Cinderella Is Dead(7)

“Sophia, come inside.”

She knows me too well.

She pushes the door open as the bells toll, signaling curfew for Lille’s women and children. Her foot keeps time with the thunderous gongs. At the final stroke of eight, we are meant to be inside, behind our locked doors. Sometimes I stand on the front stoop as the last bell tolls, just to see what might happen. On those occasions, my mother darts around the house in a fit, wishing I would sit down and stop trying to get myself arrested like some damned fool. When I was little my mother told me that if I wasn’t inside at the toll of the final bell that the ghosts of Cinderella’s evil stepsisters would swoop in and take me away. Now that I’m older, I understand that it’s not vengeful spirits I need to be afraid of. The king and his men pose the biggest threat.

I step out and make my way to the door, avoiding my mother’s stare and squeezing past her as she closes and locks it behind me. I head for the stairs.

“Sit,” she says as she pulls a chair out from our dining room table. She walks to the other side and sits down.

I want to go upstairs and fall into bed, but we’ll have to have this little talk first. I join her at the table and stare across at her.

Most people think my mother and I are sisters, so alike are our features. Our dark, curly hair is identical except that her strands are lightly flecked with gray. We share the same deep-brown complexion, but she has lines set in at the corners of her mouth. People call them laugh lines, but I’m certain hers are from frowning.

“I was chosen by your father my first year at the ball, and it was a good match,” she begins. “He was the son of a land baron, and he is a decent man, a good man.”

“I know.” She’s told me this before, but an urgency tints her voice now, like she’s trying to convince me that there’s some glimmer of hope.

“But some are not so lucky,” she says, her tone deadly serious. “Do you understand what that must be like? To not be chosen? What the repercussions of that would be?”

“Of course I understand.” That possibility scares her almost more than anything else. Girls who aren’t chosen by their third ball are considered forfeit, ending up in workhouses or in servitude. But in recent years, several girls have disappeared into the castle and were never heard from again.

My mother runs her hands over the pleats in her dress and sighs. “Tell me something, Sophia. Do Erin and Liv know how difficult you can be? How stubborn?”

“Yes,” I say. It is a half-truth. Erin and Liv are my closest friends, and I can be myself around them for the most part. But even in their presence, I feel like I have to hold back because Lille has left its mark on them, too. They hear me speak of leaving, of resisting what is expected of us, and they tell me to lower my voice. Those things are simply not done. No one leaves. No one resists who isn’t courting death.

“I do hope Liv finds a match this year,” my mother says, staring off. “Her parents are very worried, and if she’s not chosen this time, she’ll only get one more chance.”

That a girl is considered a spinster if not married by eighteen is wrong, and that the boys don’t even have to attend the ball until they want to is a sickening double standard. “It’s not her fault she wasn’t chosen.”

Liv hadn’t been selected at last year’s ball. Erin and I had discussed it, and neither of us could understand why. Liv almost never brought it up, but I’d gleaned that someone had made a claim on her and at the very last minute had chosen another girl.

Now Liv was brandishing a replica wand, hoping to conjure some magical assistance. After everything they’d seen and gone through the previous year, Liv and her parents still hoped she’d receive a visit from a fairy godmother. They had convinced themselves that one didn’t show up the year before because they hadn’t been pious enough in following Cinderella’s example.

“I’m not going to be visited by some magical old crone,” I say, frustration bubbling up inside me.

“Maybe not,” my mother says in a whisper. “But you’ll look like you were, and that is what the suitors and the king care about most.”

“You’d think they would care about me, about what I feel.” Even as I say the words, I know they fly in the face of everything I know to be true, and my mother agrees.

“Why, in the name of King Manford, would they ever think that?” she asks. She squeezes her hands together like she’s praying, but the skin over her knuckles is stretched tight. “You’ve—we’ve—got one chance at this. You must find a match. Going back to the ball a second time is an embarrassment.”

Her words cut me like a knife. “Is Liv an embarrassment? How can you say that about her? It’s not her fault some disgusting old man changed his mind.”

She looks away. “She knows what’s at stake. Foolish wishes and magic aren’t going to save her. She must conform, know her place, and do whatever must be done to find a match, and so do you.” She leans toward me. “I know you’re different, and that this will be hard for you, but you have no choice.”

Different.

That’s how she sees me, and every time she uses that word, a distinct air of disapproval accompanies it. Lille has left its stain on her, too.

“I want to be with Erin.”

“I know,” she says, glancing around as if someone might hear. “But you will keep that to yourself.” Her tone is flat, emotionless. It’s how she protects herself from the reality of what I’m facing.