The Brand Wanted Lucy in Front

Once the camera stopped recording, I let my breath rush out of me. The tension that had been holding my shoulders up finally loosened, and I turned to Lucy.

“I’m glad you helped,” I told her, looking down from the vanity.

Her grin spread wide. “You were good. You sounded like yourself.”

For the first time in what felt like forever, making a video had seemed like something we did together. We weren’t rival products under the direction of a worn-out manager. We were sisters, trying to make sense of a strange life and watching out for each other.

Our haircare video appeared online the following Tuesday. The response was kind, with viewers saying I seemed at ease and the product mention didn’t feel forced. People noticed that I sounded less like I was reading a sales pitch.

Rachel kept the numbers to herself. Still, I noticed the way she carried herself: no tight jaw, no hunched shoulders. Whatever the analytics showed, they must have been enough to calm the agency down.

We’d made it through the mess. For a little while, we found something that felt steady. I started to think we might be able to keep the channel without letting it take our family apart.

That hope lasted until Friday morning, when Mom asked Lucy and me to come to the dining room.

Rachel was seated at the oak table, a printed page beneath her clasped hands. She looked drained, caught between surprise and a nervousness so intense it seemed to hum around her.

“David from the agency called,” she began carefully. “A major retailer wants to sponsor a three-video series on our channel. It’s the biggest offer we’ve ever received, by a lot.”

Lucy glanced at me, and I looked back at her. Neither of us seemed ready to celebrate.

“Are they asking for both of us?” I said.

“They want us together,” Rachel answered. “They liked the way you two play off each other.” Her fingertips moved along the edge of the page. There was no excitement in her face. She looked cornered.

The old dread stirred in my stomach. “What aren’t you telling us, Mom?”

Rachel pushed the document in our direction. It was the campaign outline, with the retailer’s logo printed at the top. One payment from a company like that could make a serious dent in our second mortgage.

“They’ve paid attention to what people have been saying lately,” she said, keeping her eyes on the paper instead of us. “All those discussions about which one of you is better. Who comes across as more real.”

I drew the brief closer and scanned the section printed in bold beneath the campaign heading. The language seemed to jump at me from the page.

The plan was to play up our opposing reputations: me as controlled and organized, Lucy as easygoing and genuine. We were supposed to stage disagreements over the product, then let viewers vote to decide which of us had won.

I stopped there. My heartbeat thudded in my ears, loud enough to blur the rest of the room.

This wasn’t simply a pitch for a product. They wanted to turn the hurt we’d only just begun to mend into something people could watch for fun.

The dark lettering on the page seemed to press down on me. Tension between sisters. A manufactured contest. A poll to name the better one.

Somewhere, a team of marketers had studied our family as if we were figures on a screen. They’d noticed every awkward smile and every flicker of worry, then decided that two sisters struggling under public judgment would make a useful campaign.

They’d seen Lucy, who was twelve, and me, who was sixteen, living beneath a scoreboard we never asked for. Now they wanted to make the pressure part of the show.

I shoved the brief back across the tabletop. The paper whispered over the wood before stopping against Rachel’s hands.

“No,” I said. My voice came out flat, with none of the panic I’d expected. Disgust had emptied it.

Rachel kept her gaze lowered, fixed somewhere near my shirt. “Tessa, hear me out before you decide. It’s a three-month deal, not just one sponsored post. The money…” She paused, swallowing. “It could pay off the second mortgage. And we could put enough into both college accounts that they’d be safe, even if the channel had a bad year.”

I turned toward Lucy. She was still staring at the document as though it might move. Her face had gone pale, making the freckles across her nose stand out.

“They’re offering us money to fight, Mom,” I said. I waited until Rachel looked up. “They want strangers to choose which sister they like more. You know what that would do to us. You know what it could do to Lucy.”

“It’s a performance,” Rachel said, and the confident tone she used for work began to crumble. Under it, I heard the fear of an adult trying to keep everything from falling apart. “There would be a script, Tessa. You’d make the argument bigger for the camera, take the payment, and then stop when filming ended. We could still be ourselves.”

“But it is ourselves,” Lucy said softly.

Her small voice brought the room to a standstill.

She lifted her eyes from the contract and faced Mom. “When people wrote that they liked me better and said those awful things about Tessa, I felt horrible. Like I was taking something from her. And when Tessa was upset with me, I felt worse than I ever have.” Tears gathered in Lucy’s eyes, but she didn’t look away. “I won’t act like I’m fighting with my sister. Not for a camera, not for a brand, and not for a house.”