Chapter XIX. 2007
CHAPTER XIX
“What is that? What is that?” Camilla stared down at the wet clump of hair, shrieked, and slapped at her father’s hands as he turned her face away.
He’d been gentle with her, but he pinned her arms to her side, practically lifting her as he pulled her away.
This was not as he intended. He’d made a mistake in letting Camilla see her mother.
He would not let such a thing happen again.
“Camilla.” He gripped her chin and forced her eyes to his. The authority in his voice offered no room for compromise. “You have to calm down. You hear me?”
She whimpered. He loosened his hold on her face, but not by much.
“I know, baby. I know. I can’t imagine how scared you were.” He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at her eyes. “Oh, darlin’. There. Pretty as a picture. Don’t let this ruin your night. Your momma wouldn’t want that. Not in a million years.”
Camilla forced herself to nod through her panic and confusion.
There was no more time. Whatever her mother had been trying to tell her was forgotten.
She had to get back to the tree, and to do that, she had to get through the night without giving her father any reason to watch her closely.
A few more hours and Hawthorne Springs would go dark, tired from the revelry of the Ball, and she would go.
“That’s a good girl.” He offered her his arm. “Shall we?”
Together, they descended the stairs, and she let herself float beside him. Step after step that didn’t seem to belong to her. Her body an entity grown separate. Her father watching over her in the same way that glorified babysitter he’d hired watched over her mother.
David Robinson stood in the driveway beside her father’s new Mercedes GL 450, his white-gloved hand on the door as he grinned. He’d been assigned the honor of driving them to the Ball that night, and he was practically creaming his khakis over it.
Her father placed a hand on her back as he guided her into the car.
“Easy now. Watch your toes and your nose.” David practically fell over himself running to the other side to open the door for her father.
She pictured him tripping, his perfectly pressed khaki slacks befouled with dirt, and sorrow ripped through her.
It was the sort of thing she would tell Brianna and Noah, their shared laughter a momentary respite. But she was alone.
Her father settled himself before reaching beneath the seat to pull out a bottle of champagne and two glasses wrapped in towels. When he popped the cork, she winced.
“Drink this. It’ll make you feel better.” He handed her a glass and then filled his own before lifting it toward her. “I’m—we’re—so proud of the woman you’ve become, and even more proud of the woman you’re going to be.”
She clinked her glass against his and took a dainty sip, the bubbles burning in her throat as she swallowed.
Only once he buried himself in his phone did she down the rest of the glass, her head going light as the golden liquid settled in her empty stomach.
She could almost hear Brianna’s whispered laugh, and her heart twisted painfully.
She would have seen the irony of it all.
Her father happily drinking champagne with her immediately after witnessing something out of a horror movie.
The church shone like a beacon as David pulled into the parking lot—every light a sparkling reminder of the purity every girl participating in the Ball carried within her.
Already, there were mothers lined up at the front directing their professional photographers as their daughters posed in their white dresses, their mouths a perfect rictus of a smile.
But as her father climbed out, every head turned, and every eye narrowed as they waited to see what Pastor Burson’s daughter had chosen to wear.
She took her father’s hand as she stepped out, her dress trailing after her, and she saw the veiled hatred on their faces.
Their daughters were lovely, perfect flowers, but they were not the preacher’s daughter, and she drank down their disappointment like liquid fire.
She wanted to scream at them. To tell them they’d all been tricked.
She went among them silently. Her hands pressed against theirs as they dropped kisses on her cheeks, their barbed tongues offering up sighed compliments. The little girls surged around her, their hands patting at her dress, their eyes sparkling as they stared at her.
“You look like a princess,” one of them lisped, her tongue lodged in the space where she’d lost her two front teeth.
They did not know how she kept replaying the image of her mother.
That mass of hair working its way up her throat.
The sick plop it made when it fell into the basin.
That even as she smiled and posed and stood beside her father, she could think only of the tree and the Sisters.
Of what it would cost to save Brianna and her mother.
Another wave of fear clamped down on her.
Brianna. She had no way of knowing if Brianna had also gotten worse since she’d last seen her.
She scanned the crowd, looking for Noah, for anyone who might be able to tell her, but there were only the girls and their parents and the church leaders.
Several of the mothers had already begun the process of kissing their daughters goodbye and telling them to be on their best behavior during the ceremony.
She clenched her hands into fists. A few hours. She could get through it.
Inside the church, Camilla stood beside the other girls and then knelt at the altar as her father blessed each of them. As he spoke on the importance of the task set before them, and their fathers in turn, to protect their chastity until marriage.
Camilla heard none of it—her father’s voice a dull roar that did nothing to drown out her memory—but she rose and offered her hand when prompted, her eyes fluttering closed as her father slid the ring over her finger. The diamonds and platinum a lovely sort of prison.
The boning in her corset cut into her sides as she stood before the girls and their fathers and the church leaders like a flayed section of skin on display. Vivisected and held up for examination when she’d never asked for it. She smiled so she would not bare her teeth.
A final prayer, and the ceremony was over. The girls crowded together, their hands thrust outward as they examined each other’s rings. Even the smallest among them wore a tiny band with a sprinkling of diamonds, and she smiled shyly as the older girls oohed and aahed appropriately.
The fathers clapped each other on the back as they led the way out of the sanctuary and then toward the pavilion where a million fairy lights sparkled.
Jasmine and gardenia were mounded on tables heavy with charcuterie and roasted vegetables, and in the center of each, a cut crystal bowl filled with a pink punch Camilla knew was sweet enough to give her cavities.
Music drifted from invisible speakers, and the girls blushed as the younger, eligible church leaders stepped forward to offer their arms as they swept into the pavilion.
“I see you survived.” Grant appeared beside her as if emerging from the air.
She’d not seen him among the crowd earlier, but she’d been so intent on finding Noah, and she hadn’t imagined he would be there. He had no other reason to attend, so she supposed her father had made good on his intentions to bring him into church leadership.
He pointed at the ring on her finger. “That’s going to be hard to top.”
She stared down at her hand, wondering how it came to be that she no longer recognized it as her own.
“It’s Cartier.”
He chuckled as he guided her to the punch bowl. “I may not be up to date on all the latest women’s fashion, but I know Cartier when I see it.” He took one of the heavy glasses from the table, filled it with punch, and offered it to her. “To purity,” he said.
She knew it was rude, but she couldn’t bring herself to respond.
Instead, she lifted her glass and then drained it, the sickly sweet liquid coating her tongue like syrup.
She coughed against the sudden thickness in her throat, thinking of her mother.
The stretch of her skin around that matted lump of hair.
She swallowed against a building nausea.
He took the glass from her and refilled it as he pointed his chin toward the girls moving across the dance floor. “How many of them will be married before Christmas, you reckon?”
“Counting the ones still in middle school? At least six,” she said, and he chuckled.
He laughed, but she knew if the laws were different, there would be more weddings in Hawthorne Springs.
She surveyed the clusters of girls giggling behind their hands as they darted glances at the church leaders milling about the food.
She could almost see the collective visions dancing in their heads.
The bridal gown and veil. The flowers. It was what they were raised for.
What they were told to want from the time they were old enough to speak.
Several of the older girls were staring directly at her and Grant, not bothering to conceal their sneers. She wished she could pluck out their eyes, like grapes, and toss them in their drinks. Plop, plop, plop.
“Looks like we have an audience.” He leaned into her, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “They’re jealous. You’re the prettiest girl here.”
Even with everything that happened that afternoon, her entire body flushed, heat working its way up her chest. It was a betrayal she hadn’t known it was capable of. She gulped down more of the punch so he wouldn’t see how her hands shook.