"Do I look like you?" I asked, although she had told me I did so many times. "My father, maybe?"
"A bit like both of us," she said. "Didn't you see the pictures our artists have drawn of you?" We had many of them, but my face painted in oil wasn't satisfactory. What if they just lied to please me?
"You have your father's eyes," she said. "Ocean blue, almost like the pearly waves of the pond…" My mother shrugged, and averted her eyes from the window. She did it abruptly, as if she'd seen a ghost there. She just didn't want to talk about the Pond of Pearls. "I'm really sorry, Carmilla," she said. "It's all for the best."
"I don't need you to tell me this is for the best," I said. "I just need you to tell me that I'm beautiful."
"Oh, God," she almost shrieked, her eyes moist. "You have no idea how beautiful you are. If it wasn't for this curse—"
"I want you to tell me I am the most beautiful girl in Styria," I said. I guess my need for appreciation had suddenly kicked in. Aggressively. The desire of being beautiful crawled up my spine. It messed with my brain. I had been tolerating my curse, suppressing my emotions, and lying to myself for seventeen years. The anger had suddenly surfaced and reddened my soft cheeks.
My mother, who was about to hug me affectionately, stopped suddenly. Something about the way I'd said my last sentence worried her.
"Tell me, Mother, that I am the most beautiful of them all." I nodded at the girls playing outside in the castle's garden, those girls who saw their reflections on a daily basis, those girls who combed their hair by the pond for hours, those who pinched their cheeks to show ripeness and youthfulness through the redness of their face. Those girls I was never going to be like. "Tell me, Mother," I demanded.
Come to think of it, this was my first brush with the darkness in my soul, which surfaced many years later. I don't think you have any idea what it felt like.
"Fairest," my mother said, doing her best to hide her worries.
"Fairest?" I asked.
"You are the fairest of them all, Carmilla," she said, her smile old and wrinkled and dry, like early autumn leaves.
"Fairest?" I repeated. "What does that mean, fairest? I want to be the most beautiful of them all." I pointed at the girls gathering by the pond as I stepped forward. I waved at the girls who had suddenly become my enemies, those girls who could do things I couldn't, things any seventeen-year-old girl should've been doing. The truth was that I didn't want to be the most beautiful. I just wanted to be normal. "I don't want to be fairest!"
"Carmilla." My mother hiccupped against the tears promising to leave her eyes. Theodora Goldstein's eyes were flooded with empathy that didn't quench my thirst to be the most beautiful of them all.
"Tell me I'm the most beautiful of them all, Mother." I wasn't myself anymore. I was the beast of anger and unfairness in me. I was all my darkness. I was all that I wasn't supposed to be: angry, envious, and hurt. "Tell it to me every day. I don't care if you're lying to me. I don't care if I am ugly. If I am paying the price to keep all of Styria happy then this is the least you can do."
I found myself running into her arms and crying myself to death. It felt better that way. The weakness I cherished in my mother's long arms helped the beast in me to rest in sleep. The beast inside was in pain. A pain I couldn't explain myself. Again, I don't think I understood completely by then.
As I dozed off in her arms, feeling the need to crawl back in her womb and hide away from this unfair world, several apple trees caught my eye through the window. It made me feel I hated apples the most. For those silly fruits to grow, for those silly red things to bring prosperity to Styria, I had to pay too much of a price. And by looking at them, all I could see was the color of blood the vampires had sucked out of the Karnsteins.
***
To this day, I still respect my mother for not succumbing to my insecurity and wanting to be called "most beautiful of them all." Somehow, the phrase "fairest of them all" rang better with her, and I accepted it eventually.
I began watching other girls closer, noticing their beauty—or ugliness—and realized how much it affected their lives. To be honest, I envied some of them. But I also pitied most of them; girls who were average looking and had lesser chances and opportunities in life because of their looks. I thought it wasn't fair how some boys preferred the beauties to them without knowing who these girls really were. For a girl who was never going to see her own reflection, I felt occasionally blessed when I realized that I could imagine myself the most beautiful in the world and never have to face the contradicting truth.