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Leandra always knew that she deserved better than what she got.
Born to shit-poor farmers in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by grass and grain moving like a brown ocean, a momma and daddy always gone off doing something probably illegal, she had to have an imagination, or else she’d probably go insane. She spent her days with the few animals they had, a cow and three chickens, by the cow-pond daydreaming of a better life, or on the days her momma was out, at her vanity touching her hair and gazing at her reflection.
Leandra always made sure to take extra care of herself on those days, even if her mother found out and she was beaten to nearly an inch of her life. She liked dress-up and make-up, she liked the powders, potions, tinctures that promised to change everything about you. Leandra didn’t know how to read nor write, daddy’s idea, so her looks were the way to get her out of this place. Not many men, much less male catamounts passed by the general store her daddy owned, but the days they did she always made sure to flutter her lashes like Momma did and try and look as darling as possible so maybe, just maybe, they’d go “This girl doesn’t belong here at all!”, and sweep her outta there.
It never happened when she was still a kitten, but as she grew, as her body changed and she lost her spotty hair and blue-colored eyes, it got easier.
She slowly began to get closer and closer.
The closest she ever got was a young catamount man who had just stopped by to pick up feed, he had spotted her and offered to take her ‘home’- Leandra was nearly bursting with excitement and was beginning to say yes, yes, yes, when of course, Daddy caught wind of it. The man quickly left the store but Leandra was dragged back by her hair, screaming and crying as punches rained down on her, her father making her swear on the bible with a blood-soaked fist that she wasn’t going to end up like ‘THOSE girls.’
She knew what he was talking about, whispers of girls her age winding up having litters as soon as their hair changed, who stalked the streets of bigger cities whispering bad things in mens ears, girls who had a new boys arm slung ‘round them every business day, bad girls, evil girls, devils hidden under layers of muscle, fur, sinewy skin and bone. Leandra had sat at his side the next day, stewing in her hatred with a bruised lip and black eye, swearing to herself that no matter what, even if she had to turn into that she was gonna leave.
She was gonna leave and never come back.
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Leandra got sent to boarding school when she was thirteen, a catholic one up north in Virginia, which is where she first met Joel. It was her daddy's idea, she had fought tooth and claw not to go when he had suggested it, the catamounts in the northeast were apparently prudish and meek, especially the religious ones, but suddenly, she didn't mind.
He wasn’t like anything she had seen before, or like any boy or man she had ever met. He was loud, funny, took up space. The men back home were meek and quiet, but with a certain kind of cruelty in their eyes that gave you the sense that you were never really safe around them. With sallowed skin and hollowed-out eyes, most of them coming up from Florida, suffice to say, her standards were low, and Joel exceeded them all. He was healthy, radiant, had thick black hair and glossy brown skin, lean muscles hidden under wrinkled white shirts and a back that took blows from the ruler without even flinching.
Once catching her watching, he had winked during it and after had shrugged and told her, “I’d been through worse.” She was instantly enamored. Secretly, she had daydreams of taking him back home, her father objecting to their union, and Joel taking him out back and beating him back.
He fit right in with the crowd at the school, all rowdy catamounts sent away to control their hormonal behavior and be send back perfectly regulated, with Leandra on the contrary sticking out like a sore thumb. Quiet, meek, and very reserved, it was easy for her to warm up to him, and even easier to accept Joels advances- she had never known anything else and he quickly became her whole world.
Joel was a promise, an escape, a hope since childhood personified. Her knight in shining armor.
“Where are you from?”, she once asked.
“North Carolina. Up near where Georgie lives. We could probably sneak you into his house and you’d fit right up,” Joel teasingly pinched an exposed part of skin not covered by their uniforms, “All prim and proper.” Leandra didn’t even know who ‘Georgie’ was, but she glowed with pride with the fact that she could fit among what seemed to be rich, powerful folk. She fancied and imagined them as kings and queens, letting Leandra into their brood, braiding her hair and dressing her up so nicely that when she finally returned back home, nobody would recognize her.
Soon, she began braiding her stringy corn-colored hair instead of letting it hang down her face, using a piece of charcoal to draw on eyebrows that naturally could be barely seen, imitating the looks as the high society women in the colored magazines, holding herself at an air that was acceptable. It was like playing dress-up in the store as a child except this time she was selling herself into an entire group of people that couldn’t even see her.
“Look at her,” she once heard a friend of Joels mutter, some girl from his village with a curled lip, “She’s so uppity about everything and everyone. Don't she know we all bleed red?”
"Maybe we should cut her," another grinned, "Nah, instead of blood she'll bleed gold. Won't that be a sight."
But Joel said she was beautiful, and she trusted him more than anything in the entire world.
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One summer evening, down in the garden near where the primroses grew wild, Leandra had tucked herself into Joels shoulder as he threw rocks at the nearby birds. He laughed as they squaked and startled, flying away from them, Joel whispering to her that he always resisted the urge to shift and just kill them right then and there.
"It's funniest to watch 'em pull back. If I had any, I'd throw bread scraps at them and watch them come back again. Dumb fuckers."
She only smiled and nodded back, curling her hand into his open one. She was barely listening, instead playing with an open thread on her dress. it was a nice one too, she was rather upset about that.
The week had been cruel to her.
Joels friends, who had never taken a liking to her, had been ignoring her all week in class, and it had gotten to such a point that her friends started avoiding her as well. In a months time they’d graduate, go onto higher forms of education, or go up to the bigger cities to work so she was trying her best just to live through it, but it was still rough.
She had bigger problems going on in her life anyway, on account that she had gotten a letter from her daddy a couple days ago saying that she was on her own now and it was her time to take care of herself. She didn’t even have territory of her own, heck, she had nobody except for Joel. He had made sure of it.
“Where we gonna live after this?”, she meekly asked, bringing up the topic, “You know, land-wise.”
“I got a little something from my old man…”, he looked at her, “Not big enough for two though.”
“Oh…well…I thought that-“ He cut her off, “There’s plenty jobs in Asheville. I can ask Holden if you want to go with them to-“
“I know about the jobs, just…”, she paused, “Shouldn’t that be your job? I mean, Im frail at the moment, all this talk of life afters got me stressed out. I mean, I haven’t even had my monthly…”
“Say that again?”, his voice suddenly got real quiet, “Oh…oh shit. You know what that means right?”
Leandra paused, confused, “What?” “I gotta take you down to Texas. Thats why my friend Carl did, when he got his chick knocked up…”, Joel paused, staring off into the distance, “Well, fuck.”
“What?”