The Fates (Book I) - 2014 Watty Award Winner!

1.5 - The Doll

Dear Readers: Meet Lacey! aka modern-day Lachesis. Hope you like this scene, and please do comment/vote if so :)  Thank you!!

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Scene 5: The Doll

A.D. 2015

Lacey Weaver looked in the mirror. But really, it felt more like the mirror was looking at her.

For so long, she’d been owned by her looks. Always the object of others’ vision—always beheld, never the beholder. The apple of everyone’s eye. And now, it seemed, even her spitting image in the mirror had to subjugate her gaze.

She smoothed down the skirts of her champagne silk dress, set her countless-carat necklace more perfectly in place against her ballerina collarbones. As she did, she noticed something quite upsetting.

There was a tiny chip, along the edge of her French manicured ring finger. She pouted at the sight. This was the sort of thing that ruined her, when she was on the job.

Her former job, she reminded herself. Perhaps there were some post-retirement perks. For one, she could survive with a chipped nail.

She wondered whether she’d been upset because the chip was on her left ring finger. Right above her recently acquired diamond.

There came a soft knock at her door.

“Yes?” Lacey trilled, caught off guard by the sound.

The door was pushed slightly ajar. “Pardon, Miss Lacey,” one of her maids responded from the other side. “Your sister is here.”

“Oh, come in!”

She crossed her dressing room toward the door—which took quite some time, given the size of the sumptuous room—and met her sister in the middle.

“There’s my supermodel sis!” Madeline greeted her.

Lacey smiled ruefully. “Ex-model. That ended a while ago.”

Madeline brushed off the correction as she embraced her little sister. “Once a supermodel, always a supermodel. You can take the girl out of Barbie world, but you can’t take Barbie out of the girl.”

Lacey sighed, blush rising to her porcelain cheeks.

“I mean, look at you,” Madeline continued, stepping back to view the life-size doll before her. “Ugh, I’d kill for that waistline. May need to do a tummy tuck on myself sometime soon.”

Lacey laughed, as loudly as her etiquette coach from childhood would have allowed. “As if you need it!”

Madeline had never been shabby-looking herself. It was only by sisterly comparison that she’d ever seemed plain. The two had similar features, in fact: big blue eyes, radiant smile, subtly upturned nose. Madeline’s teeth weren’t as superbly straight, she had somewhat more meat on her bones, and she was a brunette. Those were the only differences, really.

Physically speaking, at least. There was also the fact that Madeline had a full-blown career, a future that was not fantastically plastic.

“You’re not even a plastic surgeon, besides,” Lacey noted as they sat down on a plush divan.

“I know. Might have to branch out a bit.”

Lacey elegantly laughed again. Meeting her sister’s gaze, she found those similar eyes to be the very opposite of mirrors—the two letters “M.D.” stared blatantly back at her. Reminding her just how different she was from her big sister. Just how much littler, as a sister and a person, Lacey really was.