bonibell toussaint, district one | cbd [1]

You've been called terrible. Wicked.

Vicious girl with all her nasty plots and schemes — the endgame has never been of any concern to you, only achieving the goal. Ambitious and cunning in all things, you learned a long time ago how to shut off your empathy like a light switch. Click. Fuse and spark meet like reincarnated lovers; you keep a lighter in the back pocket of all your designer jeans, and you dream often of causing disasters.

Your entire life has been a performance — blackhole void in the now vacant space of your mother, and an equally ambitious father bold enough to reach for the sun with his open palm. He dreams of a porcelain life, a wife who will bend herself into whatever shape he pleases, even if that form is the absence of one. Colette Toussaint's disappearance is the vanishing of a blade. Family heirloom tossed out into the snow and leaving with the thaw.

Now only the wound remains, the grandeur and the silence and the carnations that bloom in the estate garden each and every spring. A man who treats people like they are machines, and a daughter who spins on her cogs like the ballerina in the music box, so desperate to have the approval of at least one of her creators that she will replace all her heartstrings with clockwork. Heiress at the solstice gala, brutalist on the training mat; for him there is no skin you are unwilling to wear.

But somedays, you're in the garden again, and your mother and your brother and all the carnations are present. You are cruel to him, little trickster biting at all his softest parts, and Colette calls you a monster even before you have made your choice.

And now, when she appears in your reflection and nowhere else, she tells you that she was right all along.