"Mr. Wolf, can Claudia come out to play?" Vincent asks, peering around the doorway. He can see Claudia kneeling in front of Mr. Wolf's altar, her small hands clasped in prayer. Her father snaps his head toward the door as soon as he hears Vincent's voice, and in seconds his hand is on the door.
"Get out of here! I've told you not to bother her!"
"But God loves me too!" Vincent whines, his six-year-old body too light to hold the door no matter how much he pushed. "God loves Claudia and me both! Claudia's my best friend!"
"Claudia doesn't have time for friends," Mr. Wolf says harshly. "Not if she wants to live up to my expectations of her. She will be the Order's high priestess one day. But she cannot do that if we have little rats like you knocking on our door day after day! Go away!" He kicks Vincent back, a booted foot colliding with his thigh and sending him to the floor. Vincent starts crying, burying his face in his arms and drawing his knees to his chest.
A few hours later, the door creaks open. Vincent, who has been curled up outside of it for quite some time, hopefully looks up. Claudia is holding a finger to her lips, but takes Vincent's hand and pulls him to his feet. Together they run barefoot down the hallway toward the library, where they can share their secrets in silence.
"Claudia! Claudia! What's wrong? Why are you limping?"
She stops in the hallway, her arms full of dull gray laundry. Vincent is younger than her, a ten-year-old boy with wide eyes and even wider glasses, whereas she is thirteen, already old enough to have her own place in the Order, at least according to her father. Vincent is still just a little boy. He wouldn't understand such things.
"Claudia, don't walk away! Talk to me! You never talk to me anymore!" Vincent starts down the hallway toward her, stumbling over a loose floorboard and falling hard to his knees as she finally turns around. His jaw falls slack in shock as he takes in the black eye, which to a ten-year-old eye seems way worse than any cause for a limp. "What happened? Did your dad do that?"
"No. Go back to the library, Vincent."
"He did! I'm not stupid." Vincent yanks on the hem of Claudia's skirt as he glares up at her. "He always does it. I hear you cry when you come to sleep."
"Be quiet! You don't understand!"
"You used to talk to me all the time! You used to be my best friend!"
"I have responsibilities now!" Claudia rips her skirt out of Vincent's fist and limps down the hallway toward the laundry room. Vincent pushes his glasses up on his nose as he stares after her. When he grows older he will mark this moment as the moment he knew he'd lost her.
"Vincent?" comes a whisper in the dark.
Vincent blearily opens his eyes. He hasn't seen Claudia in weeks, and the first thing he notices is that her eyebrows are gone. Her hair falls freely down her back, and instead of her usual gray clothes, she wears a long black dress, with a sweater over it. Vincent sits up, rubbing sleep from his eyes with one hand while he reaches for his glasses with the other. "Hm?"
"…My father would hate me if he knew I was here."
She is right. Leonard had put up with their friendship as much as he had to when they were younger, even if he tried his best to get Vincent to leave, but as soon as Claudia had showed the first signs of puberty, that was over. He'd forbidden her from getting close to Vincent (or any of the boys, for that matter) and that was that. Seeing her here now that they no longer shared a room is strange, to say the least.
"Then why are you?"
"I'm turning nineteen in two weeks," Claudia says as if Vincent doesn't already know it.
"Yeah, so?"
"I'm going to become a priestess."
"Already?" Vincent frowns. "I thought you weren't going to do that until—"
"I know what I said. But I can hear God calling to me. She wants me to do it now, I can feel it. It's as if she's inside me, giving me instructions."
"Claudia, you give yourself instructions. God is great but She doesn't control you."
Claudia looks at him strangely, as if he'd spoken in tongues. Vincent sighs; she's too far gone to reason with now. "Alright. You're becoming a priestess, just like daddy dearest wants. Why are you in here?"
"…Will you let me sleep with you? Just once more, to set the feelings of friendship I have for you to rest."
Vincent watches her. Her shaved eyebrows make her face impossible to read; he would ask why they were gone, but he figures it's just another one of Leonard's strange ideas. But her eyes are as sincere as they have ever been, so he moves over and lets her slip in beside him, just as they'd done almost every night when they were children, and she came into their bedroom covered in bruises and sobbing into his shirt.
If he had time in two weeks to save her, he would. But he couldn't, not now with the pieces all already in motion. So he only has one other choice, if he doesn't want to spend the rest of his life watching her with regret and sadness as she babbles on about Leonard's idea of God.
He has to develop contempt for her.
"I hate you."
"I love you too."
"You deny God each day of your life, Vincent! You'll go to Hell and burn there until you realize what you've done! And even after that, you'll burn because you've already sealed your fate!"
"I'm used to living in hell, having to know you for so long."
"You think your childish insults will weaken me? God laughs at your ignorance!"
"God can laugh at me all She wants from Heaven. Just like I can laugh at you all I want right in front of your face."
"We were such sweet children, Vincent. What happened to you?"
"I grew up. I'm still waiting for you."
The door slams.