The Hating Game

Her chest laboured up and down as she ran around the busy marketplace, there were noises all over as she manoeuvred her way deeper into the market, she was being careful of objects that could harm her and large people that could knock her down. A wide smile appeared on her lips when she caught a glimpse of it, the shop she had always visited no matter how busy she might be or the punishment that awaited her at home, she didn’t care and never will.

“Esmeray!” An old woman called out from the shop when she stood there, with her hands on her chest as she tried to catch her breath. She looked up with a smile on her face and walked further into the shop, slightly closing her eyes as a bright smile glowed on her face, for nowhere in this world had ever felt like home to her like this shop.

She crouched down on her usual spot and gladly collected the water Jezebel offered to her. She waited until she had calmed down before she greeted the old woman, “Good evening, Jezebel.”

Jezebel went back into the shop as she mumbled, “I told you to stop running around in this market, didn’t I? How could you get a husband if you kept doing things this way?” That forced a burst of rustling laughter out of her. No one had ever related her with marriage but Jezebel and she wondered why. Besides, she knew that even if she did want to get married no one will marry her in Dewhurst, for a lady only get married when her family wanted her to and took her to the Runaways that took place after every three months.

Her father had never taken her to one, no one even thought of her as a girl that came to the age of marriage or even related her to it. She was just Esmeray, the girl everyone maltreated and go scot-free, for she had no one to stand for her. And it was good to say in Jezebel, she found the home and family she had never had. 

She stood and walked into the shop, helping Jezebel in handing the goods a customer had bought. She waited until she watched him leave before she turned to her with a smile, “I told you, Jezebel, that I’ll never get married. Even if Papa will take me to the runaway this month, which I know he never will, I’ll never get a husband.” She sounded so sure and confident in the fact that no one will ever want her.

Jezebel softly smacked her head before she pulled the lunch she had always kept for her, “Here, eat this before you go back home.” She sat beside her as Esmeray immediately ventured into the meal, “And I’ve always told you, Esmeray, you’ll find a husband that no girl in Dewhurst will ever get even if they were to kill a thousand people. Just wait and see.”

She mumbled incoherently with her mouth filled with food when Jezebel uttered the words she had found a liking in, which Esmeray knew will never happen. They spent over an hour in the shop as she helped Jezebel with everything that she wanted and it was only late evening before she decided to go back home when Jezebel was about to close her shop for the day.