“The bride always has a nice dress, and a corsage, and a cake to cut,” her mother insisted. “It will be a nice wedding.”
Colene saw that her mother had a fantasy of how a wedding had to be, and was determined that her daughter would fulfill the role. Perhaps she was fulfilling herself, in the manner of a father pushing his son into football, trying to realize the unfulfilled dreams of the parent in the child. And Colene could not say that this was wrong. It was certainly so much better than having her mother get drunk. So if this was what made her positive, it was best to encourage it. Colene could wear a wedding dress for a civil ceremony.
Her father had meanwhile gone off to work, but he was making the arrangements in Texas by phone. Her father had always been competent with details, and Colene had always gotten along with him well enough. She hadn’t even blamed him for his extramarital affairs, really. Who wanted to come home to a woman in an alcoholic stupor? Of course there was the nagging question whether her mother would have taken to drinking if her father had been home with her every night. Colene had never been sure which was the chicken and which the egg in this regard. Probably it had been a messy mixture, like everything else, with her father having a wandering eye and her mother a taste for drink. The two had played off each other, making each worse.
Yet it had to be recognized too that neither parent had ever abused Colene in any direct way. She had never been beaten or fondled or unreasonably punished; she had never gone hungry or inadequately clothed. Not even verbal abuse. Yet she had become suicidal. Now, as she saw her parents being so positive on her behalf, she was moved to wonder why. She had been raped, yes—but other girls got raped without turning suicidal. It had been a shock, certainly, and it had changed her opinion of herself and torpedoed her trust in people and made her extremely wary of strange men. It had left her with an abiding disgust with the whole business: the boys for doing it, herself for allowing it to happen, the society for fostering the attitude that a man was supposed to take whatever he could get away with, and that it was the girl’s fault for being the victim. She had indeed lost her innocence, and had never felt fully clean since. But now that she understood the larger picture—why was she still suicidal?
And she was still suicidal, she knew. She had not been tempted to try to kill herself since she had set out on the Virtual Mode to rejoin Darius, but she remained, in his parlance, a vessel of dolor. Any time things went wrong, she got depressive. Probably the key factor was Seqiro: within his mental ambience, she was always mostly positive, but without it she would be her natural self. She loved Darius, but she needed Seqiro. She was artificially propped up by the support of the group she had found. By the hive, as Burgess saw it. She needed the hive as much as he did.
So it had to be her family. She had not been conscious of the stress at first, but after the rape she needed the support of a strong family, and it simply wasn’t there. Her father was mostly physically absent, and her mother mostly mentally absent. So Colene had wound down, down, into her own private hell, because there had been nothing to stop her. No real family, no close friends.
But now she had friends, on the Virtual Mode. And now her parents were trying to do what they had not done before, being there for her. Rather late, and almost pitiful in their determined sincerity, but they did mean well. It was not their fault that they hardly knew how.
So she would wear her wedding dress, and carry the flowers, Nona would have to make Darius a formal suit. They would go through the motions, to give her parents a memory picture to sustain them when Colene was gone again.
Her father called: it had been arranged, in Wichita Falls, just across the border in Texas. The caterer would have it ready tomorrow afternoon, Saturday.
Caterer? “Mother, what is going on?”
“For the reception, dear. There is always a reception after a wedding.”
“Not for a civil service!”
“Well, there will be a nondenominational minister. We couldn’t arrange a Catholic wedding, on such short notice.”
They couldn’t arrange a Catholic wedding regardless of the notice, because they were an extremely poor excuse for a Catholic family, and Darius had no truck with any Earthly religion. But what were they trying for?
Colene realized that she had to get to the bottom of this. She could have Seqiro pry it out of her mother’s mind, but that didn’t seem quite fair. It was better to make her mother be open. “Exactly what are you planning, Mother?”
“Well, we thought a nice church ceremony, with music, and a photographer—”
“A photographer! That’s only for a fancy full-dress social event! And a church—music—”
“It is all being taken care of. No need to worry.”
“But the expense must be ruinous!”
“Oh, please, Colene, we only want what is best for you. We want you to be married in style.”
Colene opened her mouth to protest this disaster, but saw her mother’s strained face and realized that she, Colene, was on the verge of parent abuse. She would be here such a brief time, and her folks wanted to make the most of it. How could she blame them? Perhaps this was their way to sublimate the romance that had been lost in their own marriage. They wanted their daughter to have a romantic wedding. No matter what.
She felt tears. It was touching, in its inadequate way. A brave show now, instead of emotional support back when she had needed it. Her parents just didn’t know how to relate. “Thank you, Mother.”
Then she was distracted by something Darius and Seqiro had done. Her mouth pursed in an O of belated appreciation. Males would be males, and the man and stallion were doing something naughty. They had found the earful of punks of who had beaten up Darius the first time he visited Earth. All because one of them had given him the finger, and he, thinking it to be a polite greeting, had returned it. He could have died, if Colene hadn’t found him in the ditch near her house and helped him. That had been their first encounter, the beginning of the restoration of Colene’s desire to live. But no thanks at all to the punks, because Darius had been looking for Colene anyway, and had not intended trouble for anyone. Colene had had to go to dangerous trouble to get back the key he required to return to his Mode. The punks had stolen it from him, not knowing its nature. The punks deserved whatever they got.
She watched the picture she culled from Seqiro, really enjoying it. The punks drove by the hangout of the Chain Gang and one of them gave a gang member a wicked finger. Another mooned them. Plus a verbal insult or two. Exactly as she had fantasized it for her revenge on the rapists, Seqiro had drawn it from her mind and made it come true, in a fashion. Soon the chase was on—and Seqiro let the punk driver go. The punks would have to get out of it whatever way they could. They had just about the same chance they had given Darius, for the same offense.
But the Chain Gang was not a collection of idle youths seeking incidental thrills. They took their honor seriously. They radioed ahead, and a barricade was put across the street ahead of the fleeing car. The youths, knowing better than to stop, tried to go through it—and nail-studded boards punctured their tires. They were lucky they didn’t roll over.
They piled out of the car as it slowed to a stop. But the cyclists were already there, swinging their mean chains. They weren’t out to kill, just to make a demonstration. They were good at that sort of thing. It would take the punks time to recover physically, and longer emotionally, and some of the scars would be with them for life. It would also be some time before anybody else tried to aggravate the Chain Gang, knowing the consequence. That was okay; Colene believed that Slick, the man whose abused niece Colene had helped rescue, had come from the Chain Gang in his younger days, and Colene liked Slick despite his profession.