start on what we had to do in our shared classes.  She even sat down and forced me to start on our history report, pointing out places I could find resources.  Then it became just general girl talk.

Like I really needed an excuse to hang out with my best friend, but it was nice that she offered me some.

But since Mom had responded to m text that I could stay out as long as I wanted, I didn’t really need any.  I think she was just afraid that I was going to grow bored and decide to leave.  Like that was going to happen, knowing my sisters were terrorizing the household at the present moment.

At least this way, I could get my homework done without interruption.  I could get it done at home, but it was peppered with one of my sisters constantly banging on my door and wanting to talk to me.  It got hard to focus from time to time.

But I also knew that, as much as I wanted it, I couldn’t stay there forever.  Her roommate would return, and completely ruin the quality time we were spending together.  I liked to cut her off at the pass, and leave long before she would show up just to change into her evening wear.  Even then, she had a way of spoiling our fun.

“Seriously, one of these days, I’m going to get you to eat dinner with me as well,” she pouted as I began to pack up my things.

“Dinner’s an iffy subject,” I pointed out.  “Mom likes us all to be home so we can have a nice family meal.  It was the one thing she was always insistent on.  I hate to disappoint her.”

“Bah.  You haven’t had a proper family dinner in ages.”

“Papa can manage it with his busy schedule, so I sort of feel like I need to make an effort myself.  Besides, I’ve eaten in that place trying to pass as a cafeteria.  I think I’d rather take my chances at home, thank you very much.”

“Your loss,” she teased.  “Fine dining right there.”       

I just sort of shook my head at her.  While I wasn’t exactly what you called a picky eater, having grown up in a place of luxury sort of killed my taste buds for anything that wasn’t prepared in a fancy way.  The stuff they tended to serve in a college cafeteria wasn’t exactly up to my culinary standards.  But then again, I think that was the case for most people, actually.

Still, I had a strange sense of dread as I was walking back to my car.  It wasn’t the same sort of paranoid that I was feeling in class, but the sort of dread in which I knew Penny and Phoebe were somehow up to something.  It was sort of strange, but I seemed to have a second sense for when they were plotting.  I hated the feeling, but it saved me from a lot of pain and frustration in the past.

It kind of made me wonder if perhaps my paranoid feeling in either the classroom or walking to it was actually a sense of dread rather than the feeling of someone watching me.  It was possible, and it’d explain why I felt that feeling twice.  Perhaps whoever was watching over me felt my sense of dread, and came to investigate.

I didn’t think that was the case, since the two feelings were distinct and noticeable, but it made me feel better thinking that I had only felt the presence once rather than twice in one day.

My mind wandered from the feeling I had felt to what my sisters could be up to as I walked to my car.  I had actually only gotten my car before the semester started, although most of my peers had gotten theirs on their sixteenth birthdays, regardless if they actually had their license or not.  Penny and Phoebe were no different, sort of hinting at it as their birthdays grew closer.  And Papa didn’t disappoint. 

But I really had no desire to be given a car for my birthday.  It seemed sort of silly to be, given the fact that cars were so damn expensive.  I had felt pretty bad, despite the fact that I knew my family could afford it, when Papa gave me a whole new computer system for my sixteenth birthday.

And since I had a driver taking me back and forth to school and I didn’t actually go anywhere, it seemed pointless to have a car at that point.  I had my license – obtained the day after my birthday rather than the three months it took Penny and Phoebe both to get theirs – but it was just a formality at that point.

But heading off the college made me realize I needed a car.  College was my time of being independent, even if I still lived at home, and cutting myself off from relying too much on my father’s wealth.  So Papa and I went out and did our research, and found the best car for me.  I wanted a used car, but Papa insisted on a new car, because he ‘felt more comfortable’ knowing I had a car that no one else had driven.  And since he was buying the car for me (he insisted), I couldn’t argue with him.

I didn’t have the fanciest car, but it was cute, and fit in with the rest of the cars in the parking lot, which I was grateful for.  It was bad enough everyone knew my name.  I didn’t need them to be spotting me because of my car as well.

The drive home was blissfully spent paying more attention to the road and the drivers around me to think about anything else.  It wasn’t like I didn’t have time to allow my mind to wander, but my thoughts were constantly jarred by what was going on around me that I kept losing my train of thought, and would settle on different topics instead, like that report for History.  Sure, Maddie helped me, but was it enough help?

I still didn’t suspect anything too horrible from my sisters as I pulled in to my garage, parking next to the black sedan Papa rode around in.  He didn’t have an extensive collection of cars like most billionaires had, although he had a good number of cars simply because he had a somewhat large family and a use for having more than one car.  The most that were used were the black sedan, my car, and the minivan they had gotten to cart me and my sisters in when they were trying to act like an average family.  But it seemed everyone expects him to collect cars simply because he was rich.

He didn’t collect cars; he ran an electronics empire, so he tended to collect random and odd little gizmos and gadgets, which disappointed a lot of people, surprisingly.

I knew I was in trouble when I saw both Penny and Phoebe’s matching white convertibles parked in their usual spots.  I had sort of expected Penny to blow a gasket when Papa got Phoebe the exact same model of car that he had gotten her, merely because Phoebe requested it, but she was surprisingly noble about it.  And most likely seething on the inside.  Phoebe tended to be a bit of a copycat to my sister, even if she claimed she wanted to car because she was used to it.

Of course, the problem was that I didn’t know how much trouble my sisters were going to cause that day.

I walked into the house, resigned to my fate, expecting to see my sisters terrorizing the help like that normally did.  Instead, I walked onto what looked like a film set.

It was the last thing I expected to see in our house, but there were about a dozen men standing around, half with cameras hoisted on their shoulders trained at my sisters as they were sitting on the couch, chatting happily with Mom.  Well, if you could call it chatting.  They were clearly having an argument for the sake of the camera, and Mom looked a little like she wasn’t entirely sure what she should be doing.  She brightened upon seeing me, most likely with my jaw to the floor.  “Psyche!” she said, and I sort of wished she hadn’t.

All the cameramen swiveled to get a shot of me.  “What.  The.  Hell?” I demanded, throwing my hands to cover my face, which was usually the universe sign of ‘please don’t tape me’.  “What is all this?”

“Oh, my God, Psy!” Phoebe said to be excitedly.  “Isn’t this so awesome?  Penny and I have our own reality show now!”

“It’s Penelope, not Penny,” Penny sniffed.  Usually we’d be able to get away with calling her that, but apparently not in front of the cameras.  She hated the name, and just allowed us to call her that because we had been all our lives.  It wasn’t until she was a teenager that she deemed the name ‘too young’ for her.

Phoebe looked a little chastised.  “Sorry.  Penelope and I have our own reality show now!”

“Good for you.  Why the hell are they in our house?”

“I think you’re missing the point, Psyche dear,” Mom said, looking a little like a deer in headlights.  “Penelope and Phoebe have their own reality show.”

“I got that.  They want to be like Kim, Kourtney, and Khloe.  I’m not surprised.  I’m just surprised you’re not at your own houses.”

Phoebe flipped her long, straight blond hair over her shoulder rather elegantly, another effect for the camera.  It was, of course, bottle blond.  All three of us were born with stereotypical Greek brown hair, although I was the only one to inherit Mom’s natural waves.  Both Penny and Phoebe had stick straight hair that tended to make the other girls’ a little jealous.  “It’s not fun at our houses,” she insisted. 

Which, of course, I interpreted to mean that they wanted the added drama of annoying the hell out of me to make it to camera.

“Besides, the show’s being called Life with the Karalis Sisters.  Unfortunately, that includes you, Psyche.”

I glanced at Mom wildly.  “No one said anything about this to me.  Don’t I have to give permission to be a part of the show?”

“We already gave them permission for you,” Phoebe insisted.  “We didn’t think you’d have any objections.  I mean, come on, Psy!  Our very own reality show!”

Penny gave me a rather wicked smile which suggested that she did, in fact, know I would object to this.  Phoebe was fairly harmless – I knew that she had a hard time wrapping her mind around the fact that I didn’t quite think like they did – but Penny would be the sort of do this simply to get a rise out of me.

Mom stood in an attempt to save me.  “Come on. Psyche dear,” she said, still looking very dazed.  “Why don’t you come into the kitchen and get yourself a snack?”

“Snack?  It’s nearly dinnertime, Mom,” Penny said, still sneering.  “Don’t want to ruin that appetite of hers.  Or allow her to gain more weight.”

I glared at her as Mom lead me from the living room, shooing the cameramen following us from going into the kitchen.  “I need a private moment with my daughter, if you please.”

I was a little surprised that they backed off, but I guess they just assumed Mom was going to convince me to become a part of their stupid show. A reality show?  I didn’t exactly put it past Penny and Phoebe to actually sign up for one, since I knew they were envious of the Kardashians, but seriously?  I didn’t think it would actually happen sometime soon.

Mom shut the door on the scene in front of us, and the cook and our maids quickly went about acting like they weren’t eavesdropping.  Mom sagged into a chair at the table.  “I honestly don’t know what to do with them. Psyche.  I thought I raised them better than to show the world their ridiculous side.”

I sat beside her.  “This is Penny and Phebs we’re talking about Mom,” I chuckled slightly.  “They go out of their way to do just that.  The question is how much of this we’re going to allow into our daily lives.”

I could just see them insisting that a camera follow me around campus just to embarrass me even further.  I was doing a pretty good job remaining fairly invisible, but this was most assuredly going to blow my cover.

“I honestly don’t know, Psyche,” she said, lifting her head to look at me.  “They don’t cover reality shows in the mothering handbook.  Your father might be easier to talk to about this, to be honest.”

“Is Papa home?” I asked, surprised.

She nodded.  “He holed himself up in his study after he spotted the camera trucks.  He was the smart one.  I was too curious.”

At least this explained why she had called me between classes earlier.  I wonder how long this has been going on?  Probably all day, from the sounds of it.  I felt sort of bad for Mom having to deal with this the entire day.   It possibly could have been something she woke up to, even, despite the fact that both Penny and Phoebe were technically late sleepers.  Both of them could easily sleep until four in the afternoon thanks to getting in at seven in the morning, and tended to get mad whenever someone called them out for it.  After all, it was completely ‘normal’ for someone their age to sleep during the day.

Except it was more normal for people their age to have respectable jobs that had them working during those hours they were asleep.  But one thing my sisters were not was normal.

I felt sort of bad abandoning Mom in the kitchen to seek out Papa, but I think she understood.  It was rare to have my father home when I was nowadays, even when I end up spending all afternoon with Maddie to avoid seeing my sisters.  But that was the main reason I realized that this had been going on all day.  Papa was probably headed off to work when he spotted them, and decided to work from home today to avoid the press and the cameras, since I’m sure that’s what he initially thought they were.  He didn’t mind planned interviews, but when they ambushed him, he tended to get defensive.

I just hoped I wasn’t interrupting anything important.

When I was younger, Papa used to work from home quite a bit.  He wasn’t the sort of self-made billionaire who focused on his work and how much money he could bring in.  He worried about his family as well, especially since he was raised in a traditional middle-class Greek family where family was the most important thing ever.  He wanted to be around, but even when he was home, he was swamped with work.

There had been a few times in my youth where I did end up interrupting him because I wanted to spend some time with him.  Mom and our maids usually tried to stop me, but sometimes I was sneaky.  And as soon as he saw me in his office, he would immediately go into father mode regardless of the reason, kicking anyone else who was in there with him out, hanging up the phone, and canceling everything.

I’d like to think he’d do the same thing for Penny and Phoebe when they were younger, but they usually came to him only when they wanted money, so I think he stopped the practice after a while.

Today was really no different.  Just because I was legally an adult didn’t mean that I was any less his baby girl, and favorite daughter.  It seemed to me that he was yelling at someone on the phone – politely – when I poked my head in.

He looked a little surprised, and quickly muttered something to his employee before hanging up the phone.

It was always easy to see how a beautiful socialite princess like Mom could fall for someone like Papa, despite the differences in social class when they first met.  No even including the exotic flare he had simply for being born in Greece, Papa was still quite a handsome man.  He was only forty-six, but he certainly didn’t look his age.  In fact, I think he was still being named as one of People’s Most Sexiest Men or something, which was generally disturbing when thinking of your father.

None of that ever mattered to me.  Whenever I looked at Papa, I saw a kind and generous man who never hesitated to give you the shirt off his back regardless of your situation, a man who went out of his way to make time for me not matter the situation.  He smiled at me as he beckoned me into the room.

“Papa,” I said as I moved to take one of the seats in front of his desk.  When I was younger, I could get away with sitting in his lap, which I did frequently.  “What are we going to do about this?”

He looked confused for one brief moment.  “Ah, they’re still here, are they?”  He shook his head.

“You expected anything less, Papa?  They didn’t come here to film you and Mom.  They’re here because they want to world to see how much of a loser their baby sister is.”

“You’re not a loser, Psyche,” he said instantly, but I gave him a look.  “Your sisters don’t think that.”

“What hole have you been hiding under, Papa?” I said.  “You know very well that Penny and Phoebe don’t think kindly of me.  And the general public seems rather indifferent about me.  That’s why they want the show to be about all three of us rather than just the two of them.”

“Ah, right,” he said nodding.  “I was curious about that.  Normally they try to make everything about themselves.  I suppose a red flag should have been raised when they were trying to include you as well.”

“This is stupid, Papa.  Why are you allowing this?”

“Because they’re adults and they can make their own decisions, no matter how ridiculous it is.  Americans seem obsessed with seeing how the other half lives, and producers are looking for anyone who’ll be willing to lay their private lives out for everyone to see.  Your sisters have been laying in bare ever since they first saw a camera.  This doesn’t surprise me in the least.”

“So what are we going to do about it?  None of us want them here.”

“There’s not much I can do about it, koritsáki mou.  They’re under contract to be filmed wherever they are, and since this is technically their house as well, I have no say in the matter.”

“This isn’t their house, though!  For God’s sake, Papa, Penny is married!”  He gave me a rather dark look at the mention.  “Phoebe lives with her fiancé.  They haven’t lived here for almost a year.  They have their own houses and own help to bother!”

“Home is where you make it, Psyche.  To me, home is wherever your mother and you girls are.  To them, its apparently the same definition.”

“They couldn’t wait to get out.  The only reason they want to associate with this house is because you’re still offering them free money,” I grumbled.

He shrugged.  “Just because they don’t live here anymore doesn’t make them any less my daughters.  It’s the least I can do, after all.”

“Papa, they have money.  They just don’t want to spend their own.”

He shrugged again, and this time he didn’t have to say anything.  I knew he distanced himself from his oldest daughters a long time ago, and started associating giving them money as a sign of his love.  It wasn’t something he was going to stop now, even with them gone, because it made him feel like a good father to them somehow.

He was reserving his real love for the daughter who actually appreciated it.

I let out a sigh.  “Well, you might have come to terms with this nonsense, but I don’t want any part of it.”

“None at all?  You’ll be famous, koritsáki mou, and more of a household name.”

I glared at him.  “Seriously?  I’m trying to avoid that, and you know it.”

He grinned at me.  I think he liked the way I was proving that him naming me Psyche was a good choice.  To him, I was living up to my name.  “Okay,” he said.  “You don’t have to.”

I paused from my complaining in surprise.  “I don’t?” I asked, half expecting him to tell me I had no other choice in the matter.  Papa was sort of funny that way sometimes.

He shook his head at me, still grinning.  “You know you never have to do anything you don’t want to, koritsáki mou,” he said.  “I mean, within reason.  And this seems like a good enough reason to me, don’t you?”

I glanced at the door, thinking about what lay beyond it.  I was safe here, I knew – Papa would never allow cameras in his own private sanctuary – but I didn’t think he’d be able to get the rest of the house camera free at the moment.  “And how are you going to prevent them from filming me?”

“Well, I can’t prevent that as long as they’re hanging out here,” he admitted.  “But I can guarantee that you’ll be nothing  more than background.  I know people, Psyche; don’t forget that.”

How could I, when Papa was one of the most famous self-man men in America?  Karalis Electronics made so many electronic products that most people had them in their home without even realizing it.  Everyone knew the name of Nik Karalis.  The problem was that everyone also knew the names of his daughters thanks to my sisters’ antics.

“I’ll have a little chat with the producer,” he continued.  “This is my house, after all, and as far as I can tell, you have yet to sign a contract for this.  He’s actually required to not show anything he films of you until then.”

“Like that’s going to stop him,” I muttered.

“Oh trust me, once I’m through with him, he’ll have no other choice.”

It was always so weird to think of my father as a threatening man, although I’ve seen it on occasion for various reasons, because it didn’t suit the image I had created of him.  And he probably wouldn’t be like that if he had remained a part of the middle-class like the rest of his family, since he’d have no real need to threaten anyone beyond the safety of his wife and daughters.

Unfortunately, the little moment was ruined when Phoebe came bursting through the door.  She never bothered to knock, which was the reason I had learned to lock my doors at a very early age.  Which pissed her off something fierce, because she didn’t understand the concept of people not wanting to be around her.

“Daddy, don’t listen to her,” she insisted.  “She just doesn’t know what she’s going to be missing out on!”

Papa gave her a dark look.  Both Penny and Phoebe referred to our father as ‘Daddy’ still, most likely trying to remind him of the little girls he had attempted to mold into suitable young ladies.  I, on the other hand, had asked him once what fathers in his native land were called, and decided to start calling him that instead.

“Phoebe,” he said sternly.  “I will not have this sort of behavior in my house.  You did not ask for Psyche’s opinion on the matter, nor did you ask her permission to include her in your little scheme.  She has every right to be mad at you and Penelope right now.  Whatever you were planning as got to stop this very instant.”

She looked surprised, but not because of the way Papa was talking to her.  Where I was concerned, it was a usual occurrence, and one that both she and Penny took with a grain of salt.  We all knew I was the favorite, which did sometimes annoy the two of them, but they’ve come to accept the fact that Papa would defend me more than he would them.

“Seriously, Psy, this is going to be way fun,” she said to me.  “Stop being such a whinny baby.”

I crossed my arms.  “Since when has anything you’ve considered fun actually been fun for me?  We have different definitions of fun, remember?”

“Gawd, I know,” she whined slightly.  “You really need to get out more, Psy.  You have, like, zero social life, and that’s, like, so not healthy.  How can you prefer reading to partying?  Reading is, like, so boring!”

I rolled my eyes at her.  “Only to people like you, Phebs.  To people with a brain, it’s the most fun you can have.  Besides, I have a social life.”

“Yeah, going out once a year to hang with that social outcast you like to call ‘friend’,” she said, rolling her eyes as well.  “Gawd, get some real friends.”

“Psyche understands that it’s the quality of friendship, not the quantity, that matters,” Papa pointed out.  “And she’ll still within her right to refuse to do anything you or your sister thinks is good for her.  Would you not react the same way if she tried to force you to stay at home and read with her?”

She outright laughed at that.  Penny and Phoebe both have issues with entitlement that caused them to believe that they were better than everyone else.  While that produced an ego the size of the Marianas  Trench for Penny, it meant for Phoebe that she didn’t quite understand the people who had different interests than her.  “Like I would do that.”

“Exactly.  It’s not fair for Psyche that you’re trying to force her to do something she doesn’t care for when you wouldn’t do the same for her.  I’m sorry, Phoebe, but you’ll just have to do this show with Penelope, and not with Psyche.”

“But the show is supposed to be about the Karalis sisters.  It’s not much of a show without the third one.”

“Well, looking at it this way, Phebes; I won’t be around to bore up your show,” I said, leaning back in the chair.  “I don’t create drama, after all.”

“Because you’re about as entertaining as a brick.  Oh, excuse me; that was insulting to the brick.”

“Phoebe!” Papa said, standing.  While he wasn’t exactly a large man, he was fairly tall, and could appear intimidating if he really tried.  “If you’re just going to insult your sister, you might as well leave.  I will not have that sort of talk in my presence!”

Phoebe muttered something about ‘Daddy’s Little Princess’ in an unpleasant manner, but she was the sister who actually did what Papa told her when he got angry with her.  She slunk out of the office so that she could tell Penny the news, and I’m sure the two of them were going to get right to plotting how they could work around this little hiccup.

But knowing Papa, he was going to make it impossible for them to get their way.  “Are you going to do the same for Mom and yourself?” I asked, returning to our previous conversation as he settled back into his chair.

He shook his head.  “Your mother, certainly, if she wishes it, but I think that producers knows better than to mess with your old man,” he said, winking at me.  “This is my house and my rules, and if any of my family doesn’t wish to be filmed, than it’s in their right.  But I’m sure your mother won’t have a problem with it.”

I thought of the shell-shocked look she had when I came in, and the way she was eager to escape into the kitchen.  “I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” I said.

But still, I knew my life, at least until they got bored with their new little adventure, wasn’t going to be the same, not matter what Papa did for me.  A reality show!  Trust my sisters to find yet another way to embarrass themselves in front of millions. 

This new way was just more annoying, and harder to escape, than most of their plans, but I was determined to do just that.

Chapter One

Modern Day Cupid Chapter Two

Chapter Three