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i. More Than Bones
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Blair Cameron's rage was domestic. It was bunching up an apron and throwing it out the window; watching the fabric tear as a rock caught onto the stems and a kid drove away with the straps tangled into the wheels of his bike.
She learned it from her father, who learned it from his father before that. And sometimes she'd wake up in the middle of the night from nightmares about how she'd have to pass it down to her children too and it would drag onto the next one and so on. Her sisters didn't have it but her brother did, and she liked to pretend that sharing the burden made them closer, in a way. Domestic rage she could hide with pearly smiles and red eyeliner, but remained strong enough to destroy everything in its path. She held onto it. She mothered it. Nursed it like the empty bottles wrapped in cloth and hidden under her bed (which she hoped her father would never find though she knew he'd never raise his voice at his precious little girl).
In a way, Blair was a lot like Hurricane Agatha.
Except the natural phenomenon, you could see coming. But when the pretty blonde girl smushed her cheek against her arm, sat on the multicolor-cushioned outdoor bamboo chairs of the infamous Cameron Estate, and shot you the most sickly sweet of smiles like honeyed white wine . . . where was the rage in that? You didn't see it until the lipstick stains on your neck turned into splashes of acid and you were struggling to stay keep breathing. She wasn't a girl, she was daydream that slipped through everyone's fingertips, the starring role in the dreaming state.
Blair saw the hurricane coming from miles away, she could've sworn it. She was propped up on the edge of Ward's desk with an old copy of Pride & Prejudice in hand and a citrus gum tucked behind her molars and he was going back and forth calling on construction workers from the mainland to get enough people over to prep their house for the upcoming hurricane. Between chews, when he hung up and placed the phone on the polished wood, Blair told him she was sure the hurricane would mess the whole place up just like it had the year before that. But then he kissed her forehead and told her she shouldn't worry because they had generators and she shot him a smile then left his office with plans to get drunk before the surge got too violent.
Because that was the point of Blair's life: getting drunk and hooking up with strangers behind sandbanks. She smelled of salt and always ran around in crimson bikinis, including when the wind picked up and the storm rolled over in a darkening hue of grey. But after everything, it seemed as if she was always going back to the same boy on the seaside with the same lies in her head. Never again, but she was mentally telling herself that for months.
She was angry because her mother left and was only family through postcards. Because she found solace in another man and her father, in another woman. She was disproportionately mad at the world, which she pretended she wasn't with the trademark Cameron smile and tall glasses of bubbly champagne. She always was such a heavyweight.
