AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“If the food was good, you’d be eating it,” my father says, waving a hand. “And you wouldn’t be looking so awful. A skeleton with skin.”
I don’t look like a skeleton with skin, I want to shout at him.I look like all the other beautiful girls in my school. I look like the models and influencers society adores. I look exactly the way you and mother wanted me to look, and I’ve worked hard to look this way, I’ve made countless sacrifices.
Of course, I can say none of this.
My father, so sure of himself, continues.
“I will speak to Ambrose—that headmaster of yours. He will see to it that something is done about the food.”
“Please,” I breathe. “Don’t, Papa.”
He frowns at me. “I’m not sending my daughter to one of the best schools in the world for her to be starved.”
“I’ll eat,” I say. I don’t even know if I can because, by now, my relationship with food is so comfortably dysfunctional that I wouldn’t even know how to start mending it. But I’m desperate, and I make the promise out of desperation. “I’ll eat, Papa. I swear.”
He glares at me, then gives a curt nod. “Make sure you do. When you move to Russia next year, I won’t have it said that my daughter looks weak and sickly.”
A black panic blinds me for a second.
My heart becomes a dark void in my chest, and my skin crawls and puckers.
I give my father a look of pure incomprehension. He flicks his hand in a gesture of impatience.
“I’ve already spoken about it with your mother. Once your education is completed, you’ll be moving to St Petersburg.”
My education is far from complete, I want to tell him.My education is only just beginning.
But how can I say this when I can barely string a sentence together in his presence? How can I tell him about my dreams of going to Oxford, of completing a degree, then a master’s, then starting a PhD? How can I explain to him that I’ve barely scratched the surface of everything I have to learn, that I want to spend my life in the pursuit of knowledge, that I want to read and write and absorb and create?
He wouldn’t understand. He still sees me as the scared little girl he always sees when he looks at me.
The scared little girl I still am, deep inside.
My education, my skills, my growing confidence—my wealth of top marks and won debates—they fade to nothing when I’m around him. Everything I am shrivels and withers under his gaze, leaving nothing but a mumbling, pathetic creature.
It takes me every atom of courage I can scrape together to squeeze my voice out.
“I want to go to univer—”
He doesn’t even let me finish the sentence.
“You don’t need to. You’ll never have to work a day in your life, Theodora, and you will serve a far more important purpose. You are educated, young and obedient—you will make a desirable bride, and right now, that makes you my most powerful asset.”
A wave of nausea knocks through me. “I don’t—”
He raises a hand. “I’m not a monster, Theodora. You don’t have to marry straight away, and I won’t force you to marry someone you despise. I will try to keep your happiness in mind—but youwillmarry. You must.”
He speaks without cruelty and without empathy.
That, right here, is the true core of my painful, complicated feelings for my father.
My father doesn’t hurt because of all the times he’s grasped me or struck me in anger, but because he’s never once held me or comforted me. I’m not hurt by his insults and orders and demands, but because he has never once told me he loved me or shown me he cared for me. His cruelty has never been as painful as his utter lack of kindness.
And so the fear I feel when I’m around him isn’t the urgent, red fear of danger, it’s not the flinching fear of an abused child.
My fear of him is kenophobia—the heart-pounding, choking fear of emptiness, of the void where something ought to exist.
The gaping nothingness exuding from my father seeps into my skin, is absorbed like a disease until it’s filling every part of me, until I become that void. I stand in front of my father in the gifted gown, and the abyss inside of me yawns wide, swallowing everything inside of it until I become a listless, hollow doll.
