AllFreeNovel
Share Us
ZARA
“Idon’t understand why we’re looking for old clothing?” I’m searching through musty racks of clothing in a shop called Tatterstock. Apparently, it’s a place where you can drop off your old clothing and then someone else comes and pays a totally different person for them. Not all the clothing is in bad shape, but some of it has seen better days.
“Because we’re doing an 80s prom and I don’t sew. That means we need to find a dress that’s already made.” Ruby’s on the other side of the rack, lost to the ecstasy of sifting through old—excuse me, vintage—clothing. We’re searching through a surprisingly robust section of fancy dresses. The sheer quantity is astounding, considering how small this island is.
“A lot of the tourists come in and throw all kinds of weird parties here on the weekends. Half the time they leave this shit behind because they’re too lazy to take it back home with them.” Ruby holds up the tulle hem of a lime green dress.
“Is the idea to find the ugliest ones?” I frown down at a bright pink disaster in front of me.
“No, that's just Ruby’s natural inclination,” Miri says as she walks out of a dressing room wearing a black number. It’s strapless, with a bustier that looks more like underwear than a dress. The skirt poofs out around her in a fluff of lace and more tulle. It barely covers her butt. I have no idea if it’s 80s style or not, but she looks good in it.
Lena keeps sighing further down the row. Her sense of style is eclectic, but always polished and perfectly put together. I can’t imagine her wearing anything quite so ostentatious. Her long black hair is pulled up in a high ponytail today and she’s wearing dark-rimmed glasses that give her a studious look. It’s evident with one glance that she and Rhys are related, even if you didn't know they’re twins. They have the same color hair and eyes, and there’s something in the tilt of their chins that is similar.
Besides Ruby having some birds and insects talk with me, no one has mentioned Rhys to me. We’ve made no secret of our attraction, and he doesn’t stop himself from touching me whenever we’re together. I don’t know if the casual acceptance is just how they are, or if they don’t care.
“Can I ask another question?”
The three other women look at me, waiting for me to go on. “I’m a little confused about why we’d want to have a prom.” The last few weeks at Ezra’s, we’ve watched Carrie and then Prom Night. “I don’t want to sound negative, but why would anyone want to go to prom?”
Ruby starts laughing and the other two join in. “We really need to do a better job at explaining certain shit.”
“You’re totally right,” Miri says as she starts looking at more dresses, still trussed up in her black lace and leather outfit. “Those movies are meant to take what’s supposed to be an idealized concept of our youth, aka the special twinkling amazingness of prom, and turn it on its head. It’s the representation of that crazy bitch that lives within all of us that wants to rage out at the assholes who were mean to us in high school. That dickbag that made fun of us for having extra padding, or frizzy hair. The ass nuggets who said that we had DSL, dick sucking lips, while grabbing his insecure little pee-pee, because full lips must mean we want to suck cock, obviously.”
Ruby and Lena are both nodding. Ruby takes over when Miri stops to suck in a breath. “Or the twatwaffles who make fun of your too small clothes that you’ve outgrown, your junkie mom, and your mosquito bite tits that never really grew in but fuck them all because you don’t have to wear a bra if you don’t fucking want to.” Ruby looks at me with a grin and I high five her waiting hand.
“Anything to add, Lena?” I smile at her, but she shakes her head.
“Basically, there are always people who are mean assholes. The awful things people said about us, behind our backs, might be made of different words, but everyone has some story they could share, I’m sure. We were all lucky enough to have each other to get us through those shit times.” Lena looks chagrined after she says that last bit.
I get it. I didn’t have that net of safety surrounding me, and my barbs came from a different place, but that doesn’t really matter. The things my friends have gone through in life might be different than my misfortunes, but that doesn’t make them any less hurtful.
“Now you have us too.” She smiles at me. It’s sincere and caring and hits home that I really do have a family now.
Ruby takes a few dresses back to the dressing room as the rest of us keep searching. “Oh, I think I may have found something that could help with cutting Anthony out of our bonds.” Lena says to Miri but then she turns to look at me, her mouth pressed in a nervous grimace.
“What is it?”
“So, from what I’ve been reading, it looks like to oust him from our bonds,”—she points to herself and then Miri—“the entire Axis needs to come together as a group. Between the power that we’ll have as an Axis and the extra boost on Lughnasadh, we should be able to untie the knot his magic has around our bonds.”
“Why would that work?” Miri asks, leaning into the dresses so she can whisper over to us. We’re the only ones in the entire store, except for the clerk, but I get her reticence to talk about this too loudly. You never know if anyone is listening.
“Something about the magic of the group being more powerful than outside magic, even if we aren’t all bonded yet. We’re still more powerful as a whole. Plus, our bonds don’t want some leech clinging onto us. It’s not natural, and it’s not how the bond is meant to function. But, since we are all a part of the Axis, a piece of the whole, the hope is that our magic will supersede Anthony’s hold, and hopefully break it.”
Ruby comes out of the dressing room wearing the lime green atrocity, and it actually looks all kinds of amazing on her. It’s obvious she’s been listening, even though we’re trying to keep our voices down. “So, is everyone just onboard with forming the Axis now?”
She crosses her arms, and it almost pushes some cleavage up to the top of what I’ve been told is a sweetheart neckline, but not quite. It’s obvious from her words and posture that she’s not exactly onboard.
Lena gnaws on her lower lip as she turns toward Ruby. “First off, we’re not asking anyone else to form the bond. That’s not what this is about. And secondly, for me, and I think some of the others, we were always so afraid that the Axis changed our parents. That they’d been good people at one time and trying to form an Axis morphed them into these monsters.
“Hey, my mom wasn’t a monster.” Miri narrows her eyes.
“Exactly, because we were wrong,” Lena goes on. “I haven’t turned into some demon since Archer and I bonded. Neither have Miri or Davis. If anything, Davis has become fractionally nicer.”
“Hey,” Miri says again and then wobbles her head back and forth. “Fine, that one is justified.”
“What it has done is make our magic more powerful. I feel stronger and while I still have a ton to learn about using my magic, I can do things I’ve never dreamed of. If, in the end, we fully form the Axis and send Anthony and his asshole buddies back into Fae, then I’m on board.”
Miri shrugs, looking at Ruby apologetically. “Me too. Being bonded to Davis isn’t a bad thing.” A content smile lights up her face. “It’s actually really incredible.”
