Page 47 of Theirs

She doesn’t say a thing, but after a moment, I catch some movement from the crack in the door and hear the lock slide open. She cracks the door and peers out at me, her face red with tears.

“Oh, sweetie,” I say. “It’s okay, let’s talk and I can fix your makeup.”

She looks into my eyes, probably checking out my dark, and heavy eye makeup, with the winged eyeliner I’ve perfected over the years. She opens the door the rest of the way and eyes my tattoos before looking back up at me.

“Can you do my makeup like yours?” she asks shyly, wiping her eyes. My makeup is a little too edgy for her blush pink dress, but I won’t turn her down.

“Will it piss your mom off?” I ask, arching an eyebrow.

She nods and looks away, assuming I’ll say no to her request.

I lift her chin with a finger. “Then hell yes, I’ll do your makeup like mine.”

She smiles and follows me over to the couch in the corner of the bathroom, sitting down while I pull out my small eyeshadow compact, eyeliner, mascara, and some makeup wipes to clean up her face. She sits there quietly while I clean off her smudged makeup and I begin working on her eyes. She tells me her name is Gisele, and I tell her my name is Lavender. Maybe I’ll get my name legally changed. I’ve always hated the name my parents gave me, I like the name Ben gave me.

“You feeling better?” I ask softly.

She shrugs. “I’m not sure if I can ever feel better when my mom is trying to push me into a marriage. I’m sixteen!”

I nod knowingly. “My parents tried to do the same thing.”

She gasps, and crinkles the hem of her dress in her hands. “What did you do?”

“Turned eighteen and cut them out of my life,” I answer honestly.

“Oh,” she says, looking down. I lift her face back up so I can finish with the eye shadow. “So what was wrong with the guy they wanted you to marry?”

I swallow. I’ve only told two people what he did to me; my parents. They didn’t believe me, even when I went to the hospital to prove it.

“He raped me,” I say, trying to not cry from the memory I’ve pushed down for all these years. “I went to the hospital right after, called my parents, had a rape kit done that came back positive. You know what my parents said to me?”

She gulps and shakes her head.

“‘Boys will be boys,’”I tell her. “‘He just wanted to sample what he was going to marry one day.’”

Gisele grits her teeth. “You didn’t marry him, did you?”

I shake my head. “No. You don’t marry someone as pathetic as that, you don’t let your parents make you either. You hear me?”

She nods her head as I finish perfecting her eyeliner.

“I’m going to give you my phone number,” I tell her, putting the makeup away. “If you need help, you call me, you call the police. We’ll help you, honey. Don’t stay in that type of relationship.”

“Did you call the police?” she asks, handing me her cell phone so I can program my number into it.

I shake my head. “No, and I regret it every single day. I should have put the motherfucker in jail for what he did to me. I was just hoping my parents would help. I was hoping they would protect me. Parents are supposed to protect their little girls, not sell them off to the highest bidder.”

I hand the girl her phone and we both stand in front of the mirror to look at her touched up makeup. She smiles at me in the mirror.

“Thank you for helping me,” she says, turning around and taking me by surprise and hugging me. “I’m sorry you went through that.”

I smooth my hand over her hair. “There are scary things out there in the world, they hide behind the masks of beautiful men. Make sure you know who they are before it’s too late.”

She nods, and a knock comes from the door.

“Darling,” says MacKenna, opening the door a crack. “You okay? We need to go sit down.”

“Yes, I’m fine,” I say, grabbing my clutch from the sink and ushering the girl out the door. She heads into the ballroom, and we watch her go.

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