Ellie Franklin could see it all now: her father was sitting behind the desk in his office, glaring daggers at her. The office was bigger than the last time she remembered it was, darker with higher ceilings, but the mahogany desk and the tall leather chairs remained. At the moment, Ellie wanted to crawl into them and die. It was worse than the time she was threatened to take her riding lessons away because of a terrible grade on one of her midterm exams -- unacceptable when her father was golfing buddies with her teacher's husband.
No, Walter Franklin was looking disgusted at his daughter for a completely different reason.
It was high school and she had already been accepted to Boston College with a scholarship, so it didn't really matter what she had done from now until throwing the square cap into the air. Ellie had been partying rather frequently with her new friends, having fun and just being an eighteen year old girl in high school. It was harmless and her grades hadn't slipped, what did it matter what she and her friends were doing?
And okay, so last week she had let Mike Griffin do a body shot from her stomach. And everyone cheered and chanted while the quarterback held her ankles so she could sucessfully complete a twenty-second keg stand.
"I didn't realize the lifestyle you were choosing for yourself, Ella."
Without saying another word, Walter tossed a folder full of pictures her way. In reality, she knew it was just a picture of her topless dancing on a basement bartop. She had been dared and wasted, but a vindictive girl who was angry Ellie had taken her boyfriend's attention away sent them without a return address to her father's office.
"Daddy, I --,"
He wouldn't allow her to finish. In this nightmare, the pictures were explicit, a morphed version of some hardcore pictures with her face blurrily plastered onto them. It wasn't real, she told herself over and over, but the disgust in her father's scowl was telling enough.
"I've heard enough, Ella. You are done here. Keep this behavior up and no one will ever love you. I certainly don't, and neither does your mother. Now get the hell out of my house. You are no longer welcome here."
The dream shifted into her days at the gentleman's club, the White Queen performing to some obnoxiously loud rock song where you couldn't hear your own bad decisions. She was dressed in next to nothing, dancing and twirling around and round, her clothes coming off one by one until the only thing covering her modesty from the bellybutton up were crystal snowflake pasties. She made good money since she had been forced to live on her own with regular customers who treated her well with their consistency. But now every time Ellie looked at them as she sunk down, she could see the faces of their wives looking at her from behind their shoulders, and the children after that.
"No one will ever love you, Ella. Not when you're parading around like this. Like a common whore. Not my daughter."
His dream had come true in her nightmare, watching as the men interested in her over the years flashed before her eyes. And this nightmare made them all look at her with that same disgusted look her father had given her, disgusted when they had found out what she had done in her past. She had been a disappointment, she had let so many people down. It was her fault her mother drank in such excess, it was her fault the company was lacking a successor, and it was because of her that she woke every night to a lonely bed.
Ellie woke the next morning with what felt like an insane hangover. She knew it was a dream logically, but the feeling that she was alone and that she had disappointed everyone sat deep in her chest. How could she deny that it was untrue?
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