Read Online Midnight's Song by Keely Victoria - Free Book Online Page A

difficult
to hear such stinging words. They spoke about me as if I wasn’t
there. And, Celeste? That was my middle name, not my first.
    “Excuse me, but my name is Elissa,” I
spoke up. Beeti glared at me, but didn’t say a word about
it.
    “Come now, take off your towel and
follow the attendants. They will take you to the bath.”
    For a few moments,
Beeti stared at me and I refused to pull off the towel. Surely she did not
intent to put me through more of this discomfiture by making me
strip down before them both. Thankfully, she didn’t. The attendants
came, turned me around and took off my towel just as Beeti and
Stella turned their backs to me and walked out the door. The two
attendants were both women, artificially cheery but devoted to my
health all the same.
    “Miss,” One of the attendants began,
seeing my look of dread. “What’s wrong?”
    Obviously she hadn’t seen what abuse
I’d just endured.
    Before I could reply, both of the
attendants grabbed me by the arms and pushed me into tub of
irritatingly perfumed bathwater. One of the women took my long hair
and yanked a brush through it, pulling at my matted curls until
tears came to my eyes. I still hadn’t lost my distaste for letting
other people brush my hair. This experience would change my
feelings for it no less.
    Before I could protest, the attendant
sharply placed it in a clip above my neck before the other began to
scrub me with long, soapy brushes. The woman who had first asked me
of my feelings soon spoke up and posed her question again. I tried
to make it seem as if it was no big deal. Nevertheless, I knew
inside that there was something incredibly strange about Beeti’s
part in this whole thing.
    “I’m fine, truly. I just…I’m not used
to being cared for by Beeti like this.” I replied, possibly fibbing
just a bit in order to dodge my own ambiguity.
    The maid gave me a
strange look. Her face read guilt and concern as well as fear and
possibly even a bit of confusion. It appeared that she knew
something that I didn’t. It was as if they all did, and each person was
revealing it through subtle hints and warnings that I had yet to
understand the meaning of.
    The next 4 hours of
my life involved intense scrubbing, plucking, shaving, and rubbing
against my skin. Right after my bath, I was forced into a room
where I was dissected by two stylists with an expertise in hair
removal. There, the estheticians poured a stinging liquid onto my
legs and body that literally burned off my stubble for good. After my chemical bath,
they painfully took tweezers and plucked my eyebrows until they
became thinner, rounder brown arches than they already had been.
The end result of this vexing was an extremely uncomfortable
rash.
    “Don’t worry, that’s very common with
these chemicals. It should be unnoticeable in a week,” one of the
estheticians remarked as they examined my extensive
burns.
    Apparently, my pain
was nothing to them. It was all about looks, wasn’t it? I didn’t
care if it would be gone in a week. I felt the pain now! Despite my
revulsion of this all, I was at least relieved when it was all
over. In the end, Grandmamma took sight my rash and took such pity
on me that she ordered the family seamstress to tailor all of the
dresses in my closet and make me all new ones. I generously received the
offer, though I still felt the pain of the searing burns that now
existed on my body and in my soul.
    This was a whole new
life for me – one where pain and practicality were inadequate next
to power and impressions. I ached to go to my old home, the one
where no one would dare subject themselves to such pain in order to
assume a title. I wanted to go home, but I knew that was an empty
hope. Instead, I decided that I might be able to lift my spirits
just a little if I was able to do some exploring. After all, in a
place as grand as this – who wouldn’t want to uncover its
secrets?
    “Aunt Beeti,” I cleverly asked her at
the table that