Vendetta

Chapter Three: The Gossip Merchant

There wasn't a whole lot that irritated me. However, the source of such rare annoyance had managed to slither into my house and ruin the sunny morning barely before it began.

". . . It's not a good omen, Celine. I have a sixth sense about these things . . ."

Rita Bailey's voice, which was shriller than a police siren, had no trouble infiltrating my bedroom despite the fact she was an entire floor below me. I scowled at my ceiling. I didn't want to hear about Lana Green's affair, Jenny Orin's worsening psoriasis, or the Tyler ' scandal. But the volume of the old lady's voice had left me with no other option. I would have to suffer it either way, and, given the depressing messiness of my bedroom coupled with my desire to eat breakfast at some point, I decided to face her head-on and get the most unpleasant part of my day over with.

I rolled out of bed, crawling between crumpled jeans and inside-out to fish out a partially obscured bra. Springing to my feet and around without touching anything — because sometimes I liked to make a game of it — I swooped a pair of denim shorts off the ground and pulled them on before settling on a white tank top and my favorite pair of Converse. After messy braid, I crept downstairs, steeling myself for what I was about to hurtle into, coffee-less and

Rita Bailey, an old, portly woman with cropped white hair and pinched, shrunken features, hunched over the kitchen table, sipping her coffee in an outrageous pink pantsuit. Beside her, my mother was politely enduring her company, offering a tight smile and a robotic head nod at appropriate times. She had even cleared part of the table, which was usually buried beneath stray sewing projects and piles of fabric samples. Now confined to just one square foot of space, they balanced precariously against the wall, threatening to topple over them.

When we lived in a spacious, four-bedroom house on Shrewsbury Avenue, my mother had two whole rooms dedicated to containing the explosions of materials needed for her dressmaking, but here, her works-in-progress always seemed to spill from room to room, following us around our cramped home in every shade and pattern imaginable. Yards of Chantilly and ivory lace stretched along armchairs, jostling for space beneath mannequins in short summer dresses and rich evening gowns. On several scarring occasions since we'd moved here a year and a half ago, I had woken up screaming at the sight of a half-finished dummy bride perched in the corner of my room, or a denim dress that should never see the light of day.

It wasn't that my mother didn't have some sort of system in place it's just that no one but her could ever figure it out. She was probably the most organized disorganized dressmaker in all of Chicago, and I think she liked it that way. Mrs. Bailey, who was staring narrowed-eyed at the teetering pile of fabrics across the table, evidently did not.

I swept into the kitchen, pulling her attention away before her frown became so intense it broke her face. "Good morning, Mrs. Bailey." That wasn't so bad.

She her stare on me. "Good morning, Persephone."

I winced. It had been a while since I had heard my name in its hideous entirety and, unsurprisingly, nothing had changed — it still sucked. But the way the old lady said it always seemed to make it worse, drawling over the vowel sounds like she was talking to a five-year-old child — Purr-seph-an-eeeee.

"I prefer Sophie," I replied with a level of exasperation that usually accompanied the topic.

"But Persephone is so much nicer."

"Well no one calls me that." It wasn't my name and she knew it. It was just a symbol of my mother's fleeting obsession with Greek mythology, which had, rather unfortunately, coincided with the time I was born. Thankfully, my father had given up on the mouthful within the first year of my birth. It didn't take him long to think of "Sophie" as a passable alternative — the name I suspect he wanted all along and one that rendered me eternally grateful to him for two reasons: 1. that I didn't have to go through life with a barely spellable relic for a name, and 2. that he didn't nickname me "Persy" instead. When my mother conceded defeat, I became "Sophie" for good. Plain, simple, and pronounceable.