Silent Daughter 1: Taken by Linnea May, Stella Noir

Chapter 1

    LIZ
     
    Her big day has finally come. My sister Sandria can hardly contain her excitement and has been fluttering about for days and weeks. If this is what she is like during the preparations for a simple engagement party reception, I cannot wait to see what she will be like when the actual wedding approaches.
    My graduation from college a few weeks ago was by far less interesting to my familythan this event. For everybody except me, that is. I didn't even expect my family to show up that day, but they did. All four of them sat there, my two older sisters and my parents watching as I dutifully received my degree and hurried off the stage right after. They clinked glasses with me, they congratulated me in a formal and distant manne r — as it has always been with u s — and then they drove off, only to have Sandria announce her engagement a few days later.
    So that was that.
    When it comes to my family, I'm not even mad or disappointed any longer. When there are no expectations, no need for their praise or attention, no hope for affection ontheir par t — how could I ever feel bad?
    I am the third of three daughters, and obviously, I was meant to be a boy. After two girls, I was my parents' last attempt at conceiving a male heir who could continue the family name. Instead, I not only turned out to be another girl, but I also grew to look like my late grandmother on my father’s side. A dark haired woman with big, dark eyes and what my mother considers a “challenging personality.”
    My grandmother was a rebel, mostly because she married late and reproduced even later, focusing instead on her own career. She was a writer, a journalist,and an avid traveler. All that was tamed a little when she married my grandfather and became a mother. But she stopped after having just one child an d — heaven forbi d — divorced her husband when my father went off to college. She dove right back into her work, traveling the world and writing pieces about all kinds of topics for the biggest newspapers.
    She died when I was seven years old after that bitch cancer took a hold of her. Although I only remember very little of her, I feel a deep sorrow for her early death. I feel like she was the only person in my family that I was close to.
    Just like her, I didn't follow along the path that has been laid out for me as eagerly as my sisters did, despite giving that impression at first look. I have always been a good student; I took every class they wanted me to, learned to dance and play music. My little rebellion when I took to the goth community for a while during High School can hardly be seen as anything but cute.
    Doesn’t sound too bad now, does it? Others would say that I am the perfect daughter.
    But I never make the right friends. I never say the right things, and I am unwilling to behave as they wish me to. I am too quiet, too withdrawn, too weird, and too blunt. I have too little interest in the right people, the right men, the right topics that define life. When they let me chose an instrument to take lessons for, they were delighted to hear that I wanted to play the violin. Such a decent and perfectly elegant instrument, an excellent choice for a daughter of the Barrington household. However, they neither wished nor expected me to fall in love with the instrument. Instead of a silly little decoration, something to brag about, the violin became my companion, my only outlet for expression. The better I got, the more I played, the less I spoke.
    Not being able to hold a proper conversation with their guests at the dinner table is a deadly sin in my family's world. They tried to take the violin away from me, but there was nothing they could do about it when I left for college. As much as they wanted to control me, they also wanted me to follow the normal path of a well-educated child of a good family. So they had to send me off to college.
    When I told them that I decided against both Brown and Yale to go to a private