This isn't weird.

A Gift for Evasion

She called her Camellia.

Millie's stomach lurched. Her skin prickled. Her ears were assaulted by an overwhelming barrage of noise—not the piercing, high pitched tone that usually marked the onset of a panic attack, but a grating wall of garbled sound, rushing air and pouring water, violent booms of thunder and the crackle of fire, scraping, grinding, the creak of rusted metal, a deafening roar of senseless auditory input that vibrated down into her bones and outward through her pores, until every last nerve was tingling and numb.

She called her Camellia.

And yet, no. It wasn't her own stomach. That wasn't her skin. Those couldn't be her bones, her nerves, her anything. It was as if she was outside of her body, a mere bystander witnessing someone else suffer this horror. She understood every emotion in all its depth and complexity, but there was a divide, a glass barrier between awareness and experience. She knew what she felt, but she didn't feel what she felt.

She called her Camellia.

From the outside, her options seemed numerous and clear. She could put down the book and walk away. She could throw down the book and walk away. She could topple the display, watch the books crash to the floor in a heap, like garbage, and stomp on them until their jackets crumpled and their spines cracked and their pages were torn and bent. Better yet, she could set fire to the whole table.

Our story begins with a girl, a green-eyed girl who was nimble and quick and half-wild. She was unusually slight, and for that received much ridicule from the many who dwarfed her, but she learned early to use her exiguous frame to her advantage, for she could not be contained; she could slip catlike through the narrowest of gaps and vanish into secret places where none could follow. Like any child, she was curious and willful, but where others discovered the somethings, she found the nothings, the negative spaces between the whats and the wheres that she alone could contort herself into. Her name, you will have by now deduced, was Camellia.

But she did none of those things. No, instead, she watched herself begin to move, as if everything was quite normal, her eyes still fixed on the book as she walked to a nearby chair and quietly seated herself. Her gaze didn't lift. Her hands turned the page.

She was the youngest of five surviving sisters, motherless, raised instead by the eldest sister, Marigold, who was but a child herself when this responsibility was thrust upon her. Their father came and went, unconcerned with their welfare, for he was a selfish and wicked man. Her sisters were cowed by him, fearful and subservient in his presence, but Camellia could not be taught such obedience. Her sharp tongue would have been the death of any other child, most assuredly, but our girl was possessed of a gift for evasion that was well honed and rarely bested.

Why was she still reading? Why did she need to know what word would come next? She didn't want to know. She didn't want to know. It wasn't too late to stop, to forget the thing existed. She could box this memory up before it got too big, bury it deep, wall it off with bricks of smoke and drink before the memory had time to set.

It was instead her sisters who suffered punishment for her impertinence, thus with the exception of Marigold, who was both blessed and cursed with a heart most forgiving, they had little love for her. Camellia knew this well, and so, much like her father, she could rarely be found.

But she just kept reading. Helplessly, she watched herself turn page after page, swallowing down her personal exploitation with a morbid curiosity too greedy to resist. Noah Wexler had poured her soul through a sieve, strained out the mundane and the inconvenient, remolded the rest to suit his hackneyed plot and overwrought prose, and sold it. Sold her.

And there was nothing she could do about it.

One chapter followed another, and she remained glued to the page, until she was no longer watching her physical self, but her twisted literary doppelganger, in vivid, crushing detail. She watched herself bristle against a world where she didn't belong, watched herself traipse deeper and deeper into an unknown wilderness where the wolves passed her by with cool regard, watched herself lured by pretty words and brilliant blue eyes out into a bitter, bitter winter. Even in the brightest moments, her violation hung like mist in the background of every scene as she watched her once-heroine devolve into a hollow plot device, a stepping stone for the true protagonist to walk over, until any pretense of feminine agency was cast aside without a second thought.

Millie was only vaguely aware of Real Paul's hand nudging her shoulder, indicating that it was time to go. As she stood behind him in the checkout line, still, she kept reading, stopping only long enough to complete her own transaction. The fog was briefly penetrated by the dirty feeling of handing over her money for this heinous thing, knowing where that money would go, but only for as long as it took to put her wallet away.

She didn't see her companion studying a stack of small, glossy fliers on the counter while he waited for her. She didn't see him fold one and half and tuck it into his pocket.

To his credit, Real Paul had absolute respect for the sanctity of a reader's absorption in a book. He didn't ask questions, or distract her with conversation, and shushed the others when they made any attempts to disturb her. The lone scrap of reality that won a sliver of her attention was the brief glimmer of affection she felt when the sun was growing dim, and he silently passed her a slim clip-on book light, and it occurred to her that he was the sort of person that just carried one in his pocket at all times.

It should have made her sick to read in a moving vehicle, but her stomach had reached its maximum threshold for nausea long before they had left the bookstore, and she remained too detached from her body to be hindered by it. It was a thick book, heavy enough to be a doorstop, but she read without pausing until she reached the very end. There was no afterword, no acknowledgements, but instead of its traditional place at the front of the book, the dedication page waited for her at the very back. It had only two words.

For Millie.

She felt nothing.

Emerging from her trance, she found that they had stopped on the beach. It was morning. Her friends had already slept and risen, and were all four seated around a small campfire a few yards away, sharing a breakfast of bacon and potatoes roasted in foil over the embers. The smell failed to inspire her appetite.

When she stumbled out from the van, blinking and stiff, Real Paul offered her a plate. She declined.

When she joined their circle, hugging her knees as she sank into the sand, Paul-Come-Lately offered her a bongrip. She accepted.

When she exhaled a hit deep enough to alter her sense of gravity, Kathleen offered her a lukewarm mug of murky, foul-tasting tea. She accepted.

When she choked down the last of its silty dregs, Amber offered her an unidentified pill. She accepted.

Then she was hungry.

Then she was nothing.