AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I glance up at Calliope to show her that I’m taking this seriously, but…
“It says your family is rich.” I say this as generously and carefully as I can, because I don’t want to dismiss Calliope’s feelings. Rich is not the word these people have used to describe us, but that’s what they mean, at the end of the day. “And they’re being very rude, but…it’s true, isn’t it.”
“That’s not what they said.” Calliope snatches the phone out of my hand, scrolls angrily, and hands it back. “Look.”
These comments are about her. They’ve made up an unkind nickname for my baby sister—my blood boils at the sight of it—but these aren’t threats. They aren’t even specific.
“Calliope, I don’t—we can tell Dad, if you want, and he’ll?—”
“No! I’m not going to tell him anything! Swear you won’t tell him!”
“Okay, okay!” I hold both hands up. “I won’t tell him. But if you’re this upset, then maybe we should?—”
“They said I act like Marie Antoinette!” she practically wails. If my parents were inside the house, they’d be up the stairs in two seconds.
“You’re not Marie Antoinette,” Daisy answers soothingly. “And these people are horrible, worthless jerks, but this is not a French Revolution scenario.”
“I know it’s not the French Revolution!” Calliope whips a throw blanket off her bed and wipes her face with furious despair. “It’s not—I’m not upset because of, like, the guillotine implications. I’m upset because of the—the—Versailles implications! We don’t live at Versailles! These are just houses!”
I remain silent, because the reality of our lives is that our dad and his brothers live in a row of three luxurious mansions that have all been designed to protect Daisy and our Uncle Hades from harmful light exposure as much as humanly possible. None of this is cheap. To a lot of people, we do live at Versailles.
“It’s not—” Calliope continues, struggling to catch her breath. “I know we’re not royalty. We don’t live in palaces. But they’re saying—they’re saying I order people around.”
She looks at Daisy and me, her eyes wide, waiting for us to join in her fury.
“What the fuck,” Daisy says, a beat too late.
Calliope drops her head back in frustration, then picks it up again. “They say I order people around because I know they can’t refuse me.”
“Calliope…” I put her phone down on the nearest available surface and pull my sister into my arms. “These people don’t know you. They just want to say mean shit because it makes them feel better. We all know it isn’t true.”
She wraps her arms around my waist, trembling. “It just seemed…very specific.”
“Specificity is what drives ad revenue,” Daisy says in a comforting tone.
I give her a what the hell? look over my shoulder. She shrugs, mouths I was a dangerous witch, remember?, then draws a finger across her own throat to emphasize the point. Which is simultaneously cute and funny and sad, because Daisy is not about blood and death and assorted carnage no matter what some of her paintings might suggest. She is about old sitcoms and new period films and destinations that have cool places to visit at night. She’s about vacations on our family’s island and staying up late talking and, most of all, she’s about Hercules.
People think Daisy is into blood and death and carnage because she looks like her dad. On Daisy, a lot of Uncle Hades’s mannerisms—most of which grew out of the terrible childhood he and my dad and their siblings had, and most of which were, I have to think, originally attempts to protect himself—take on a subtler, more elegant form, and ironically strangers read them as more unpredictably threatening. The world is constantly doing a patriarchy on her, so of course rumors about her being a murderous witch would drive ad revenue.
Time to refocus with a deep breath. Calliope is a ball of tension in my arms, her chest still hitching with tears. I don’t like the assholes on social media, either. I think one of the screwed-up things about present-day society is that it frequently puts people in a position where the quickest way to financial security—usually temporary or illusory, nothing you can build a life on—is
“It hurts,” I tell Calliope. “It always does, even when they’re completely in the wrong. So we can be angry about it together, if you want, but we should also do something we want to do. To make ourselves feel better. Because those assholes can’t stop us.”
“Fuck the assholes!” Daisy shouts.
Calliope laughs against my chest. “Daisy! My parents could hear you.”
Daisy cups her hands around her mouth. “I have it on good authority,” she shouts. “That your parents have heard the word fuck before.”
Calliope lets out a strangled, laughing shriek.
“Do you want to talk about wedding plans?” Daisy asks. Calliope relaxes. “Should we order food and talk about the menu?”
“Shoes first,” Calliope says.
“Shoes first!” Daisy cries, and goes to retrieve her phone so she can order food. I offer moral support during the food-ordering process. Then Daisy and I sit on either side of Calliope, Daisy holding out her phone and scrolling through wedding-related photos.
“I like this one,” Daisy says through a mouthful of sushi, forty-five minutes later. “But you have the power to decide for yourself.”
