AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter One : Family Above Everything
Marissa
“Benjamininvitedustothe park tonight.” Her warm breath brushed against my ear, and I only shut my eyes tighter, fighting the urge to tell her to go away. I wanted to bury myself deeper into the pillow, but instead, she simply huffed, knowing full well that I wasn’t asleep.
Benjamin was always inviting her to the park. I went with because she wouldn’t go without me, but everyone knew that it was Chantal he wanted.
“P-l-e-a-s-e.” She dragged out the word on a breathless whine that had me opening my eyes and finally looking at her.
“I’m tired.” It was the only sentence that I could think of offering her.
“Please, Ris. Please. Jonathan is going to be there, and he’s been asking about you.”
I didn’t care about Jonathan, and the only reason he was asking about me was because I told Tiffany that I overheard him bragging to his friends about kissing her on the fields at school.
“We have a math test tomorrow, and I don’t want to fail.”
This time Chantal rolled her eyes at my excuse. Because that’s what it was - an excuse. We both knew I wasn’t going to fail. I was fastidious about school - adamant that I would go to college and be all the things our mothers weren’t.
“We don’t have to stay late.” She made it sound as if she were the one making a concession, and not the other way around.
“Are you going to kiss Benjamin?”
She squealed in girlish delight, but I simply pulled myself upright and waited her out. The truth was that I didn’t care about Benjamin, but if she was going to be more infatuated with him than she already was, I needed to intervene.
We weren’t going to dig our way out of our shitty circumstances if Chantal went and got herself knocked up by a neighborhood boy.
“Did he say something?” Her gaze was filled with delight and curiosity, and it wasn’t the first time that I felt like the sullen, bitchy cousin that everyone painted me as. Her joy tugged at my chest, and I fought the urge to cave right there and then. Her happiness was somehow infectious. It was annoying.
“Fine.” I sighed out my concession, “but if Benjamin tries anything, we’re leaving.”
Her arms wrapped around mine, knocking the wind from my chest as she giggled in delight. I would never admit it, but the ache and panic inside of me lessoned with each hug she enveloped me in.
The dream was always the same, my subconscious showing me her face in my dreams - as clear as day, only when I woke I couldn’t remember the exact shape of her jawline - the specific angle her cheekbones sat - reality serving to smudge the lines of memory, making it an awful, fallible thing. For if you couldn’t even trust your own memories, what hope did that leave you with?
I shifted in my bed, my gaze adjusting to the dim lighting as I was forced to take in the low, crappy ceiling, complete with peeling paint.
In the grand scheme of things, I wasnothing- I wasnobody, but I still looked enough like her that I had managed to wrangle myself entry into their ridiculous Society.
Ridiculous and dangerous.
I laughed even when they weren’t funny. I twirled when it was expected. I smiled when it was encouraged. I channeled my cousin with every hoop and jump they had laid out for me.
My mother and my aunt were twins. Not that that was terribly unusual, but the fact that I came out lookingexactlylike my cousin made for some uncomfortable questions. When we snuck out together, we lied, telling others that we were sisters and not cousins, and that we wereIrish twins- excusing the eleven month age gap between us. And even though we looked similar - nearIdentical- I couldn’t recall her face. I was certain her jawline had been sharper than mine - her eyes brighter - her steps lighter. She was always the bold and brave one, testing her mother’s boundaries and strict rules, whereas I had always been the unsure one - the one that followed the rules - the one who sat up late at night and listened to my aunt and my mother when they thought we were sleeping. It hadn’t mattered that she was the older one, not when her safety was in question.
I understood the risks - understood what my aunt and Chantal were running from, but I also understood my cousin’s craving for freedom - the will to escape and live dangerously, if only for a night. It was the only reason that I went along with half of her hair-brained ideas that saw us scaling the roof and fleeing to the park simply to meet some other neighborhood kids. Those moonlit escapades served as some of my best memories. The feeling of the two of us on a bike, the wind slapping her hair against my face as we held on, swallowing down our screams of excitement and joy. The way she always seemed to have a bag of jellybeans on her just for those moments.
She was magnetic. The other kids loved her, and even though we looked the same, they didn’t act like that towards me. I was too stiff - too jumpy - to be deemed the same as her. And there was a rightness to that because Chantal had been perfection - she was a ray of walking sunshine. When we played spin the bottle, the boys practically fell over themselves at the mereideaof kissing her. She was unattainable in that way that only made people want you more. And I was the sullen blonde in the corner, choosing to play look out instead because somehow - even then - I knew she needed the escape - knew she was on borrowed time.
We never found her body, but I knew that the body was the least of our worries. Chantal was dead. It had been too long for her to be anything but dead, and after they had killed her mother, forcing my own mother and myself to flee town, I understood her need for freedom all too well.
Sometimes I wondered if it was those nights at the park that had been our ultimate demise - if we had inadvertently led them back to her house. Or if they had known where they were the entire time, lulling them into a false sense of safety until they came for them.
But such wondering was pointless. Especially when I was walking into the lion’s den tomorrow. It should have been difficult, for The Society was not known for accepting outsiders, but fate had been kind to me. As their breeding program went, The Society families were not producing enough girls - meaning that their male legacies could not continue without wives - or at the very least, someone to show off at events and carry their spawn.
It was rare, but every once in a while The Society opened its ranks to outsiders, taking in new blood to even out their club. It took some maneuvering, but I had managed to secure myself a place in their program - and then acceptance into their fold. Tomorrow I would be entering myself into their servitude program, leaving me at their mercy for the next three months.
That was what we wanted them to think, when in truth it would be them atmy mercy. The Society had grown too powerful - too greedy - too ostentatious, and many were left disgruntled by their old school money and brash ways. That was where my truth lay - where my loyalty was - to those who had taught me how to gut a man in under a minute - to those who had helped orchestrate this entire thing, with the understanding being that I would dismantle them from the inside, leaving a power vacuum for us to reign.
