On the ninth day of her confinement, Dad came into June’s bedroom without knocking and sat on the bed, which June had just made. She saw him look around, taking in the newly arranged furniture, and dared to wonder if he would compliment her on her cleanliness.
“It smells in here,” he said, his lip curling, and June went to open the window. “Like something metallic, some sort of chemical.”
June resisted the urge to put her nose to her underarm. “I don’t smell anything,” she said.
“You wouldn’t. You’re in here all the time,” Dad said, then seemed to remember what he was doing in his disappointing daughter’s room. “Listen, there’s something we need to go over. And before I even start, don’t be interrupting me with your crying or your eye rolling. Believe me when I say that I’ve had enough of that shit from you, June. I have had enough, and I will not stand for it any longer. All of that from before, it ends now. You are here, and you have a duty to become a responsible young woman like your mother and I taught you to be.”
June said nothing.
“Well?” Dad barked. “Is that understood, little lady?”
“What is it you were going to tell me?” June answered, her insides devoid of any emotion. With all the dreams she’d been having the last few nights, she hardly even understood that this was reality. How could she get so much sleep at night lately but wake up feeling even more exhausted? She didn’t understand it. June was scared by how the world felt—nothing felt how it was supposed to.
“Robert took me out for a drink after work the other day,” Dad started, and June’s fingers curled into her palms, the deadness inside warming painfully to life. “He was decent enough to ask me for my blessing, to ask for your hand in marriage.”
June stared, unblinking. “Marriage,” she repeated without meaning to. Robert, that little prick. He’d promised June not to bring that up again until she was ready. How could he think she’d go for this?
“What did you say?” June asked, fearing the answer.
Dad looked at her as if she were dim. “I told him that you had confided in me that you were waiting for him to ask,” he said, and rage filled her like hot air. “What could you ever hope to have in a husband that Robert doesn’t have? He’s got a good job, June. He’ll take care of you and your children. And of course Stewart—”
“I don’t care at all what Stewart thinks,” June yelled, surprised at herself. “I don’t want to marry Robert!”
Dad rose and stood over her and crossed his arms. “You listen to me very carefully,” he said. “You have shown us that you have absolutely no right to make your own decisions. You need to learn that your mom and I want what’s best for you.”
“You want what’s best for you!” June interjected, and the pulsing vein on his neck made her lower her voice. “You want what’s best for the business.”
“I want what’s best for everybody,” Dad said, and paced back and forth in front of June. “I thought all this time alone in here would help you come around. Maybe you need some more.”
“Please,” she said, a little too drily. “Let me live in here forever if you’re not going to let me do anything worthwhile with my life.”
“How dare you imply that starting a family isn’t worthwhile?” Dad cried out. “How would your mother feel if she heard you talk so poorly of her life? You wouldn’t be around in the first place to whine and complain if we hadn’t decided to make you, to bring you into our family.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have,” she said, and while Dad didn’t slap her, he did stop pacing and, with a dangerous silence, reached forward to grab her chin and tilt it up so she was looking at him in the face.
“You’re going to do this,” Dad said. “You’ve lost the privilege of making your own choices. You’ll thank me when you’re older and happy as a clam with your husband and children, in a nice big house that has all the modern appliances a housewife could ever want. Hell, June! You’ll probably even be able to afford for someone else to keep the place clean for you, since we all know how limited your skills are in that area.”
June thought she should cry and scream, but she was horrified at how still she was on the inside once again. It scared her. She wondered if she’d died sometime during her grounding and just didn’t know it yet.
“Now,” Dad went on, satisfied at the silence. “There’s to be an engagement party for you and Robert.”
“What?” June couldn’t believe it. “How is that possible? I haven’t even said yes yet! He hasn’t even asked me face-to-face!”
“He will in the next few days,” Dad said. “Robert is very eager to see you. He’s under the impression that you’ve been fighting off a nasty stomach flu all this time. Is your head right enough to come out, June, or does the flu need to come back for another wave?”
“You can’t make me,” she whispered. “As soon as I’m eighteen, I can leave and never come back.”
“Never mind the fact that you don’t have a penny to your name that would allow such a thing,” Dad said. “If you don’t do this, I’ll destroy that typewriter of yours. You’ll never get another one. And I’ll burn that story you’re so keen on.”
That got her, and he knew it. Her entire demeanor changed then: she went from emotionally dead and disbelieving to truly understanding. This was her life. Tears made her eyes feel heavy. The lines beneath them burned. From where she sat, she could see her story stacked clumsily on the desk.
“I can’t stress enough how important it is that Stewart and Robert never suspect you’re unhappy in any way,” Dad went on, and June couldn’t believe his nerve. “If there is one thing on this earth that Stewart refuses to take quietly, it’s being duped. He has the power to take everything away from this family.”
June realized for the first time that she didn’t even know the details about what Dad’s and Stewart’s business was, or how it worked, or why. It’d never been discussed in front of her and Mom. She had no way to know if her father was exaggerating or underplaying Stewart’s supposed ruthless side. She couldn’t personally imagine him getting upset enough for it to make any real difference if she were to break up with Robert. He never seemed like the type to blow his top.
But then June remembered how Robert had shoved her into the brick wall at the school after graduation, caused her teeth to click together and the back of her head to hurt. How, before that moment, she’d thought herself silly for ever thinking he could be a threat.
“Don’t you love me, Dad?” June asked, earnestly. She reached forward, took his big clenched fist and wrapped her hands around it. “Don’t you care at all if I’m happy? I’m your daughter!”
Dad’s face relaxed, and he sat down beside June on the bed. “Ah, Junebug,” he said, still with too much of an edge to be considered gently. “Of course I do. That’s why I have to do this for you, even if you don’t understand it. I’m making sure you’ll be happy, honey. You’ve always been so dramatic, your mother always says that, but I never really understood what she meant until recently. You love to act as though it’s the end of the world for you, when really it’s just the beginning.”
“I love to act...” she repeated, her voice cracking, barely above a whisper. “You have no idea what happiness even is, Dad. And especially not for me.”
He became rigid, pulled his hand back and stood. “You’ll thank me one day,” he said, walking out without another word and leaving June to her new room and her story and her open door. She was officially free from the isolation. Nine days, June thought in wonder. It feels like it’s been closer to a hundred.
“June,” Mom called from downstairs, as if none of this had even happened. “Your date will be here at seven tonight. Make sure to have a bath, and roll your hair first, dear!”
June ran a bath and sat in it for four hours. She spent the time thinking, allowing herself to sink into the tub as if she were a part of it. The only thing that moved were her eyes, following the bubbles as they rolled across the surface of the water before eventually thinning out and disappearing. She breathed out hard, hoping to expel some of the poison she felt inside. When she became light-headed from it, she still felt like she was rotting from the inside out.
She didn’t roll her hair into curlers when she came out. She didn’t put on any lipstick. She didn’t smile at Mom and Dad when she came down the stairs, didn’t make eye contact with Fred in fear that she’d kill him with her bare hands. This was all his fault, really, if you looked at it a certain way. June decided that it was much more Fred’s fault than her own. Yes, that was better.
Robert looked shocked at June’s appearance only momentarily when he arrived. “That flu really took it out of you, huh, kiddo?” he said with disgusting concern, taking it upon himself to push a lock of hair back from her forehead with his finger. “We can just do something low-key tonight, get a few bottles of ginger ale, and maybe rent a rowboat at the park.”
June saw Mom’s eyes sparkle as she slipped Dad a knowing look, and June realized that Robert would be proposing to her tonight, on a rowboat where she wouldn’t be able to go anywhere. She looked at Dad, who seemed to be waiting to give her a quick little wink as he set his hand on her back, leading her to the door where Robert stood with his hand extended.
“Have a great time tonight, kids,” Dad said. “Well, I guess I shouldn’t call you kids anymore, not with this girl fresh out of high school and ready for next steps!”
June looked back over her shoulder at her father, and the sight of her face caused his to falter just in the slightest.
“Is everything all right?” Robert asked once they were in the car. “You seem...off.”
June looked over at Robert, an unnaturally wide smile awakening on her face. “What could be wrong?” she said, her voice high.
He smiled back, a little nervously if June was seeing things right. It gave her pleasure to see him in discomfort. She spent the rest of the drive imagining being his wife. She could mix trace amounts of laxatives into his morning coffee, she could rub some cooking oil onto the edge of any stairs in their house. She could use a needle to poke holes through the soles of his shoes so his feet would get wet every time it rained. She could pretend that cooking was her entire pride and joy, and then purposefully make things that were bland and off, rotten ingredients eaten with a smile.
If she had to be a wife, June told herself, feeling at least a touch of comfort at last, that was exactly the kind she would be. She would stop brushing her teeth. She would eat with her mouth open. She would drink in the daytime and pass gas in restaurants and let their dirty stupid children wander into the street to play. At these thoughts, June smiled a little, and Robert instantly put his hand on her knee.
“We’re here,” he said, and June realized that the car was parked.
They were just down the street from the park, and they could buy the ginger ales at the drugstore on the way. June held Robert’s hand and said nothing, letting him pull her around this way and that, having no reaction to anything he said. But of course he took no notice, just kept talking and talking about things that made June want to die from boredom. She picked a cherry cola instead of a ginger ale, but Robert gently took it from her hand and put it back.
“That’ll upset your stomach,” he said with a little laugh. “The ginger will help—it really will.”
Her fingers itched to break the bottle over his head and then cut his throat with it, or her own. Either would be satisfying.
“Thank you,” she said sweetly, her unnatural smile beginning to make her face ache. “You are just the smartest man alive, Robert. The greatest to ever live. How did I ever become so lucky as to have you as mine?”
He laughed it off, but June could see that flicker of discomfort that she was hoping for. She let it wash over her heart, a grim and beautiful pleasure, and she let herself become hungry for more.
Later, once they were in the middle of the pond and the soda bottles were empty, Robert asked June if she would marry him. “Your dad already said it’s okay,” he finished with, as if that would somehow blow away everything they’d said about it in the past. June wondered if he knew that her parents were already planning the engagement party. She wondered if he had anything to do with it.
June gave a cold and quick nod, grabbing the ring out of his hands and putting it on herself. It was so much lighter than she could have imagined. If she were to strike somebody with her fist, though, it’d cut the skin right open. Then she crossed her arms over herself in the cold, sniffed, and mentioned that her stomach was beginning to hurt again.
“I think I just remembered,” she said as he pulled the rowboat up to the pond’s dock. “I’m allergic to ginger.”
“What a thing to forget!” Robert exclaimed, wrapping his arm around her as if she needed help making it to the car. “You should lie down right away, darling.”
Darling. She despised the word more than any other she could think of.
When they got back home, June’s parents were waiting there with Stewart. They threw confetti and popped champagne and started discussing the details for the upcoming engagement party. It sounded like they were going to be putting a great deal of money into it, inviting a whole lot of people from the business, since Robert worked for his father. Every time June tried to imagine what it might feel like to have a party that fancy thrown in her honor, there was a funny magnetic pull in her head that made it feel like there was a needle lodged in her brain.
After the celebrating was over and Stewart and Robert went home and Mom and Dad had gone to bed drunk, June retreated to her room and dug her diary out of its hiding place.
Tonight I was pledged to become Mrs. Robert Dennings, she wrote in her loveliest handwriting. There will be a grand party.
She started crying then, feeling like she couldn’t even begin to explain how she really felt about it all, not unless she wanted to fill the rest of her diary and kill her already-weak wrists, which were still recovering from her typing binges. So instead, she let herself cry and finished the entry with just a single line before throwing the damn book back into the snow boot and getting into bed with all her clothes on.
I’ve been murdered. This is what it feels like to be dead.