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It started when she was fourteen. Her aunt and uncle?s Learjet 45 had gone missing somewhere off the Cayman Islands prompting a ten day search that ended with the first signs of wreckage. The disaster brought the Huntington family into the attention of the media, though in those first days, all eyes were on Jamie, her aunt and uncle?s only son. He was barely nineteen at the time, handsome, sad, and then suddenly an orphaned billionaire.

It wasn?t long before Lucy was photographed beside him -- at the funeral, holding hands, the slight young redhead next to the strapping blonde, the two teenagers destined to share one of the oldest fortunes in the nation?s history. Together, they captured the interest of the country, in photo after photo, him hunched around her, trying to shield her from the cameras like a protective older brother. Her, barrelling into womanhood in the public eye.

The tabloids couldn?t get enough. Lucy Huntington Mitford, but her family, and thus the media, called her Mitsy.

And then there was the website. Chronicling every picture of her ever taken. Gleefully archiving every humiliating frame. There were hundreds of them. BlubberMits -- photos of her in tears. UpSkirtMits -- photos of her getting out of cars. DrunkMits -- photos of her at parties. HideyMits -- photos of her trying to hide from the cameras. And of course, CharMits -- photos of her disastrous relationship with Charlie Chandler.

To Lucy, the cameras sounded like machine guns. All the shutters, rapidly firing. It was loud. And the flashes alone were assaults. She would step out of a dark club, and someone would be waiting for her, the flash, right in her eyes. Over time, she learned from her mistakes, and there was less and less to see. By the age of sixteen she never went outside without wearing makeup. By nineteen there was nothing lurid to be seen up her skirt. By twenty-one she had learned to wear sunglasses even at night. And by twenty-two she stopped acknowledging the cameras at all.

But she couldn?t hide from a telephoto lens. And she couldn?t hide in her apartment all the time. And when everything happened with Charlie, she couldn?t hide from the lies.

The only place she could hide was RhyDin.

October 2003 CET, Haverford Green Preparatory Academy

"Has no one ever explained this to you?" Jamie stared at his cousin across her dorm room, his blonde head wreathed with smoke, lounging back, his arms and legs stretched out as if the chair wasn't big enough to contain him. "Your mom never sat you down? Your dad?"

Lucy shook her head, her blue eyes still almost too big for her sixteen-year-old face, pinched with worry. She tugged at a corner of a decorative pillow, her legs tucked beneath her on the couch. "My mom always says that it's rude to talk about money."

Jamie laughed, his head tipping back. "Well, look. You're not going to run out of money." Lucy didn't look reassured. Jamie pushed out of the chair and bent to crush out his cigarette. "Go get me a calculator."

Lucy got to her feet, leading Jamie towards the wooden desk in the corner of her dorm room. Jamie brought his chair over, taking up a seat beside her. He grabbed one of her notebooks and opened it to a blank page, then handed Lucy a pen.

"Let's say you have $2,000 and you decide to invest it. Write that down." Jamie pointed at the blank sheet of paper, and Lucy dutifully wrote it down. "You want to be conservative, so you put it in a slow-growth fund. Let's make the numbers simple, and say you earn five percent annually." Jamie reached for the calculator and started tapping the keys for her. "After your first year, your investment has earned $100. Write that down." Lucy put the second figure beneath the first. "You add that $100 to your initial investment for the second year, and so for the second year, you earn another five percent. Now your investment has earned $105. As long as your rate of return is higher than inflation, which is typically around three percent, your money is earning money, right?"

Jamie looked at Lucy. Her big blue eyes were staring at the calculator, a little furrow of concentration above her nose. She didn't follow him. He tried a different tact.

"Okay -- your trust, assuming it's close to the same size as mine, is worth two billion dollars." He pointed to the sheet of paper. "So take that $2,000 investment and add six zeros to it." Lucy looked up at him a moment, then wrote it out: $2,000,000,000. Jamie nodded. "Now add six zeros to the first $100 investment return." Lucy wrote it down: $100,000,000. Then she looked up at Jamie. She still didn't get it.

"Assuming that very conservative rate of return, and even assuming that you never try to earn a higher rate of return, and not even accounting for the interest compounding, you earn $100 million dollars every year."

Lucy looked down at the paper. It was too large a number to even conceive. She looked at the zeros, then up at Jamie. "But -- but we live an expensive life right? I mean -- ?"

"Luce, you're an expensive girl, sure, but you're not that expensive." Jamie laughed at the thought. "Most people would need a couple lifetimes to spend that kind of money, and it's coming to you like clockwork every year."

"So -- ?"

"So, you never have to work if you don't want to. The money is never going to run out. You don't have to think about it if you don't want to. Ever."

Lucy's eyes widened and she looked up at him. The thought of it overwhelmed her. There was just so much of it. "Does everybody here -- ?"

"Your classmates?" At Lucy's nod, Jamie continued. "Well, everybody here is rich, Luce, but no. No one else is in the billionaire club like us."

Lucy nodded, carefully setting the pen back down on the sheet of paper, staring at the numbers again. Jamie reached out and set a hand on her shoulder, his voice softening. "Why are you getting upset?"

"I don't know -- it's just. It's so much. And I -- I haven't done anything -- to deserve it. It's not -- it's not normal to be like this, is it? Everyone must -- everyone knows -- and I -- I didn't do anything for it."

Jamie sighed softly, reaching to pull Lucy in for a hug. "You were born right. That's all." He bent his head, pressing his cheek to her soft red hair, rubbing her back gently. "Just don't think about it. Don't think about it."

CELEB-STREAM! September 21, 2009, Vol. 9, Issue 14

CHAR TO MITS: 'HIT THE GYM!'

After the shocking photos surfaced last week of Lucy Mitford looking considerably more plump than usual, sources are reporting that she and longtime boyfriend Charlie Chandler had a very public blowout at new SoHo hot spot, Ink, on Saturday night. The subject of the fight? Mitsy's weight.

Those who witnessed the fight, which reportedly left Mitsy in tears, say that Char accused her of "letting herself go" and claiming that she was "embarrassing" him. Ouch! Onlookers say Char refused to leave with Mitsy until she "fixed her face." Brutal!

Is this the end of CharMits? We here at CELEB-STREAM don't know who to side with. While Char was admittedly harsh, there's no doubt that Mitsy has been looking pretty pudgy recently. Tell us what you think will happen in our online poll at CELEB-STREAM.com!