Eliza Bennett
May 18, 2012 11:09 PM
Fuzzytimed news by Eliza Bennett
OOC: Takes place around early October; yay, fuzzytime! BIC:As she read the letter, written in her mother’s most artificially bright tone just to solidify how very much this was not good, in her hand again, a muscle twitched dangerously in Eliza’s cheek, and her hand tightened on the pale pink parchment until it crumpled a little. She made herself not grip it any harder once it did that, but it was impossible to make her fingers relax completely.
Normally, Eliza carefully responded to each letter she received, and put both the letter and a copy of her reply in a locked box, bespelled so that it would seem empty to anyone but her who touched it, in a specially-charmed compartment in the very bottom of her trunk, but after a long moment’s deliberation, she didn’t do that with this one. Instead, she stood up, walked with deadly purpose, her red-patterned dress swirling around her knees, over to the empty fireplace, folding the letter as she went. When she reached it, she tossed the folded letter into the fireplace, and then set it on fire, watching while it burned itself out. Then, her arms folded, she went back to her favorite chair, her eyes fixed on one scarlet high heel as she began to think furiously, trying to figure out how on earth to turn this to her advantage and, on the side, whether she should laugh or cry about it.
In her first year here, after all, Eliza would have given anything to hear that they were going back to their house in California, that her life was going to be back to what it was before her aunt had a breakdown and her uncle had a far more dramatic one that put him in a psychiatric ward and made it necessary for her father to move to Illinois to take care of his sister. Now, though, things were different. Eliza was not stupid enough to not realize how many more opportunities there were in Illinois, how she and her family could get closer and closer to being seen the way they wanted to be seen, rather than as upstart Bennetts, there – which was, she assumed, why her father had stayed there even after Aunt Kat got back together with her girlfriend in British Columbia – and it was now, then, that she had to go back, all because her uncle had managed to prove himself sane enough to deal with his property and decide it ought to be a belated wedding gift for his former girlfriend, who was now, for all societal purposes, dead. Again.
Who did she know who was anyone and also from California? Oh, yes; no one at all. She thought Daisy was from somewhere in her former state, but Daisy did not exactly have the makings of one of the great female names of their generation. Sara Raines did, and her friends did by extension, but where was Sara? Nowhere near California. Hers and Eliza’s had always been a friendship of convenience rather than real feeling on either side, she thought, and she could kick herself now for not working harder to cultivate the other girl as a true friend. Whatever pretext that might have existed for marrying Gemma to Sara’s brother Alan would be gone when they moved and the Raineses no longer had to pretend to like Eliza’s tacky mother; Eliza’s own standing would be reduced as the best contact, if only strictly in the sense related to pureblood society, she had became more distant.
With an effort, she made herself stop moving her foot back and forth as though she were trying to hypnotize herself with her shoe and then made herself flip idly through a magazine, looking up to scan the common room from time to time so it was obvious she could be interrupted, instead. She’d figure out a way to handle this, since she had no choice, and it most likely wasn’t as bad as it seemed right now, but oh, she wished that none of it was happening for her to have to think about. She didn’t like situations where she felt obliged to make a bold move.
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Eliza Bennett
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