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“It’s our home Mother. Our parents were missing, assumed dead, why wouldn’t Tallulah and I seek out the comfort and love of our childhood home?”
“I don’t know what you think these childish games are going to achieve. Changing the locks, firing our housekeeper, I thought you were more mature than that. You and your whore of a sister are not welcome in our home, you sacrificed all claim to the Archibald name the moment you ruined all of our lives and walked away from billions of dollars. You’re nothing but an idiotic, fat, waste of life, that money was the only way you would ever have anything of worth to offer, and now it’s gone. Your sister might be a whore but at least she bagged herself a good husband. That should have been you, you should have been engaged to the Lexington boy and we’d be the most powerful dynasty in the country. But no, between the two of you, you’ve destroyed everything. We should have aborted you when we found out you were both girls, if we’d have been able to have a son, we’d have given you away.”
Carson leans forward and ends the call, picking up my cell and launching it out of the open door. “Your mother is a fucking bitch,” he snarls angrily.
“It’s nothing I haven’t heard before,” I mutter, my embarrassed gaze firmly fixed on the counter. I’m not hurt by her words; the insults are practically a mantra I can recite I’ve heard them so many times before. It’s the fact that everyone else heard them too that’s making my cheeks heat with shame. It’s common knowledge that my mom’s a bitch, but to have them witness her vitriol sucks all of the strength I thought I'd gained from me in the blink of an eye.
“Who the hell does she think she is?” Watson growls, shocking me with the anger in his voice.
“What?”
“What the fuck gives her the right to speak to you like that? That motherfucking bitch,” he hisses.
“No more playing around, we need to fuck with them, I want to ruin them,” Olly snarls, his normally happy-go-lucky expression gone, replaced with clenched teeth and barely restrained anger.
“I want the party bought forward to as soon as possible, I want the world to know you’re mine and I want us to own as much of Archibald Inc as we can, as soon as possible,” Carson demands, moving to my side, his palm sliding possessively around the back of my neck, his firm hold encouraging me to lift my head.
When I do, I find all eyes on me, anger and fury and barely restrained violence clear on all of their faces.
“We don’t put up with this shit from them anymore,” Arlo confirms, his eyes locked with mine.
We’ve never exactly given him the title, but it’s clear to everyone that Arlo is the leader of our group and this is the first time he’s looked at me like I’m one of them. His firm confidence, combined with the obvious anger of the others, forces me to nod in agreement with him. Carson owns my body, he’s mine and I’m his, but it’s Arlo’s acceptance of me that has me standing straighter and nodding with more ferocity.
“Right, it’s time to get to work,” he says, pulling Tally into him and smiling down at her.
* * *
The next few days are a flurry of activity, we arrange a venue for my ‘I’m not going to be a billionaire’ party, make a guest list and send out invites, all branded up with the Archibald family insignia. Tally and I post picture after picture on social media and pretend that we haven’t seen the humiliating news stories that are circulating about our parents’ near death experience.
It’s exactly five days before the party when the first news article about me hits the internet. The story shows pictures of me bent over a toilet throwing up, the pills my mom forced me to take in a smaller picture to the side. The headline reads, Archibald heiress on the verge of hospitalization: how girls of today are obsessed with being thin. Several other pictures of me looking ill and skinny with fake smiles plastered across my face appear in the article. The story is a sensationalized version of events, with me being described as hooked on diet pills and making myself ill every day in order to remain a size zero.
My legs buckle and I collapse to the floor as I stare at the images of me purging in my bathroom. What the image doesn’t show is my mom is standing behind me, watching me, forcing me to throw up again and again, before making me swallow pills that made me even sicker. What the headline should say is, Teenage girl was so hungry on her restricted diet that she ate a candy bar and was starved for three days as punishment.
Tears roll down my cheeks, but I don’t lift my hand to wipe them away. I can’t believe they did this, although it really shouldn’t surprise me, we released pictures of them, they released pictures of me, an eye for an eye.
“Carrigan,” Tally shouts, rushing into the room and throwing herself down onto the floor next to me. “They’re fucking assholes,” she seethes, curling in close to me, but not touching me, like she’s unsure if I want her too.
“Mom was standing here,” I say, pointing to the edge of the picture. “She made me do it. I don’t have an eating disorder, the only time I ever made myself sick was when she forced me.”
“I know. It’s them, it’s always them. I want to kill them for this, I really do,” she says, suddenly pulling me into a hug and clinging to me tightly.
“It was them,” I whisper, wrapping my arms around her and holding her just as tightly as she’s holding me.
“Priss,” Carson says quietly, startling me and pulling my attention to where he’s standing next to us.
“I’ll give you guys a minute,” Tally says, kissing my cheek softly then climbing up from the floor and leaving the room.
Carson sinks down to the floor next to me, taking the spot my sister just vacated. “Priss,” he says my name again, like he literally has no idea what else to say.
“I don’t have an eating disorder,” I say.
“Tell me,” he quietly demands.
“She would tell me I was fat, that I needed to be perfect, that everything needed to be perfect so I could land the richest husband and gain the most power. One day she caught me eating some popcorn, I knew I wasn’t supposed to, but I was so hungry. She got really mad, she dragged me into the bathroom and forced her fingers down my throat until I was puking. Then she kept me in the house, she cancelled all our plans and told the housekeeper I was too sick to eat.”
“They starved you?” he asks bluntly, the anger lacing his voice steely and dangerous.
“Yes. She had these pills that make you sick too, they give you the symptoms of a stomach flu and she’d make me take them, then laugh at me when I was so sick I was throwing up blood. She’d tell me at least I was thin. It didn’t take long until I stopped trying to cheat at my diet, that food became just a necessary evil. In the picture she gave them for in the article she was standing behind me, forcing me to purge because she caught me eating a candy bar. I had one bite, that’s all, and she found out, she didn’t let me eat anything for three days that time and the whole time she was telling me how fat and ugly and worthless I was. I couldn’t fight back, I couldn’t tell anyone, who’d believe me? So I just did what I was told, and ate what I was told, because it was the lesser of the two evils.”
