Grace
When I was a child, I had a family of dolls. They lived in a little white dollhouse, with a blood-red roof and blue windows. Inside the house, there was a set of white plastic furniture, plus some random household items: a matchbox television, a mirror crafted from a piece of foil, a few plastic farm animals — a cow, a pig, a goat, and a very large (larger than the cow) chicken, which lived outside the shoebox.
The family itself consisted of:
One pretty little doll who, in my games, represented me; one lanky female doll, whom I designated to be the mother (I made it a tunic out of an old handkerchief and glued a lock of my own hair to its head); and a tiny baby elephant of unidentified gender, made of hard and matte plastic.
What the family lacked was a father, but one day, suddenly, it so happened that I got a father doll as a gift! Apparently, my own father bought it for me as soon as he noticed the lack of one. It was a beautiful doll with a hard body and a face made of soft, squeezable plastic. The father doll had only one imperfection. It was a little shorter than the mother but was taller than the kid. I loved the doll so much that I didn't see this as a shortcoming until Grace pointed it out.
Grace and I had met exactly one month after the father doll arrived. It was September, the first week of school when Grace moved to my house with her mother.
Grace was the same height as me and had soot-black hair tied in a pair of ponies reaching just the end of her chin. She was different. She looked different. She always used to wear those dark corduroy coats with napkin-like collars while despite being of her age I got to wear beautiful linen and silk dresses bought from A Shop in London. Also, she didn't mind wearing a strange snobby face 24/7 just like the black and grumpy cat she owned.
One day, after dinner I invited Grace over to my room. She took everything in with a quizzical expression, as if making an inspection.
"So you have your own room?" she asked.
I nodded. I was suddenly proud of the fact that I had my own room.
"And you have a balcony?" I said, "Yeah."
She walked over the rug to the wall above my bed and yucked at the lamp.
"And you have rugs and everything," she said.
I nodded and yucked at the lamp, too.
"You're rich, aren't you?"
I nodded. I honestly didn't know whether I was rich or not.
Grace seemed to like my dolls. She took them out of the box one by one and nodded in approval. She smiled at the father. Her smile seemed way too peculiar, more like an eerie smirk.
"Listen," Grace said. "Let's give your animals a bath..."
But then her mother, Miss Sharet, came in and said that it was time for my piano lessons.
After she left, I looked around my room, at the balcony door, the rug, the nice furniture, and the white little house full of posh little beds and tables, and I felt enormous satisfaction. But —
My newfound identity was shattered as soon as my father got home. I asked him if we were rich. He laughed for two full minutes, then bent over and pointed to his feet. "Look at my shoes," he said. "Does that look like the kind of shoes a rich person would wear?" The shoes were scuffed, discoloured, and covered with brown dirt stains.
Later that night, on my way to the bathroom, I overheard my father talking about Grace.
"What do you think of that girl?" my father asked.
"I don't know."
"Apparently, she told Ethan we are rich."
"Rich?"
Now it was my mother's turn to laugh.
After that, they started talking about other things: things other than Grace.
The next day as soon as I came back from school I saw Grace. I saw her staining my dolls with red paint. She even had a knife with her. I couldn't believe how she could touch, and stab my dolls!
I soon dashed and leaped at her, pounding her in the chest. Her body felt firm and resilient under my fists, as if it were made of hard rubber. I kept pounding, even after she had released the father and started to growl with her already bleeding teeth. I honestly had no idea that hitting someone could feel so good.
Justita is a highbrow loner with social anxiety. But she can also be the loud, giggling bee that you really want to swat. Help her find some balance at [email protected]
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