The Fly House (The UtopYA Collection) Read Free Page B

list, Maeve was still fascinated that the call was happening at all.  She had assumed that her parents were going to pull a fast one, quietly overlook their only daughter on Freezer Day, scurrying over to the Archive to get themselves good and frosted before Maeve got wind that she was written out of the will and out of their future.  It only seemed right, since they’d managed to ignore her existence fairly well throughout her life, starting even from the moment she’d been born.  Her parents had immediately handed her over, after the slew of new mother photographs that would appear on national magazine covers, to the first of several caregivers.
    "I want all that graffiti on your body completely covered," her mother went on. "And you need to remove all that garbage you put in your face —"
    "Why?  Do piercings screw with the icebox?"
    "It's not a cryogenic facility.  They use Profanyl.  Gases."  Her mother groaned.  "And don't say screw, Maeve.  It's so unrefined."
    "That's because I'm a diamond in the rough."
    "We're going to be dramatic this morning, is that it?"
    Instead of arguing for the greater good, Maeve took the low road.  "No, dahling , we shan't."
    Another sigh.  Maeve thought that even her mother's exhales were crafted to be high snobbery.
    "Promise me that you'll arrive looking decent, just this once.  Your usual costumes make us look as though we raised you in a circus.  It embarrasses your father."
    Maeve decided to ignore the whole costume remark.  After all, her mother shouldn't throw stones.  Some of her own couture made it seem as though she could balance beach balls on her nose.
    " I wouldn't dream of it, lovey ,” Maeve said.  “I promise, I'll wear my best fishnets.  No snags."
    "You're making me cross on purpose."
    "Cross, you say?  I sooo enjoy a good row out of you, Caroline.  Let's have at it, shall we, dahling ?"
    "Maybe this was a mistake."
    That drew Maeve up short.
    "By mistake," she said, her tone turning to the metal she often used as a shield,  "do you mean shelling out of your beloved Midas pile, to popsicle your only daughter, or are you speaking in the broader sense, that your only daughter's entire presence is a mistake?  Just remember, mother, I didn't ask to come into this world.  You’re the one who chose to have a child... dahling ."
    She meant to sound like an ungrateful bitch.  Acknowledgement was a childhood war she'd lost with her parents long ago.  She'd spent years pawned off on nannies and when she outgrew them, she was dumped in her wing of the mansion to grow into a woman on her own.  As if raising a child to maturity could be done as easily as stashing a Poinsettia in a closet.
    It would have been a miracle if Maeve turned out any other way than she did —fearless, clever, skin like hardwood—except that her parents knew just how to get under it.  She was their female Pinocchio, a symbol rather than a real girl.  But luckily, she'd finally learned how to play their puppet, pulling back on the strings in a way that supplied a dance on both ends.
    Her mother sighed.  "Don't forget.  Five p.m.  The Archive in Lancaster."
    "I got it, Mother," Maeve sighed back.  "Be Punctual. Be dull. Dress like the other sheep."
    "Dressing properly is not dull, Maeve."
    "If you say so."
    Once the call flat lined to a dial tone, Maeve flicked off the phone and lay down on her nest of blankets to think about whether or not she would actually show up at the Archive tomorrow.  It would be freaky to fall asleep for seventeen years, even freakier if she never woke up at all.  But when Maeve really looked at where she was in her life with a tight lens, the view wasn't that great.  The Archive could be a perfect escape hatch. 
    At twenty-two years old, Maeve had flipped off her family and their money and decided to make it on her own.  It hadn't worked out so well.  She'd succeeded in proving her parents mostly right—that a trust fund baby was helpless