Don't Speak (A Modern Fairytale, #5)(3)
Damn Brodie Walsh to hell and back!
With twenty-one kids in the entire high school and only six in Laire’s graduating class, the pickings for a prom date had been slim. Not to mention, she mostly looked at the island boys, whom she’d known since infancy, like a bunch of jerky brothers. At least Brodie, whose mama was the daughter of the pastor, seemed to have some manners. At the time, she had considered him the least disgusting of her choices, but now? Gyah! She could just kill him for spreading rumors about her when she’d kept her reputation lily-white for eighteen long years.
Laire looked over her shoulder, shooting her oldest sister a dark look. “I didn’t let him touch me. There’s no understanding between us. It’s a lie and that’s that.”
“Hope Daddy don’t catch wind of it then,” said Kyrstin, giving Laire a shit-eating smile over the rim of her tea.
They don’t understand, thought Laire, crossing to the front closet to grab a hanger for the dress. They think it’s a game.
She hung the dress carefully on the bar, at the back of the closet, behind Mama’s old winter coat, and closed the door. She’d work on it later. She didn’t trust herself with the delicate material and beadwork right now. Her hands were shaking with fury.
She loved her sisters, but they were both content to marry local boys and be fishermen’s wives. They’d have a bunch of kids—the eleventh generation of Cornishes—who would grow up together here on Corey, which had a static population of just under nine hundred souls. Isolde and Kyrstin would end up running Bingo Night at the United Methodist Church and rope the altar with fir greens at Christmastime. On their tenth anniversaries, their husbands would take them on a big weekend to Raleigh or Myrtle Beach, and they’d talk about it for decades after.
Remy took us on down to Myrtle, but I felt fair quamished by all the lights and smells.
You want t’talk smells? she imagined Isolde exclaiming. It’s right yethy in Raleigh with all the bus fumes!
And all the other women organizing bins of clothes at the village secondhand shop for the annual sale would tut and nod in agreement: Off-island might be interesting for a visit, but Corey was home.
And the thing is?
It was a good life. A respectable life. A fulfilling life. Hell, it had been her mother’s life, and Laire loved her mother more than anyone else in the world, living or dead.
But it just wasn’t the life Laire wanted.
She had a very different plan for her future, and it included being part of the off-island world. Specifically, the world of fashion.
Not only had Laire made Kyrstin’s wedding dress from scratch, but last summer she’d made Isolde’s as well. Her passion for clothes had started when she was nine or ten, after her mother had passed. Her sisters had had no interest in their mother’s old Singer sewing machine, but Laire, who’d spent many happy hours listening to it hum, had found profound comfort in teaching herself how to use it. She imagined her mother’s fingers on the bobbin, threading the needle, lining up the presser foot on a seam, and felt her presence keenly.
By age twelve, she was making shorts and blouses for herself and her sisters. And by fifteen, she was being asked to help classmates with prom and graduation dresses. Now, at eighteen, she had as many as five or six jobs at a time, making dresses, shorts, pants, and blouses for friends and family on the island, in addition to outfitting herself, Kyrstin, and all of her sister’s bridesmaids for the July wedding.
And one day? Well, one day she wanted to make it up north to the Parsons School in New York City or RISD in Rhode Island. She wanted to go to college for fashion design and learn from the best. She wanted to start her own line of clothes, inspired by the greens and blues of the water and sky on Corey. She wanted her own house that didn’t smell like crabs, with carpets that weren’t perpetually covered in a gritty dust of dried salt and sand. She wanted a different life than Corey Island could ever hope to offer.
That said, college didn’t come cheap. She figured she had three or four years of clothesmaking to go before she’d be able to swing the first-year tuition, even with financial assistance. And working on free jobs, like her sister’s wedding, did nothing to further her cause.
She looked up to find her sisters staring at her.
“So?” asked Isolde. “What’re you goin’ to do about Brodie?”
“I’ll march over to his house, and I’ll stand there in his driveway, and I’ll call him out as a liar for the whole island to hear,” she said, raising her chin.
Isolde gasped. “You will not make a scene, Laire Maiden Cornish.”
“Oh, yes, I . . . I goddamn fucking will!”
Laire’s use of the word fuck made her sister’s eyes wider than a full moon over the Sound. They were not the sort of family who used curse words beyond an occasional damn, ass, or hell.
“Better not kiss Daddy with that mouth!” exclaimed Kyrstin, shaking her head in disapproval.
Isolde shoved the tea at Kyrstin and placed her hand over her belly as she took an angry step toward Laire. “I don’t want my baby hearin’ that kind of filthy talk. I’m goin’ home.”
“Good.” Laire put her hands on her hips. “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out!”
Isolde had just gotten to the front door as it swung open, and there, taking up the entirety of the doorway with his maple-tree strength and brawn was their father, Howard “Hook” Cornish, the best crabber in the Outer Banks.