The app advertised itself as a video-sharing platform that gave users an opportunity to tell their stories, like a virtual diary. Extremely community driven, Joan hoped it would give Stella a place to express herself as well as make friends in a safe environment, because Golden Rule was like Big Brother on steroids.

All facets were heavily monitored. Users were required to show their faces in their videos, it had a strict zero-tolerance policy for hate speech and bullying, and users were warned nothing on the app was truly private. Followers had even been dubbed “voyeurs” to ratchet up the cult factor.

Stella had used her first thirty-minute allotment to make the obligatory welcome video, choosing the same username she always did—StreetcarBouvier. It had come from a joke she made one day when her English tutor showed her a cartoon as a fun way to examine parodies and transformative works. Fifteen minutes ago, she’d logged in and had received her very first message: an invitation to Golden Weekend.

“Indeed I do, Daddy-o,” Stella said, “which is why I never ask for anything—”

“You ask for things all the time,” Diane said.

“Yeah, but you never say yes, so those things don’t count.” Stella pretended to wave the “things” away with her hand. “Clean slate. This trip could be the one you finally say yes to and make all my newly formed dreams come true. It’s literally a trip of a lifetime. Think back to when you were a kid, decades and decades ago—didn’t you have a favorite celebrity you would’ve voluntarily given up some of your rights to hang out with?”

Diane’s frown miraculously softened; however, Lloyd continued to be an immovable iceberg, saying, “You didn’t even know who this Jewel girl was before two days ago.”

“That’s beside the point,” Stella said, also waving that away.

“If that’s beside the point, then what is the point?” Lloyd asked sharply.

Stella nearly flinched at her misstep. Damn. No one else could make her sweat like her dad. He kept her on her toes so much, they should’ve been permanently bruised by now. She was losing them. Her tiny battleship had barely been in the water ten minutes, and it already had a gaping hole in the bottom, water flooding in to kill her crew and her freedom-tinted dreams. But she refused to let her despair leak into her argument. Fists next to her thighs, she pressed them into her body, thinking and making and discarding ways to turn the conversation in her favor as fast as her brain would allow.