I can elude most family functions, like the billion gender reveal parties thrown by my two older siblings, and pregnancy reveal parties, and soon enough it’ll be ovulation day parties—but nobody tells Grandma they’re not showing up for Christmas and lives to tell the tale. She will not be deprived of her yearly opportunity to lament, for a week straight, what a disappointment we are, and we must soldier through if we are to inherit anything. Like ten million dollars, or her collection of blood vials harvested from headliners of the ’98 Warped Tour.

If she’s disappointed in me now, when she thinks I’m flush with Instagram sponsor cash and relaxing in my beach bungalow, I shudder to think what she’d say if she knew the truth.

I’m especially dreading seeing my dad. He and I got into a fight over FaceTime when I said I wasn’t visiting him and Mom in Los Angeles for Thanksgiving. Truthfully, I couldn’t afford the plane ticket, and my car wouldn’t survive the drive from Colorado. But I couldn’t tell him that, because money talk is a dangerous thread to pull, and I’m too busy trying to look like I’m just as prosperous as my siblings. So I had to lie about having other plans.

“Your mom will be devastated,” he’d said.

And then he’d corrected himself. “Your mum will be devastated.”

(Too many years of living in America has sanded down the edges of his British accent. All of his British friends have been poking fun at him. “Listen, Patrick. Listen to how he says the word blueberry.”)

My parents were firm about giving us a normal upbringing—public school, making Kaia and me share a bedroom. We all had chores, we all had to get jobs when we were teenagers to buy our own cars, et cetera. Dad’s a photographer who earns a modest living, and he and Mom have been together since he took her picture for a magazine spread when she was twenty and he was twenty-four. She had been an actor in her teens but didn’t love the job. So she tried ballet, but it was too hard on her joints. She didn’t discover her true passion, which is cooking, until she was fifty and finished raising all her kids. Now she writes cookbooks and hosts a holiday baking show on Netflix, which tapes in the summer. She does some voice-over work for a weird two a.m. show on Adult Swim, too.

While I was growing up, they wouldn’t take any money from Grandma and Grandpa Watson. It was drilled into us kids ever since we were embryos that we’d be expected to forge our own paths as well. My brother and sisters have risen to the challenge, each famous for their achievements. I’m famous for being famous, for being related to famous people. And for my failures.

My older sister Athena is a commercial model who’s worked her way up from Proactiv to Burberry. She doles out lukewarm fashion takes for E! during red carpet season, taking care to mention L’Oréal and bareMinerals because both companies contractually own her soul. She’s got a sheet of shoulder-length white-blond hair, skin like a vampire, and wears pastels in solid colors, never patterns. She graces covers of parenting magazines with her latest (and therefore most favorite) child in her lap, the baby dressed like a Puritan. Athena has cultivated this soft-spoken, I-only-use-organic-oat-diapers-for-my-babies environmentally responsible persona that is patently false, with a loud, stupid husband who makes sure, everywhere he goes, that everyone knows he’s married to Athena Hughes. I called her Ivanka Lite at her rehearsal dinner, and she had my car towed.