Spellbound

[kaolinandbone]

You’ve been twelve for a decade, now.

You found a routine, after a while. The platform shoes: the twice-cinched corset. The careful makeup each morning: the phrasing of each sentence and the pitch of your voice. If you’re very good, you can almost believe that you have the body you should.

Almost.

Today you must be seen, though. You have a duty, as an heiress. You have a summer ball to host, spellbound or not.

You love and hate your corset on days like this. How it stiffens your spine, shapes your figure. How it gives you the form you lack and buoys up your heart. You wear it like armor. You lean on it like a crutch.

You breathe out hard, tighten down the laces, and try not to think.

***

You open the ball with a small speech on the nature of summer. You speak easily, extemporaneously. Your heart holds no fear of the crowd: it’s people that you have trouble with.

You stumble once, trying to work in one of your prepared remarks – but you find Sophia’s scarlet hair in the crowd. Her firm gaze and encouraging smile steady you: you smile back, and pick up the thread of your speech you dropped.

Later, you stare at her across the crowded ballroom, thinking impossible thoughts. Sophia, who wears her bloody hair like a fashion accessory. Sophia, who makes it look easy to be spellbound. Sophia, who seems completely comfortable in her own skin.

Sometimes you’re not sure if you’re in love with her, or with the idea of being her.

***

The ball winds onwards. You drift from conversation to conversation, nodding and smiling and making small talk. Someone mentions offhand that “children these days don’t know their place”, and you bite back a cutting remark. How could you speak for the children? You’re not even properly one yourself.

Another conversation: a man wearing a bold orange cravat and a dark suit looks into you, through you. His lips curve up into a smile. He calls you “precocious.” You leave, before he has a chance to elaborate to his fellow partygoers. Your nails leave harsh red marks as they dig into the skin of your forearm.

***

You meet Sophia in a corner of the ball, away from the mass of the crowd.

“Your hair is beautiful”, you say. You can’t take your eyes away from it.  

Her smile freezes over.

“Thank you”, she says.

Your tongue slips away from you. “May I touch it?”

Astonishingly, she nods. Her fixed smile glares at you.

Her hair feels like ridged glass. Your hand comes away wet, stained bloody carmine.

You need to say something to fill the silence.

“I don’t know how you bear it.”

She looks away.

“You wouldn’t.”  

You open your mouth.

You close it again.

You tell yourself later that someone could have overheard you.

***

After the ball, you write a letter to Sophia. In it, you tell her that she terrifies you. That the way she lives shows you that there is a way for people like you to exist in the world where they don’t have to hide. That she makes you fear that you’ll do something tremendously stupid and brave – and worse, that you’re afraid that you’ll do something stupid and brave and like her when the lesson she’s taught you is that you can be yourself.

You never send it. After all, you barely know her.

***

Over the next year, you start noticing other people like you. They live furtively, squirreling themselves away in awkward places. They have a network, of a sort: you start exchanging letters.

You can afford corsets and shoes and makeup. Some of them cannot. Some of their spellbindings are harsher than yours. Their stories cut at you – but the family’s fortune is not yours to spend. You send them words, because words are all you have. For all that they are strange people, with minds like crystal, you feel more at home with them than anyone else you have ever known.

They visit each other, sometimes. One of them sends you a letter saying that she’s going to take a train across the continent, far away from her birthplace, to a city where other spellbound congregate. She hopes she can make a new life there. You hope someday you have her strength.

There are counter-charms, ways to reverse the spellbindings – but they are imperfect at best. One of your correspondents relates their day matter-of-factly to you: “I spent an hour this evening screaming. I hate what this counter-charm is doing to my mind. It is making me into someone I do not want to be.”

You write to them in turn. You tell them how your mind seethes and spits at you, how your ill-fitting body wars with you. But – give up your youth? You’ve never known any other way to live. If you break the spellbinding, you will grow old and die one day. Is it worth it? Can it be worth it?

You remember Sophia.

She would want you to say “I can have both.”

You don’t think it works like that.

But if you must choose between “an eternal life of torture” and “a chance at happiness” –

***

You wear the counter-charm as a pendant around your neck.