The Bride Wore My Nightmares Chapter 01
There was once a girl who bullied me through my entire adolescence.
She probably never dreamed, not even in her worst nightmares, that the girl she used to grind her heel into, the girl she used to force to drink toilet water, would one day pay her back tenfold — and teach her the real meaning of humiliation.
All because she fell in love with my brother — Ethan — and thought she could waltz right through the door of the Callahan house.
…
Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. Ethan texted me to say that he and the girl he’d been seeing had made it official, and that he was bringing her home the next day for us to meet.
I was so happy I nearly jumped out of my skin.
Ethan had always been my hero. Handsome, brilliant, and fiercely protective of me from the time we were kids. For years I’d been praying he’d find a girlfriend soon — someone else to look after him, to love him.
But it took him until his second year of law school before that oblivious dork finally found himself a girl.
I was thrilled. I went through the whole house top to bottom, tidying up.
Mom, on the other hand, seemed weighed down by something.
She said Ethan’s girlfriend had dropped out after only community college, that her education wasn’t remotely on par with his, and that the two of them were bound to clash over all sorts of things down the road.
“Mom, a degree isn’t the same as character. You have to trust Ethan’s judgment,” I said, disagreeing.
The words had barely left my mouth when the doorbell rang.
“Mom, Dad, we’re here.”
I heard Ethan’s voice from my room, threw on my shoes, and rushed toward the foyer.
“Mr. and Mrs. Callahan, since it’s my first time coming over, I brought you a little something. I hope you’ll like it.”
A voice so sweet it was practically dripping honey rang out at the door.
I froze in place.
That voice. There was no way in this lifetime I could ever mistake it.
…
My mind was yanked back to a summer in high school.
The girls’ bathroom on the third floor of my school.
I was pressed into the corner of the innermost stall, hemmed in by a wall of girls.
“Think you’re so smart, huh? Think you know so much, huh?”
The ringleader grabbed a fistful of my hair, spit flying, reeking of her cheap perfume, all landing on my face.
My scalp burned like fire and tears kept spilling down, but all I dared do was stammer back, my voice barely above a whisper: “The… the teacher told me to say it…”
“So the teacher tells you to speak and you speak? What are you, his lapdog?”
She yanked off my cardigan, and the rest of them descended on me like I was some toy at a swap meet, ripping at what I had left — top, skirt, bra, underwear — every piece stripped off and thrown onto the filthy tile floor.
My arms and legs were pinned so tight I couldn’t move. I could only sob and beg them, no, no, please — but in the end they stripped me bare, exposed to every one of them.
“What the hell are you crying for? Your tears are getting all over my Jimmy Choos!”
That still wasn’t enough for her. She clamped her hand on the back of my head, mashed my face into the toe of her shoe, and forced me to wipe it clean with the half of my face that wasn’t yet caked in filth.
They didn’t stop until the bell for next period rang.
But I had no face left to walk back into that classroom — my clothes were shredded, both my cheeks slapped raw, and every strand of my hair, every crevice between my toes, was streaked with whatever had been pooling on that bathroom floor, water or God knows what else…
And that whole humiliation — it was all because during English Literature earlier that day, I’d pushed back on her interpretation of a passage during class discussion.
— And that girl was the very same one standing beside Ethan right now.
She had her arm looped sweetly through his, her exquisite face beaming with a smile so happy it practically spilled over.
Vanessa Whitaker.
A name I would never forget as long as I lived.
I stood frozen in the doorway, unable to speak. Ethan was the first to notice me, and he waved with a smile.
“Come on, what are you standing there for?”
My feet felt like lead. Step by step I dragged myself forward.
Vanessa lifted her head too, that painfully polite smile hanging at the corner of her lips. “This must be your little sister? She’s so pretty.”