Timeless Fashion Reflection

Betrayal never goes out of style. 

There have been many times in my life I’ve been betrayed. In relationships, in friendships, in workplaces… hell, one of the worst places I ever worked betrayed me a couple months after I wrote this very chapter. Betrayal is so common in society we’ve gotten to a point where we’re just like Callie, we’re just kind of expecting it to happen. We plan contingencies for if someone betrays us, set up escape plans and create backup documents and contracts to protect ourselves in case the people we love and trust more than anyone else in the world betray us because either we’ve heard the stories or we’ve lived them. 

Callie is that part of me that wants so desperately to trust. We all do. Every last one of us wants to be able to fully open our hearts without fear and without worry, to be open and honest, living and loving authentically to the point where the masks we wear every single day can be hung in a closet to collect dust, forgotten along with the pain and frustration of daily life. We want it, but we never believe that it can happen, so we continue to have contingencies and backup plans to protect ourselves from the pain we feel is inevitable. 

Callie had it worse than others. She had put her hope and trust in one person, the man who taught her that people couldn’t be trusted. There was no one in the world that she could trust… except for him, of course, since he was the one teaching her how no one could be trusted. Why would a scorpion tell a frog it couldn’t be trusted afterall, the only difference is, unlike the ones in the proverbial story, Marcus didn’t sting her prematurely in the middle of the river, he waited until he got what he wanted before driving his venom deep into her unprotected flesh. That’s how most abusers are, they’ll finish you off just as soon as they get everything they could want from you. 

Diego was right to call Marcus a groomer, he molded and shaped Callie into what he needed her to be, and then was fully willing to throw her away once she outlived her usefulness, but the problem that he ran into was one that he could never imagine happening. 

Callie hadn’t been fully molded. 

There was a reason that once Grey went over the side I chose to begin the diverging perspectives with hers. Callie has had the least screen time, the least development, and the least connection with the rest of the group, but she’s been the most affected. While Diego has bonded with Grey and begun to shift his world view in ways with Grey’s prodding, and Isadora has been isolated, only just now allowing herself to connect with others, Callie has been the most adverse to change. 

This is the kind of person we struggle with most in our own lives, isn’t it? The person who sees the wrong in the world, but it isn’t affecting them enough to want to make a change. Instead, they accept the shitty situation around them as “just how it is” and keeps plodding along. If this chapter had happened from Diego’s point of view, I doubt anyone would ever like Callie as much as I do. See, Callie is more a victim than anyone else in this story. She’s been manipulated, tortured, and abused, but not with physical pain or emotional degradation. No, she’s been abused with positivity, been told that she’s special, that she’s better than others, and that she was meant for great things, only to slowly realize that the person promising her the moon and the stars can’t really provide them.

She begins doubting earlier in other chapters, we can see subtle glimpses into this, but the guilt she feels at manipulating Diego, regardless of how she doesn’t seem concerned for Grey or Isadora at all, begins to show her values. Grey and Isadora never treated her with the respect she felt she deserved, so there is remaining animosity there, but Diego, who she originally thought as the most malleable, has treated her with kindness and fairness, though fairness is a funny word to Ventrue. If anyone was going to break through to her, it was going to have to be him. That being said, she wasn’t going to come full circle without hitting rock bottom. She and Grey are both in the same place here, just in their own worlds, hitting their own limits. Both, beyond anything else now, need to rely on others, something neither of them are fully capable of doing. 

I put them in parallel situations on purpose, because they are the most alike among the coterie, which is why they butt heads the most. One of my greatest weaknesses is my disdain for having to rely on others, despite my mantra that humans are tribal creatures, communal creatures, who rely on one another for everything they need and do. We require community, and while many of us enjoy our solitude, I am beginning to wonder as I get older if that is because of how our society grooms us into being weak and alone, easy to cull and replace, or if our society has become so toxic and terrible that it isn’t worth socializing with one another anymore. 

But then a person like Diego comes along, the perfect mix of Golden Retriever and Scary Dog Privilege that can make us feel safe and protected in a world that constantly tries to rip us apart. They come in and make us believe again that perhaps someone can be trusted in this world, and that makes us more scared than anything, because if this person betrays us, the pain is going to be even more unimaginable than anything we’ve ever experienced. This is the human condition, made worse by the world we’re living in. It is my hope that I, and many more people out there, can behave more like Diego. Give people around us a reason to trust, and perhaps they’ll do the same for us. 

Will Callie? 

That remains to be seen, but before we can ever find out if she can be trusted, we need to see if she can learn how to trust again.