Obedience
The Guild Book One: Chapter One
This is the beginning of the novel Obedience, The Guild Book One by Nichole M. Willden.
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Emma halted as soon as she trudged into the house. Leader was home. She could feel his presence. Whenever he was home from prolonged business trips, he was a cancer that took hold and metastasized immediately, pressing the infection of his presence into the rest of the House.
Fingering the black-dyed tips of her formerly blonde hair and tugging at the shortened hemline of her school skirt, Emma tried to slip past his office to the stairs without being seen. There was little chance he was away from his office. He seemed to reside there and, in the brief periods when he was at home, he never seemed to sleep. The stairs that represented her escape seemed much farther away than usual, as if Leader’s large presence forced the building to expand.
“Emma,” his melodic voice, at once hypnotizing and reproachful, caught her before she managed three steps. Her wide blue eyes were devoured in his gaze. Her body stopped abruptly and she turned toward him—a sunflower to its god.
“Sir,” she whispered. Words tripped over themselves in her mind as she attempted to find an acceptable greeting. “Welcome home.”
The left brow slowly rose on his forehead, the only movement in him. Emma was small and weak and insignificant in front of his towering scrutiny. Rather than allow the sensation to sweep her away, she rose to her full height—a foot south of him—and squared her shoulders. Blue eyes met penetrating black.
“It’s important to blend in here,” he reminded her in that same stern melody. He did not raise his voice at all, but he somehow seemed to shout. Her fists tried to clench but she restrained them.
Selecting carefully from her trained vocabulary, she answered, “I do not understand the importance of sitting in a blender with these people.” Informative, complete, and hardly defiant at all. Emma was pleased.
Leader was not.
“You know this is where I have the Family stationed. So, regardless of your ignorance, you will do as I say.” Also informative. And not just a little threatening.
When words tried to escape in a volley back at him, she resisted. It would never do to get him angry. She had only ever seen him at a simmer.
His gaze did not so much as flicker away, but Emma found she could no longer meet it directly. Instead, she was drawn to the black hair above his unyielding brow, dancing slightly in the breeze from an overhead vent. The same gust rippled the fabric of his gray silk shirt and brought the clean scent of linens and aftershave to Emma’s nose. His black suit jacket hung loosely on the back of his desk chair, not in motion and yet somehow as sinister as the rest of him. Clothing that knew, somehow, they belonged to Leader and, therefore, could never tamely hang in a closet or drape on a chair. Although his jacket was off, his narrow gray tie was still in place, and the thin leather belt in his belt loops. He looked like a man about to descend on a quavering boardroom rather than at rest from business.
“What is it you will do?” Leader asked, snagging her gaze once more with that seductive, venomous tone.
At first, she did not comprehend his meaning, but then she realized it was a trick question. There was only one kind of answer to a question like this: “I will Obey,” she said in perfect semblance of humility.
He nodded and looked away, forgetting her immediately. He settled himself in his desk chair and opened his laptop with a practiced lift of his perfectly clean fingers. Emma remained on his threshold a few moments more, entranced as she always was by Leader. There was no way to ignore such a man. A total eclipse that casts a shadow for miles across the ground could not demand as much attention as he did. His shadow eclipsed her courage.
When at last she tore herself away, his distracted tone called her back.
“Have Ilene bleach that atrocious color out of your hair. Adjust your hemline to a respectable length. And strip that polish from your fingers. You’re supposed to blend in to the suburban Utah culture, not front a gothic rock band.” He did not even have the courtesy to raise his gaze from his computer.
“Yes, Leader,” she whispered and gave her fingernails a quick glance. Before he could say more, she hurried away, her steps heavy but somehow soundless, as though he had stolen away even her will to be noticed.
She moved several steps down the hall and leaned back against the wall with a long breath. She fingered her rough split-ends and mourned the loss of the harsh black color. It was completely wrong for her skin tone and, more importantly, for her superficial Utah cover. But it had been a mark of defiance, a little pin in the voodoo doll of Leader’s captivity of her. But, like all things, Leader removed it from her grip. Theft of a bottle of hair dye stolen from an unfortunate girl’s open locker was not even Emma’s crime. The crime was that Leader had given her an image to maintain, and blonde was part of that image.
She pushed off the wall and moved toward the stairs. As she suspected, no one noticed her. Even Scott, Emma’s direct superior who was seated on the steps to the second floor, did not look up as she approached. He leaned forward, his forearms on his knees, with an expression that suggested he was waiting for his doom. In his right hand was a pink slip detention paper. This was the kind of paper given at their school to misbehaving students who were expected to return it signed by their parents. Emma did not envy Scott’s forthcoming conversation with Leader. Trouble at school did not compare to trouble with Leader.
Emma slipped past him, then crept down the hall to the storage closet to find bleach and nail polish remover.
The acrid smell of bleach surrounded Emma when she was finally permitted to escape to her private room. She closed the door behind her, and was alone at last. Breathing in the sanctuary on a pained sigh, she allowed her eyes to slide shut.
A full day at school of being jostled in halls, sneered at in the lockers, and generally ignored in class took its toll on her each day. She always came home exhausted. Leader in the House, though, could drain her energy reserves in moments. Yet still she had to attend to her homework, chores, and possibly an evening training session before she could climb into the very enticing bed across the room.
Emma had always had her own bed, but she never had a room of her own before the Family moved to Utah. It was by no means something Emma would have designed herself, but she did not care because it was private. The bed was four-poster glossy white with yellow satin sheets and sunflower bedding. The vanity dresser was also glossy white. It held a mirror framed in white with sunflowers stenciled in yellow around the edges. Photos clung to the mirror with tape and tacky, as if she had placed them there herself. She hadn’t. Emma did not recognize anyone in the photos. She had no friends; she moved too often to make any meaningful connections in school, and she got along with no one in the Family.
Beside the window, which looked out onto the landscaped front yard and the quiet street, were framed pieces of childish artwork that bore her young signature, though she was relatively certain she was not the artist. The only recollection she had of bringing home artwork was when she had drawn a portrait in kindergarten and brought it home to excitedly share it with Leader.
“See?” she had crowed to him, dashing into his office and waving the picture around excitedly. He had been on his red phone, the corded one that sat on his desktop, completely out of place among the sterile white of everything else. “I drew our house. See? The teacher said she loved it! See? See?”
But Leader slapped a hand over the receiver and shouted, “Amos, get this child out of here!” He looked at Emma then and glanced at the paper in her hand. “Do you think I’m interested in your being an artist? I’m not.” And without another glance, he returned to his phone call.
Emma slid the picture behind her back and allowed herself to be led away by gentle Amos. He had complimented the picture and said he would hang it on the fridge, but she answered stoically, “I’m not interested in being an artist.”
Despite her comment, Amos had hung the portrait up. It taunted Emma for several weeks before it was removed from the refrigerator. She never saw it again. She never asked about it again. After that, she never brought another art project home; she threw them away at the school door.
There was also a scrapbook between bookends on her plain white desk full of photos she had not taken or arranged. And a shelf with several trophies she had not earned. In some ways, Emma felt that decorating the room with trophies, artwork, and photos was taking their job of “blending in” much too far. No one outside the Family would ever be in her room. The pretense, rather than being homey, was isolating. But Emma ignored her discomfort at the duplicity in favor of having a space of her own.
She tossed her backpack on the chair by her desk and, even though it was well made, it gave an ominous creak under the weight of her textbooks. She was used to the weight of a private-school education, but her dainty little chair was not. She sighed and flopped down on the bed. There was no time, really, for lying around. According to the clock on her bedside table, it was already after four. Monique would be home at five and would expect a favorable report of finished homework and completed chores. But it was impossible for Emma to move now. Leader’s presence in the House weighed her down more than even her books could.
She was so heavily disappointed! Dyeing her hair, though risky and unnecessary, had been a choice she had made for herself. True, she had done it with an ill-conceived plan of striding in to show it off to Monique, with the full knowledge that it was temporary. Emma never considered the possibility Leader would be home to see it first. The prank was for Monique. She was the person who had snapped at Emma this morning during breakfast, “You do not need to make friends at school!”
Monique’s lack of understanding, her completely unsympathetic approach to Emma’s isolation at school, incensed Emma. The bile of rebellion caught in her throat and she seethed all the way to school, and all the way through her first and second periods. All she could think about was how she had confided in Monique that she hated her new school, and she did not feel she belonged there.
“I have not made a single friend!” But Monique had obviously not cared about that. Black hair and fingernail polish had been a statement, an attempt to control her own isolation. If she had seen it, Monique would have quirked her famous eyebrow—a portentous sign of imminent danger—but she would have probably let it go with an eyeroll and a “suit yourself.” Leader’s reaction was crushing because he did not even recognize it as mutiny.
Emma’s cell phone rang. She sat up in alarm; it never rang. The phone was an accessory Leader had given her to complete the extremely fake image they attempted to create in their new city. She was meant to be the rich, privileged, but ultimately well-behaved daughter of a wealthy businessman. Modest, religious, and Obedient. Obedience was her only responsibility in the Family, but it taxed her every moment.
Confused, she got off her bed and walked over to her backpack on the chair. She retrieved the ringing phone from the right pocket. There were Family orders about cell phone use, but Emma could not remember offhand, because it was knowledge she had never needed before.
She studied the phone, looking for an answer button. There were no words to indicate which button was the right one, so she touched the screen over the green button shaped like a phone.
She pulled her phone up to her ear and spoke hesitantly. “Hello?”
“Hi. Is this Emma Harris?”
The caller was a young woman, but not anyone in the Family. She had a valley accent. As a scholar of languages and accents, Emma could hear the tiny nuances that identified her location. She was a Utah County girl through and through. But Emma did not know who she was.
“Who’s asking?”
“Oh, sorry!” The girl’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “I would have texted, but my mother made me call.” Then back to her conversational tone, “I’m Cara Winters. I’m in your biology class.”
Emma could not verify the girl’s story. She did not know any names of the girls at school because she mostly avoided them. Whenever she tried to have a conversation with kids at school, she became flustered. She never knew what to say. The topics they discussed never seemed to have anything to do with her life. They talked about movies and extracurricular activities, parties, and crushes. She understood nothing except the Family’s expectations of her.
“How did you get this number?”
Cara answered unconcernedly, “I got it off the official school roster. My mother volunteers in the office occasionally. I know it’s a gross violation of your privacy, but I really needed to ask you a question.”
The idea that it was a violation of her privacy meant nothing to Emma, because there was never any privacy in her world. She was intrigued. This girl’s question had been important enough she had asked her mom to go through the trouble of looking up her number on the school roster. Even though Emma hadn’t known her number was on a school roster, finding it had shown some ingenuity. Of course, ingenuity was dangerous for people at the bottom of Leader’s chain of power.
Cautiously, Emma asked, “What’s your question?” She glanced toward the door, but if anyone was listening from outside, she could not tell. She comforted herself with the idea that Leader was safely ensconced in his office downstairs.
“I’m having a birthday party tomorrow night at my house and I wanted to know if you wanted to come.”
Emma was shocked. She knew all about parties, what they were, why people had them, but she had never actually been to one. No one had ever invited her to a party. People invited their friends to parties. She did not know Cara Winters. She would not have been able to pick her out of a group of school girls if Leader pointed and said, “Which one is Cara?” The thought of Leader made Emma wince. She could not go to a party. Leader would never let her out of the House for a frivolous party.
“I can’t,” Emma explained. “My father doesn’t allow us to go to parties.”
“That’s kind of silly.” Cara sounded like she was smiling. Her voice took on a condescending tone that Emma knew well. Leader and everyone else in the Family used that tone with her. “It’s not a keg party or anything. We are just going to watch some movies and eat cake.”
Really confused now, Emma stared at the phone in her hand. It could not produce answers to the swirling questions in her mind. The only people she spoke to at school with any regularity were the teachers who greeted her at the beginning of each class, and her biology lab partner. Cara was not her lab partner. Emma could not imagine she had made such a good impression in classroom roll calls that this girl really wanted her at her birthday party.
“What is it you really want? My biology homework, or something?”
Cara replied, “It’s just a party. Will you be attending?”
“No” was the correct answer, but Emma could not say it, because she had a strange sensation of longing. She wanted to go to the party. She wanted to hang around with silly school girls, talking and watching movies. Emma had only ever seen one movie in her life. It was an old rendition of “The Scarlet Letter” in her English class, but it had fascinated her. She knew newer movies were more interesting and had better acting, so it would probably be enjoyable. The cake she would have to pass on, since she could never compromise her health with sugar and processed foods. She did not actually know what she would say to the girls from school; she had nothing in common with them. Interacting with them was daunting, but she was curious about what it would be like. She was intrigued by the idea of making friends. Hope blossomed from the pit of her stomach, springing to life in the hole left behind by the scent of bleach.
“Look!” Cara’s voice altered to scathing, dropping out of the sweet tone Emma now realized had been pretense. Her real tone was impatient and reminded Emma of home. “My mom said I had to invite you because you’re new and lonely. It’s not my idea, okay? She told me last week that I had to give you an invitation, but I didn’t want to. Now she is saying that if I don’t ask you I can’t have the party, and my friends are all planning on it.”
That made a kind of sense to Emma. It certainly explained the reason for this call. Emma did not understand why Cara’s mother was interested in her loneliness at all. It could possibly just be a tactic to convert her to their religion or something. People in this valley tended to be aggressive proselytizers. She had been approached several times at school by kids who wanted her to take a “release time” from school to go to some kind of super-specific Bible study. She had always rejected them because in her life there was no “release time” from academics. Academics and Obedience were her life.
“Listen, I already told my mom you are coming, so it’s important that you do. Tell your dad that it is for biology homework or something and I will see you tomorrow night.” The phone clicked, and Emma looked at it in shock once more. The words “CALL ENDED” flashed across the screen.
Emma was puzzled by the entire interaction, not sure what had happened exactly. Cara seemed to think Emma was to blame for this, but it was a personal issue. If Cara had lied to her mother—Emma could not imagine lying to Monique!—then how was that Emma’s problem?
She put the phone down slowly on her lap and sat back against one of her white bed posts. Emma tried to think rationally about it all. The party would probably just be a bunch of girls from school she had avoided for weeks. It would probably be a lot of conversations about topics she did not understand or had no interest in. It would be mindless giggling and whispering, like in the halls at school. Inane, that’s what it would be. But Emma wanted to go anyway and find out for herself.
Her phone buzzed again, but this time it was not a call. It was a text message with an address, followed by the words: 6ish dont B L8. She memorized the address, and then deleted the text. She also deleted her call history, which had only the one number. No one ever looked at her phone, but if Leader suddenly took an interest in it, she didn’t want him asking questions about this call until she decided what she was going to say about it.