Veronika has a minion!

Republic the Iceeci

Owner: Molly
Art: [x"] by Ageless.

Ilive with my sister. My husband is a soldier for the Russian army, and has been away for many months, and so I have no choice - but we do not get along, my sister and I. She has always been in love with my husband, you see. This had been the case even before I met him; she had admired him from afar, as some sort of unattainable idol. That all changed when he took an interest in me. I suppose she felt that if he liked me, he would like her better. It took months of his ignoring her subtle - and then increasingly bold - advances for her to realize that she would get nowhere with him, so long as I still wanted to be with him.

As of late, I am questioning whether he's truly worth all this hostility. I've written him countless letters, but he returns none of them. He makes no attempt to contact me, sends no word of when he might return. I know he is safe, for the word would have come from other sources had he been injured or killed - and so, I can only conclude that he is deliberately creating this stalemate between us, this break in communication.

Still, what she did infuriated me. She could have had any man in the world; she didn't have to choose him. When we were younger, any boy who had so much as spoken to me would meet Is and never again show so much as a glimmer of interest in me. I saw the way they looked at her. Can you imagine how that made me feel? I suppose I'm just sensitive about it. I've never been the pretty one. Even in school, before Is could even walk, I was never the center of attention.

We went to Catholic school, in a convent that our parents shipped us off to because they were too poor and too lazy to do anything else. Our peers were mostly orphans, for the nuns ran an orphanage next door. When I was twelve, my best friend left on a scholarship from a fancy art high school. Emilia and I had fallen together as children in mutual weirdness; neither of us were beautiful, neither orphans. We understood each other; we saw the world the same way. Losing her was like losing a part of myself. I didn't know what to do; I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep. I played my violin, read my books. She wrote me letters of her exciting life and the friends she was making, the things she was doing. I wrote her letters that I never sent, telling her about my days. They all ended up crumpled and burned in the fireplace, for deep down I knew that she had better things to do than to read my repetitive letters about a life she had outgrown.

When Emilia came back, we were sixteen and she was different. She told us secrets of shopping in department stores, of boys and their desires, of love between women, of things to which we had never before been exposed. I was fascinated. But so were all the other girls.

Suddenly, all the girls wanted to be friends with Emilia. She was still kind to me, but we were never the same. We had always been on the outside together, and now, I was alone. It was months before I confronted her. I told her that it wasn't fair, this defenestration of everything that our friendship had been. She told me she missed me, too, but had been too nervous to say anything. She said I'd changed, also; she told me I'd become less sociable, that I kept to myself, that I'd lost so much weight. I told her that the other girls were scared of me, thought I was strange.

Emilia shocked me by confiding that she was jealous. Jealous, of me! She'd plunged into her new world with abandon, but once she had entered into it, she found it impossible to get out. She longed for those days when she could read her books and draw in her sketchbook. At first her stories had been real, but as she became disillusioned with that life, she began to spend more time alone and simply made excuses. Half the stories and stories and secrets she'd spilled to the hungry girls upon her return had been lies. She'd felt compelled to tell them, but now they were swallowing her slowly. Eventually they would catch up with her and drown her. It was nice, this heart to heart, but I still felt between us a rift that I feared could not be mended.

When the time came for the Carnival masquerade, Emilia concocted a plan. "We're jealous of each other, but should we be? Let's find out, for sure." Emilia made her entrance to the ballroom with a beautiful feathered mask in her hand. I felt, forgive my metaphor, like the ugly duckling waddling along behind a gorgeous swan. Every head in the room turned to look at her. She breezed through the room, sprinkling formalities and nods. She put her mask on and whisked me to the powder room, in which she revealed her plan.

"You'll wear my mask and dress, and I'll wear yours. Everyone will think you're me, and I'm you, and you can dance with as many boys as you'd like while I sit right over there, reading my book." She pulled a copy of The Underground Man from her purse and tapped me on the shoulder with it. "Are you ready?"

Once a year, under the guise of Carnival, I lived in Emilia's mask, and she in mine. We both loved it. I got my limelight and she got her solitude, and at the end of the evening, we were ourselves, again. We went to university but continued our tradition, never letting our false personas slip. That is, until I met my husband. It was our third year at Carnival. He was an American, and he thought I was someone else, this famous, beautiful girl of whom he had heard so many rumors. We danced all night. At the end of the evening, when it came time to meet Emilia in the powder room to switch our clothes and masks, I didn't want to go. I showed him who I really was, expecting him to yell at me for deceiving him, or storming out in disgust. Instead, he simply asked, "Why?"

When I had explained it all to him, he touched my face lightly. "It's a clever plan, but there's just one flaw. You aren't an ugly duckling anymore."