Rich Girl, Poor Girl

In the chiaroscuro of 1917 Hollywood, two mirror-images—one a soot-smudged drudge flayed by brutal fists, the other a porcelain debutante asphyxiating on ennui—collide beneath the cypress shadows of a seaside manor. Nora, her cheek still bearing the violet bruise of a stepfather’s belt, slips through a loose iron gate; Beatrice, languid in silk, yawns at a marble fountain where goldfish glide like coins never spent. A single glance: the same clavicle, the same storm-grey iris. Instead of terror, recognition blooms like nightshade. They barter destinies the way children swap marbles: a moth-eaten pinafore for a rope of pearls, a lifetime of hunger for a gilded cage. Yet the exchange is no pastoral masquerade; it is a blood transfusion gone septic. In the servants’ corridors Nora learns that privilege is merely violence wearing gloves, while Beatrice, dodging fists in a dockside hovel, discovers poverty’s ingenuity for cruelty. Each girl’s heartbeat becomes the metronome for the other’s doom, until the manor’s mirrors, once sympathetic, now shatter into accusations.