My sister was beautiful, but she lacked presence. People would often say things like, “I never noticed she was beautiful before.” If you looked at her long enough, her beauty would captivate you, yet if you weren’t consciously looking for her, you wouldn’t even notice she was there.
The other young ladies vying to become the next queen often said behind her back that she was “like the midday moon.”
Honestly, I always thought it was strange. However, because Prince Elliott was so radiantly beautiful himself, despite being a man, the way my sister faded into the background was, indeed, like the moon in the middle of the day.
“Hey, George, it’s you!” Sykes said in a slightly urgent tone.
George looked up, seeming a little out of it. “Oh, Sykes...”
Sykes rushed to where George was sitting on the garden steps. “You haven’t been coming around to see His Highness lately, so I got worried. What’s gotten into you, man? You look awful! Are you not getting enough sleep? Or are you not eating?”
“That’s not it, I’m just...a little exhausted...”
“Steak will cure what ails ya,” Sykes stated confidently. “It’s just the thing for when you’re exhausted. You eat half a kilo of rare red meat and it’ll fix just about any physical fatigue.”
“No, no, that’s not the issue.” George laughed weakly and explained, “Alexandra’s suddenly come back. And now they’re putting me through the wringer at foreign affairs, saying they’ll make me a man deserving of her. My head can’t keep up with it all. I think it’s going to burst.”
“I get you! Well, at times like that... Yep, steak’s the thing. Half a kilo of well-marbled beef will fix that mental exhaustion in no time!”
“Steak is a cure-all only for you and no one else.”
“Anyway,” Sykes continued, “Alexandra, huh? It’s been, what, a year since she went abroad with her father on work?”
“Yeah.”
“So, how was it? Did she get all worked up the moment she saw you and start kissing you and stuff?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It was nothing like that.” George couldn’t possibly tell Sykes that she’d been waiting in the shadows as his sister revealed all the secrets he never wanted his friends and family to find out. “Ever since then, Alexandra’s worked me like a dog, so I haven’t had the time to visit His Highness.”
“Oh, I see how it is,” Sykes said, smirking as he playfully poked George in the shoulder. “You go and be happy with Alexandra. I’ll look after Margaret.”
“Margaret’s not like a fiancée; she’s something higher, more noble. And hold on, Sykes, aren’t you in the same position as me? Does Martina know how intoxicated you are with Margaret?”
George was wearing a nasty smile now.
“You know how passionate Martina is about you. It’s not like with His Highness and my sister, or with Alexandra and I, where political considerations or a long, unpleasant association brought us together. Well, as long as His Highness is around, you won’t be marrying Margaret anyway, but won’t you be in trouble if Martina finds out that you like Margaret more than her?”
While Sykes’s fiancée had also been chosen for political reasons, Martina had been head over heels for him since she was a little girl. She was also away on work outside of the capital, near the border, but since she was planning to marry Sykes, she wouldn’t stay away.
George had just been teasing Sykes, to push back a little, but Sykes was shuddering. His big muscular body was not so much quivering as it was rapidly vibrating, as if he were some sort of machine. His face was dripping sweat, his eyes looked hollow, and his arms flexed with tension.
“Sorry, I shouldn’t have mentioned Martina,” George mumbled.
Once Sykes had settled down, George said to himself, “With all this chaos lately, I remembered something...”
“What? Some memory from a long time ago?” Sykes asked.
“Yeah. It’s an odd one.”
George picked up a pebble lying at his feet and gave it a toss. It sailed several meters through the air to strike a wooden stake in the lawn.
“For some reason, I don’t know what came before or after, but I remember just this one scene.”
He didn’t know if it was something he saw himself or if it was a dream. He thought that he might have envisaged a particularly striking passage from a book he read or merged multiple unrelated scenes in his head.
“The weather was great, and the blue sky spread out above the garden.”
It was probably a memory of a garden party. George could see children.
“But the problem is that the scene unfolding there is nonsensical.”
Next to a large garden pond stood a girl with reddish brown hair. She wore a dress and was staring intently into the pond. She was holding some small rocks, and she would occasionally throw one at the water. It would’ve been a common children’s game...if not for the person she was aiming at.
There was a boy in the pond, quite a distance from shore, drowning. He was desperately thrashing his arms, but because he wasn’t calling for help, he might have swallowed too much water already. He fought to stay afloat, but he couldn’t get any closer to shore because the girl was pelting him with rocks. If he tried to swim in, the girl would threaten him with throws stronger than you’d expect from a child. When one of them hit him, he finally managed a small scream.
“The bizarre thing is her face...”
The girl was drowning the boy, yet her face remained calm and emotionless. Her expression didn’t have the scorn of a bully, nor did it show anger or hatred. It was dispassionate, as if her father had told her to “make sure the fire’s gone out completely,” and she was simply complying because she had to. It was businesslike, as though she were being forced to handle a boring job.
And all around her were boys in their fine clothes, muddy and crying. Boys bigger than her, their faces a mess of tears, were begging, “Please. He’s had enough. Let him go,” and, “Stop. You’re killing him.”
But the girl ignored them and kept watching the boy in the pond. Occasionally, one of the other boys would cling to her, but she would turn and smack him with a rock to drive him off.
“That’s all I can remember. Nothing else. Whatever happened, that one scene is seared into my memory,” George asserted.
“That’s, uh...pretty surreal,” Sykes replied.
“So surreal that I can’t be sure it wasn’t a nightmare. It could be something I saw happen, or it could even be a painting. I consulted a scholar, thinking it might be a metaphor for something, but he couldn’t tell me anything.”
“And that’s what you remembered? Ha ha, it sounds a lot like how your sister’s been acting lately.”
George slumped. “That’s the thing. That’s what made me realize. Those horrifying methods of hers...”
That scene was no nightmare. It was reality.
“This strange memory isn’t a dream. I’m just remembering what happened right in front of my eyes.”
“You mean...” Sykes started, trailing off.
“Yeah. At some sort of gathering, my sister was bringing down the hammer on a boy who’d done something to displease her...”
As total silence fell over them, a swallow lured out by the sunlight cried as it flew overhead.
After some time, George looked up and said, “So, getting on to the point. When I remembered that, I realized something.”
“What?” Sykes asked, looking wary. “I don’t want to hear any more scary stories, okay?”
“I don’t know how you’ll feel about this until you hear it, but...I was scared of Alexandra.”
Though they’d been friends from a young age, George and Alexandra never really got along all that well. After all, she would always insult him and play horrible tricks on him. He remembered things that had come close to bullying, things that had instilled in him an aversion to her. Obviously, she hadn’t laid a hand on him recently, but she was still overbearing and verbally aggressive. Honestly, when she went abroad with her father, he’d been relieved that he wouldn’t have to see her for a while.
“But it was all a misunderstanding,” George muttered.
“A misunderstanding? I only met her after we’d all grown up a little, but Alexandra has always been like that, hasn’t she?” Sykes pointed out.
“True, but once I realized what that memory actually was, I knew I’d mixed up a number of things inside my head. If I think about it, it wasn’t just one girl. I don’t remember it so well, but when I was little, sometimes the girl’s hair was blonde, and sometimes it was a reddish brown.”
“Wait, doesn’t that mean...”
George nodded. “The blonde girl always insulted me. The brunette, though, would do things to me without a word. The girl who played pranks on me, or more like experimented on me... That wasn’t Alexandra. It was my sister.”
Sykes gazed up to the heavens. The sky seemed so high today.
“Sounds like Alexandra’s been the victim of an awful misunderstanding,” he remarked.
“Tell me about it,” George said. “I feel so bad. The memory that made me so averse to her...wasn’t of her at all.”
“What happened to you?”
“I only remember one scene from that too...”
How old was I then? I was in the garden, playing, when I found a snail. At some point, a girl came up next to me and then dragged me to the back of the garden.
The girl with reddish brown hair checked that no one was watching, then suddenly pulled down my pants.
“Wh-What?!”
“Ah, yes. Could I borrow your bottom for a second?”
She was holding a big box of firecrackers in her hand.
“Wait, hold on... What happened?! What’d she do to you?! What the hell...? No, forget I asked! I don’t even want to hear it!” Sykes yelled.
“Ha ha ha, don’t worry!” George replied. “That’s all I remember too! I don’t know what my sister did to me. I don’t remember!”
As their strangely shrill and hollow laughter echoed through the gardens, a passing maid tilted her head and wondered what it was all about.
Lately, my sister had grown more beautiful. That could be because she was living life on her own terms, not letting anyone force her into a mold. The real her was gorgeous and possessed an almost radiant beauty—one that rivaled His Majesty’s.
My sister was no midday moon. She was a supernova, ready to swallow up the sun.