All Dolled Up!

Charlotte’s POV

Once night fell, I went to go find Charlie. I looked out the window and saw only his automobile there, meaning that he was probably alone. I messaged him, and didn’t get a reply.

Maybe he was asleep?

This was a bit of a risk, but I decided to go out and check, sneaking along the walls. During times like these, for once, I felt that this new body being slightly shorter than my old one was a boon rather than a bane.

If I was caught- would standing absolutely still like a statue work? I might pass off for one, but they would wonder how I had gone from upstairs to here if they had seen me earlier, which I was sure that Charlie’s sister had in the past. I wasn’t sure about his parents though, maybe that would work on them?

I didn’t see any lights on, and I couldn’t hear the sound of a television or footsteps either. I slowly crept down the stairs, something I had not had to do for a long time.

“Charlotte is that you?” a voice called out.

Right, Charlie wouldn’t be saying that if the others were home. “Yes!” I said, running towards the sound of his voice. He looked fine, though I had heard that he had bruised his chest. “What happened?”

He gave me a short version of things, though that was more than enough to kill my earlier jovial mood. “What were you thinking? Charlie, you didn’t have to do something like that-”

“Please, Charlotte, I already got an earful from every one of my family members. Even Suzy had decided to lecture me,” he said. He sounded truly exhausted, so I decided to hold off on scolding him.

“Hmph, well at least I can be happy that your family has some common sense unlike you,” I said.

“Hey, it’s not as if I was doing something crazy or anything, I used to do stuff like that all the time just… I guess it was too much for me right now,” he said.

“Yes, and I hope you’ve realized that you need to be more careful,” I told him. “Now, take your shirt off.”

“Hu-wha?”

“I want to see the bruise!” I said, my cheeks lightly tinged. “That’s all!”

He obliged after a slight shake of his head in disbelief.

It took a lot of self-restraint not to leap at him and smack him over the head when I saw the size of the bruise - it covered nearly the entirety of the right side of his chest! “What were you thinking?”

“Like I said, I just wanted to help out-”

“-and this was completely avoidable, and you ended up with that!”

“Aren’t you my fiancé? Shouldn’t you be siding with me and not my family?”

“Your family is completely right in this regard.”

He sighed. “Well, anyway, I can’t undo this. I will be more careful in the future though. With that said, Merry Christmas, though that’s passed, I can still give you your present.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Charlie, I already told you that I didn’t want anything.”

“Sure you did,” he said sarcastically. “I’ve fell for that in the past, I won’t now.”

“Charlie, this isn’t a ‘I said I don’t want anything but I still actually want something’ sort of situation,” I told him.

He had already gifted me with enough. Not just his love - but Aunt Emily’s necklace, and the news of my family despite how depressing it was. Not to mention the engagement ring. I didn’t want anything else.

As it was, what could I even do with something else? I couldn’t really wear other clothes for too long, and anything valuable would be difficult for me to keep. As it was Aunt Emily’s necklace was still in its hiding place, so it would just be something else I’d have to hide out of sight. Not to mention if it was bought for me to use, that would also present its own problem.

For example, my engagement ring. Though I wanted to wear it, it wasn’t considered a part of my ‘base design’ so to speak as Charlie called it, so I was constantly worried about it falling off of my finger when I wasn’t fully awake. If something like that happened, I wouldn’t even be able to retrieve it for hours. And what if by mistake I dropped it outside and something like a bird grabbed it as it was something shiny and flew away with it? As unlikely as it was, those worries constantly plagued me whenever I wore the ring on my hand.

As such, I had taken to wearing the ring around my neck on a chain much like a necklace. That had actually been Charlie’s idea, and from what I could tell he had gotten the idea from some book series about an evil wizard and short people called ‘hobbits’, but I had to say that the idea itself had merit regardless of where he had gotten it from.

I even had a feeling that he had initially suggested the idea entirely as a joke, but upon seeing how well it worked decided to act as if it was what he had meant all along.

All of this was to say that there really was nothing that I wanted, especially given the fact that I knew that his financial status was not too strong. “Well, I got you something anyway,” he said.

“I really wish you hadn’t,” I said.

“It’s right over there,” he said, pointing to a nearby table that had a single envelope on it. Whatever it was did not appear to be too heavy, thankfully, so it probably wasn’t too expensive. “Open it up.”

I did, and was confused as I looked at what it was. It was a letter written on top of thick paper, with the margins and all yellowed out, though it didn’t feel like it was that old.

'It is unfortunate that it has come to this, but it appears that I have no recourse but to send this message out. I’m afraid to say that the quality of the cotton delivered for the last few months has been subpar to the point that it has affected the finished product that we ship out. Given this, we have a simple message - that either the quality needs to improve or we will be terminating this business relationship of ours.’

The rest of the letter went on like this, saying how it would be such a shame, etc.

“Uh, why did you get me a customer complaint letter as a present?” I asked. I hadn’t expected a present in the first place, but this was certainly completely out of left field.

“Look at who wrote it,” he said.

I looked down to see a name and signature I recognized. “This- this is from my father? Where’d you get this?”

“You remember Sam?”

“That ghost hunter?”

“Yes, him, well, he never broadcasted the episode he filmed, but he found this later on while digging up stuff and sent it to me as well as a few other things,” Charlie said. He then showed me a photograph on his phone of a piece of paper that was yellowed out and was torn in various areas. “This is the actual letter. I was able to photoshop much of the writing and the signature at the bottom as well onto a piece of paper, and then I used some creativity to try to get that to seem old and worn out. I don’t think I entirely succeeded, but I tried to get it as close to the original as I could.”

I looked down at the letter. The body of the letter wasn’t in my father’s handwriting, only the signature, meaning it was likely one of his secretaries who had written it and my father had simply signed it at the bottom after dictating it. Still, it was a relic of my parents, one of the few ones I had, even if it was for something as mundane as a shipment of cotton. To think that this was one of the few things of theirs that had survived to while being somewhat intact. “Charlie… thank you so much for this…” It was valuable in a way that neither gold nor jewels could ever be.

“Sorry I couldn’t get you the real one,” Charlie said. “I mean, you deserve to have the real one, as it belonged to your family - but the thing is that there’s no way that I could successfully legally petition to have it sent to me. You might be able to - but, well, we know why that’s not possible, so for now it exists as a public record file so it’s hard to get back. Some of the parts of the original letter were torn and unreadable so I had to fill them in with words myself, though the signature is something I tried to photoshop perfectly onto it.”

I hugged him, being careful not to put too much pressure on the right side of his chest. “Thank you. This... it might just be a piece of paper. But it means the world to me - not just for what it symbolizes, but for all the effort you put into making it. If… if only I had a gift I could give you in return.”

“You already have,” he said and chuckled. “I wanted to live in this house all alone, to get away from everything… but I realize just how miserable I would’ve been all alone. How it would’ve been absolutely awful if I hadn’t met you.”

I looked around the house- at how it had been decorated. At how the feeling that there had been a real celebration - something that hadn’t happened for over a century in this house, hung in the air.

“Is there one other thing that you can do for me, Charlie?”

“What is it?”

“Did you and your family take photos before they left? Can you show them to me?”

“Oh, yeah, Suzy took a bunch of selfies, but there are quite a few with all of us,” he said, showing me photographs of them doing various things, though the one I loved the most was of them standing together near the tree - the same one which had caused a lot of this mess. But they all seemed to be so happy together. With some changes of outfits, they could’ve passed for a picture perfect family from my era.

Yes, if there really was a gift that Charlie could give me, it would be to create more memories like the one he had seen me. Only, one day, they would know who I really was, and when that happened, I hoped that I could be with them in one of those photographs, smiling at the camera.