The Thirteenth Union: Prelusion

Prologue: Company

Part II

My friend Warren was over today. He was a nice boy. Daddy’s friends sometimes come over and bring him and his brother, Rowan. I don’t quite know what his parents looked like, because they always liked to shove us into my Play Room to keep us busy. A lot of times Rowan would throw fits. He was a lot older than me, so he couldn’t get away with it as much as me and Warren could. Sometimes, would take my china dolls and break them, and other times he would rip the heads off of my stuffed animals. There was a particular one he always went for: my doggie, Rosie.

Whenever he came over, now, I hid her under my bed, in a shoebox.

That was where I hid all my special things. I had an old pocket watch with a bronze design imprinted on the inside, but it didn’t work anymore. The hands stopped ticking long before I had found it in the backyard. My journal was in there too. Daddy says I’m not really good at writing, but I like to write down what I’ll will tell God—I pray the entries to Him at night, because I know He likes to hear them.

I’m always afraid the boys will find my special box. I have other things in there too, and I don’t want them to see. Those things are mine. Not even my parents know they’re in there. They can’t know. Or they’d take it all away and sell it—like the diamond necklace I found on the floor after one of Mommy’s parties. And, one time, Daddy left some cool pictures on his desk of a girl sleeping in red paint; they’re in my shoebox too.

“Warren,” I asked from behind my dollhouse.

He was a skinny boy with sandy blonde hair that fell in his eyes. Today he wore a pair of brown shorts and a pale blue collared shirt with a ketchup stain on the stomach. He held a small model plane in his hands, flicking the spinner on the nose.

“What, Jessie?” He didn’t look at me. Sometime he liked to ignore me because I was a pretty girl; he thought it was funny.

“Do you wanna play with me?” I pestered for the hundredth time. “It’s boring all by myself, Warren. I’ll even let you play with the boy doll…” I picked up the boy doll and showed it to him for proof.

“But I don’t want to, Jessie,” he whined, putting his airplane down.

I stuck out my bottom lip and batted my eyelashes. “Puh-lease!” I begged.

“Can we play a board game instead?” he bargained. He struggled to his feet, almost tripping over my perfect pyramid built from wooden spelling blocks. A side crumbled to the ground and I shot him and infuriated frown. I worked hard on that pyramid! “Sorry.” He shrugged flippantly.

“It’s fine,” I said, but I was still angry he’d knocked over my blocks. It was really hard to get them that way! I set my dolls down inside the dollhouse and pushed up from the floor. It was hard to play in a dress. This one wasn’t like my stupid yellow one. This one was red with pockets. I liked to take the candies from the bowl in the kitchen and hide them in the pockets, because my dress was so swirling that you couldn’t tell they were in there. “What board game do you wanna play?”

He thought to himself for a moment, tapping his chin. “How about Monopoly!” he shouted with a grin. “My daddy loves that game. He said it reminds him of a simpler time, whatever that means.”

I pouted, genuinely distraught. “All I have is Disney Memory and Scrabble,” I said, pointing to the boxes under my bed. “But we can check the game cupboard downstairs.” I stepped over a pile of my clean laundry. The maid hadn’t been in today on Daddy’s orders, so my clothes didn’t get put away yet. “Where’s Rowan? He usually goes and gets the games for us to play.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. He went on a trip with my mommy yesterday.”

“Oh?” Rowan was always here. It seemed a little different. I kinda missed him, even though it was always him that got Warren and I in trouble. Once, it was my fault—I was trying to eavesdrop on Daddy again—but every other time it was Rowan. “Did they go to France? I’ve always wanted to visit France.”