“Ivy,” my mother stopped me before I could hang up my coat and disappear into Sloane’s bedroom for the rest of the night. Her voice was poised and authoritative, her glassy green eyes narrowed and expectant. “I expect you to put in some face time tonight. You heard what Nix has planned for you. He won’t want you hiding away. You need to remind him and everyone else why he would pick you. It’s not public knowledge yet, but when he makes his claim to you I don’t want there to be a shadow of a doubt for why he would pick you.”

She leaned forward to straighten the neckline of my mandarin collared sheer shirt dress. She brushed invisible lint off the shoulder and then adjusted it so that it layered over the dress-length slip underneath perfectly. I willed myself to be still underneath her ice cold fingers and intense scrutiny.

“Mom, nobody will notice,” I argued doing my best to keep the pleading tone I desperately felt out of my voice. “It’s not like Nix is going to announce his intentions tonight.”

“Don’t argue with me,” she chastised immediately. “And please, Nix’s affection for you has never been anything but common knowledge. Do you think anyone else could have pulled that little depression stunt last spring and gotten away with it?” My mother laughed derisively, completely and effectively putting me in my place. “Hardly. So don’t you dare seem ungrateful tonight. Get your act together and give Nix what he wants.”

“Yes mother,” I ground out obediently sounding like a Stepford robot. I knew there was no point arguing what might as well have been a command straight from God in this circle of delusional crazy people.

She gave me another head to toe dissecting glance, pausing a little too long on my solid black leggings like they were an eye sore. And then she turned her back on me to greet her…. colleagues. I looked around the elegant rooms of Sloane’s house, each one exquisitely designed and furnished. The house cost the same as our condo which could have reflected badly on Sloane’s mother Thalia. Our circle was entirely wrapped up in price tags and paychecks. But where Thalia had been frugal with the house she had made up for with extravagant pieces of art and design.

The first floor of Sloane’s mother’s house was filled with women just like my own, gold diggers all vying for Nix’s desired attention. Not that Nix would ever be an end all for these rich bitches, but he had his own charm and appeal that was absolutely intoxicating to these women…. to every woman. Nix floated between clusters of beautiful but conniving females, dazzling them all with his charm and wit.

I had the sudden urge to vomit all over the antique ottoman to my left, just to cause a scene. Obviously I squashed the urge, but the bitterness stayed firmly lodged in the back of my throat.

I took one more brave look around the first floor from my vantage point in the foyer, swearing to myself that I would never become these women, that I would never let myself get swept away in the shallow-possession-coveted existence that poisoned them. I lifted my chin in mild defiance and let the promise to myself weave a protective layer around my cynical, jaded soul, around my broken, malformed heart. I was better than this. I was better than this life.

Nix caught my eye from across the room, his dark eyes hypnotizing me, his allure calling to me, asking me to stand by his side. He hardly acknowledged me other than the way he kept his gaze tightly locked with mine, not even a head nod or incline of his chin. But it was because of the subtlety of his authority that I felt the call to him stronger than even the oxygen in my lungs, more intimately than the blood pumping through my veins. I held my ground and fought with everything I had against the intense desire to walk over to him. His lips quirked into a perceptive smirk, and I felt his expression turn knowing. It was like my defiance only spurred him on, only encouraged him. More afraid of that truth than anything else, I broke our gaze and bounded upstairs and to the safety of Sloane’s room.

“There she is,” Exie squealed. “Shut the door behind you, Ives.”

I followed her directions and plopped down on Sloane’s oversized bed. Sloane’s room was decorated in the same style as the rest of the house, light and airy with touches of eighteenth century France. Every piece of her ivory painted provincial bedroom set was occupied in some way by Sloane, Exie or their sisters Evaleen and Anaxandra.

Exie was at the vanity curling her sister Anaxandra’s hair. She had long golden curls, just like Exie and icy blue eyes framed by impossibly dark lashes. They were big-boobed Barbies with tiny waists and perfect manes of hair. Anaxandra watched disinterestedly as Exie arranged her hair in a perfect mess that would appear casual even if it had taken several hours to accomplish.

Evaleen, Sloane’s sister shared her pale complexion and deep, dark brown eyes, but her hair was more chestnut than Sloane’s rich almost black hair. Evaleen was definitely Snow White’s older sister, and not the fairy tale princess that Sloane was, but she was still breath-taking, still heart-stopping. All of these beautiful girls could give anyone an inferiority complex.

That is if you weren’t equally as beautiful and acutely aware that this kind of splendor came with an insipid, disgusting price you would have to pay for the rest of your existence and never, not once, not even in your outspoken fantasies or most private hopes and dreams have the opportunity to be free.

“Hey, Ivy,” Evaleen greeted in a falsely casual tone. She lifted her eyes from a gossip magazine and pinned me with an accusing stare. “It’s been a while. How was the…. what are you calling it? The mind-vacation?”

I gaped at her. She was speaking to me with barely hidden cruelty like she was accusing me what happened was my fault. She should know better. We were all brought into this together, the same way. We used to be in this together. But apparently Exie was right, these two girls that I used to look up to as heroes had bought into the lie.

Everyone in the room was waiting for me to say something, staring at me with jewel-like eyes and practiced expressions of curiosity.

“Rehab,” I finally whispered, my own voice failing to stand by my side. “I’ve just been telling everyone I went to rehab.”

Anaxandra snorted her disapproval. “Not a very flattering lie. Fat camp would have been better than rehab.”

I swallowed my righteous rage at her callousness and decided to save the “beauty is on the inside” fight for when it actually aided my case. In fact, all of my beauty was on the outside. All of it. So it didn’t really matter if I wanted to argue with Anaxandra or not, she would clearly win this argument.

“But rehab isn’t really a lie,” I replied pathetically. “At least not if you hear Nix or my mom talk about it.”

“What was it like?” Evaleen asked, sliding down from her perch on Sloane’s long gilded dresser. “Was it really intense?”

“Yes,” I admitted. I hadn’t even had this conversation with Sloane or Exie yet. I preferred never to think about my time in the posh brain-washing camp I had been sent to. Most of the time I believed my soul was still intact, well, small pieces of it, but there were moments of weakness when I wasn’t so sure they hadn’t penetrated my mind. “Lots and lots of therapy. And Nix had several veterans visit and share their success stories with me. I guess he was trying to sell me on this whole thing.” I gestured around the room lazily, as if Sloane’s room summed up our entire existence.

“Spa time?” Anaxandra pushed, probably noticing my glowing skin and manicured nails, both of which I had chosen to neglect before I went in. I nodded my answer. She sighed enviously. “It sounds like vacation. What I wouldn’t give for Nix to pamper me like that!”

Evaleen squealed with laughter, “No kidding. Six months of constant relaxation and spoiling. It sounds amazing! Was it amazing?”

“No, obviously not.” I looked at these two girls that had just as much influence in raising me as my mother did and could not believe how far gone they were. They were five years older than me, which was an insane amount of time in my life. It was the difference between fighting fate and accepting it. They were almost finished with college, about ready to enter our society completely and they were going on and on about spa time? Everything in their lives was already a vacation from reality and still they wanted more? I wondered who they were at the core of their beings; how far down the morally deluded they had really fallen.

Evaleen once pulled me aside at a garden party when I was thirteen and slipped comfort inserts into my four inch pumps when she could tell I could barely walk straight anymore. She whispered in my ear when I turned fourteen and had to go to dinner with Nix for the first time by myself that I would be Ok, that I was strong enough to handle a four course meal and when dessert was over to simply tell him that I was exhausted and had school in the morning and couldn’t be out any later. She had shown me one of Nix’s greatest weaknesses, that he was a gentleman to a fault in public and nothing would come between him and keeping up appearances.

And Anaxandra had been the closest thing to an older sister I ever had. She tweezed my eyebrows for the first time, taught me the tricks of well-placed duct tape and Band-Aid placements and never let me cry in public. Never. She would somehow see tears form in my eyes from across entire ballrooms, race to me, scoop me up and hide me in the nearest bathroom until the tears stopped and she could reapply my makeup. I was gone six months and came back to invasion of the body snatchers. I came back to sell-outs. The reality of that epiphany was like a slice to my already battered heart. What if that was me one day? What if I forgot all my moral high ground and coveted convictions and allowed the idea of spas and vacation to completely cloud my judgment? That was the scariest question of all.

“I was still processing Sam…. It was kind of the opposite of a vacation.” I breathed out in a shaky whisper.

“Oh my god, Ivy, get over it already. It’s not like he died. You are being so dramatic about the whole thing!” Anaxandra rolled her huge blue eyes in an exaggerated circle and then removed her attention from me completely, looking down at her nails as if they held the solution to world hunger.

Exie smacked the back of her sister’s head with a sharp satisfaction. “God, Ana, that is the ugliest thing you have ever said! What is wrong with you?”

“Ow!” Anaxandra rubbed at the back of her head and scowled at her little sister. “What is wrong with you? And you know that Ivy is the only one upset about the accident. Everyone else seems to think it’s a good thing…. a sign of things to come!” Her face lit up with an expectant smile. “You’re a good omen, Ivy. Stop worrying about Sam and enjoy what this means for you!”

The bile rose higher in my throat and I lunged forward, throwing myself in Sloane’s bathroom. I didn’t have time to reach the toilet, so I stood at the sink, dry heaving the non-existent contents of an empty stomach. A weighty pressure landed on my lungs and my vision blurred at the edges, threatening my consciousness altogether. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe.

Sloane appeared behind me and turned me away from the mirror where I had been unconsciously staring daggers into my own, hated reflection. She pushed roughly on the back of my head until the top half of my body hung upside down and my face was awkwardly placed between my knees.

“It’s Ok, Ivy,” Sloane murmured sweetly to me. “Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Slowly, that’s it, slowly.” Sloane’s voice held a gentle authority that I responded to immediately. This wasn’t the first time we had been through this routine.

The world started to come back into focus even as all the blood rushed to my head and my neck flooded with warmth. Breathing was becoming easier, the sick, venomous feeling slowly receding back to the depths of my black, toxic soul.

“Ivy sooner or later you’re going to have to get over this cry for attention,” Evaleen taunted from the other room. “If Nix loses his patience with you, you’re only going to have yourself to blame.”

“There is something wrong with you two,” Exie scolded as she joined us in the en suite bathroom. “You’re just like everybody else. It’s like you’ve turned into them.” Exie gestured toward the floor, indicating the party downstairs. She hit them with an insult that once upon a time would have really riled them up. “You’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid.”

“Grow up, Ex,” Anaxandra snarled. “Some of us like drinking the Kool-Aid. One day you’ll get it, you’ll accept what every single one of us eventually comes to accept. It’s easy to be judgmental from where you’re standing, but one day you’ll have to stand in our shoes, one day when they offer you the proverbial Kool-Aid you’re going to drink it. Just like we did, just like our mothers did, just like their mothers did. Remember that.” Anaxandra finished her speech by returning her gaze to the oval vanity mirror and preening for three more seconds before nodding her head to Evaleen. Both girls gave us one more pitying stare and then left to join the party downstairs.

The three of us stood silent and frozen in the safety of Sloane’s bathroom processing Anaxandra’s ominous words. Sloane was the first to move and when she did it was with an icy frigidness. She turned around and leaned forward on the bathroom’s marble countertop, gripping the edge until her hands became white.

“What if she’s right?” Sloane whispered, avoiding her face in the mirror. “What if we turn out just like them?”

A hundred different answers spun and twisted in my head but when I finally spoke it was with hope. “What if we don’t?” I paused, letting the question settle in the air around us. “Sloane, what if we don’t?” Each word was spoken with solid intension and earnest strength. There was so much hope in that seemingly impossible future that it was too tempting to set aside without further examination.