On the cold bathroom tiles of the Vale mansion, eight-year-old Eloin Vale sat with her tiny hands trembling. Her bare feet were numb against the marble. Blonde hair fell out in soft clumps around her like dead petals. In front of her, Miss Calva froze, her pale eyes widening. The hairbrush slipped from the woman’s fingers and hit the floor with a sharp clack. Behind them, a man in a thousand-dollar suit stood in the doorway. Ariston Vale, Eloin’s father, stared as if the world had just ended. The color drained from his face. His jaw dropped. He looked like a man who had just seen a ghost.
Before anyone moved, before anyone breathed, everything that had brought them to this moment hung between them like a storm cloud. Years of choices, signatures, and willful blindness pressed in on the room.
Before we get to what the doctor would later find buried in Eloin’s scalp, you have to understand how things got this bad.
Earlier, the bathroom had been quiet except for the soft rasp of a brush through hair and the uneven sound of a child trying not to cry. Eloin sat on the tiled floor, knees pulled up, blonde hair falling out in clumps. Every bristle of the brush was packed with strands. Her hands shook as she lifted it toward her head. One stroke, then another.
Pain shot across her scalp like fire. She bit her lip hard, tasting blood. Crying was forbidden. Miss Calva hated crying. Crying meant weakness. Weakness meant punishment.
More hair came out. It slid down her shoulders, drifted to the floor. Eloin stared at a clump in her palm, pale and fragile.
“Why does this keep happening?” she whispered.
In the mirror above the double sink, she saw herself: bald patches scattered across her scalp, angry red marks that looked like burns, shiny and inflamed. She reached up and touched one gently. It hurt so much she saw stars.
A shadow moved under the door. Heavy footsteps, slow and deliberate, crossed the hallway. The doorknob turned.
Miss Calva walked in without knocking. Tall and angular, with cold gray eyes and lips pressed into a permanent thin line, she looked at the hair scattered across the bathroom floor and then at the brush in Eloin’s hand.
“What did you do?”
“I just brushed it,” Eloin said quickly.
“You’re careless,” Miss Calva replied.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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