(stepmother)

There were my girls. My two oldest. Out there on the balcony, drinking and plotting together. It made me smile. I couldn't hear what they were saying, but I wasn't so foolish that I couldn't figure it out. The boy was positively charming, and no one had looked at my Ana liked that before as far as I had seen. Certainly her only boyfriend had not. I had the impression that Ana felt beautiful under his gaze, which is all I could ask for for her right now.

I turned around, feeling like an awful mother for smiling to myself, yet I still was. As long as they got along well I would sleep tonight, and if they made another mistake in the process there was nothing I could do to stop it anyway. Go on, hurt your cousin, heaven knows how she's meant to hurt you. And then I reprimanded myself for thinking that as a mature, grown adult. I resolved to go downstairs and have a drink, before my mind regressed any further.

It was then that I turned up the hall and made my way down the staircase, smiling like a schoolgirl over who knows what; visions of romance, I suppose, that my girls had just reminded me I once dreamed about. My fingers skimmed the wall on my left side as I descended, drumming along to the slow tune that I was hearing a few seconds before I realized I was hearing it.

Then simultaneously I noticed that the song was not coming from inside my head, and that it was coming from the door just two steps below on the next floor landing; the door with the photo of the prince stuck on it with scotch tape. It was Zelda's room. I was quite accustomed to music leaking out from the spaces around Zelda's bedroom door, although I use the term "music" very loosely, but I wondered what she was doing listening to a slow love song rather than her usual... punk-metal-noise. The words were muffled and indecipherable but the tune was unmistakable, I knew it to be a love song. I took the two steps down noiselessly, and saw that underneath the door shone, not the bright white light of usual, but the flickering yellow light of many candles.

Now, as a former teenager, I remembered a time somewhere long in the past when I believed myself to be clever and sneaky. I assumed that Zelda thought her strange behavior would go unnoticed, but it did not, and my heart jumped slightly when it occurred to me that Zelda, my tiny Zelda, was acting as if there was a boy in her room. At a loss on how to handle this, I decided simply to knock. My knuckles firmly tapped the wood of the door twice, and I heard shuffling from inside. I stammered at first, and then tried to sound merely concerned.

"Is everything all right in there Zelda?" I called, and found my right hand twisting the doorknob while the other one still knocked. I got no answer. "Zelda?" I pushed the door open to be blinded by the pink walls which were somehow emphasized by the candlelit darkness. My eyes fell next on the wide-open window, curtains tossed aside and fluttering lightly in the delicate breeze, and then on Zelda. This was a most peculiar look for Zelda. Her black hair was carefully curled but slightly ruffled, and her makeup was not applied so perfectly as usual. Her clothes and bedsheets were wrinkled, but still her whole ensemble were like something she would wear out to the mall or a party... except her reading glasses which she normally kept hidden to ensure that none of her friends would ever find them, and certainly she never wore them out of the house. And she held a book open in her hands, reading, something I had not seen her do since the fourth grade. She looked up as if she had only just noticed me.

"Oh, hello, mother." She said inconspicuously. My eyes shifted around, barely trying to hide my suspicion. I saw nothing more obvious than what I'd already noticed. I looked back to Zelda.

"Come downstairs and help me with the dishes." I asked her. She opened her mouth as if to make an excuse, but she closed it and then reopened it again.

"Yes, mother."