Petals on the Wind Part 2

Part One

It’s Christmas, and Paul surprises Cathy with tickets to see the Nutcracker. Apparently the Rosencoff School of Ballet, in small town South Carolina, is very professional. They go backstage at intermission, and meet Madame and her husband Georges. Madame tells Cathy to come to the school the next day for an audition. Cathy freaks out because she says she’s out of practice, but Chris calls bullshit on that, he’s seen her practicing. She’s just scared.

That night, Chris and Cathy start going at it under the Christmas tree, all while Cathy tries to convince Chris not to go off and leave her alone to become a doctor. They decide to take it upstairs, and choose Cathy’s room that she shares with Carrie. Nice. She hasn’t been traumatized enough. They get completely naked, and start wrestling, with Cathy kind of wanting it and kind of not. They only stop when Chris discovers food she’s been hiding under her bed. He says he understands, and then begs her to love him one last time. If this sounds confusing, it is. Cathy says if he goes away and leaves her, the answer will always be no. IT SHOULD ALWAYS BE NO ANYWAY, CATHY! Geez.

So Cathy and crew go to the audition the next day. Madame Marisha asks what she’s going to dance, and Cathy boasts that she can dance the Rose Adagio from Sleeping Beauty all by herself. No, you bloody well can’t, Cathy. You literally can’t do the most famous bit without the princes. But whatever, Cathy is the best dancer ever, and so defies all logic. She flirts a bit with another dancer, hottie Julian Marquet, who says he’s only there as a favor to Madame, he’ll be back in New York soon. She begins to dance, and then Julian decides to join her. She’s all excited, but then has a terrible pain in her abdomen, and a pool of blood at her feet. She passes out. When she comes to, she’s in the hospital, and Chris informs her she had a D&C, all her missed periods had essentially backed up. Ok. She gets flowers and a card from Madame Marisha, telling her she’s been accepted. I guess she likes a bit of drama.

After the holidays, it’s off to school. They send Carrie to a private boarding school during the week. She freaks out over this of course, and I can hardly blame her. It’s probably not the best thing for her. And Chris goes away to a college-prep school thirty miles away. Chris and Cathy have a drawn out, private goodbye. He warns her about being alone with Paul, but she says that’s silly. Then on the way home, Cathy checks out Paul’s legs. Ugh.

That night, Cathy goes downstairs to go to the kitchen in her flimsy nightgown, and runs into Paul. She caresses his cheek, and he gets all turned on. He pulls her into his lap, and demands to know what’s going on between her and Chris. She kind of admits to some wrongdoing, but not really. Then Paul starts feeling her up, and kissing her. And then he dares to blame her, and calls her a witch. PAUL. You are a forty-year-old man responsible for some seriously fucked up kids. Do not blame a fifteen-year-old for seducing you.

At ballet, Julian keeps popping in from New York. He keeps telling Cathy she needs to get to New York ASAP, and that they’d be a great team. Then he asks her out on a date. They go out a couple of times, and he pressures her to do things with him, and then calls her a tease when she won’t. He gives her a sob story about how Madame and Georges, who are actually his parents, pushed him his whole life into ballet.

It turns out Bart Winslow is from the next town over, and the papers are full of stories of how Corrine in transforming his house before they move into it. Cathy gets all upset, and vows revenge against her. Paul tries to guilt trip her and make her realize she’s not the only person who shitty things happen to. He tells her about his wife and son who died. His wife Julia never liked sex, and after she got pregnant, told him that was all. So Paul had an affair, and eventually Julia found out, and wanted to hurt him. So she killed herself and Scotty in the river. After telling his story, Cathy and Paul almost have sex. Of course. But Paul stops himself, and Cathy pouts that he’s now rejected her twice.

Carrie has a terrible incident at school. These horrible little girls gag and blindfold her one night, and put her out on the school’s roof to spend the night. And Carrie fucking hates roofs, y’all. She makes her way to the trapdoor to get back in, and falls down the stairs, breaking her leg. And she stays hidden away there under a bunch of crates, until Cathy, Chris, and Paul come and find her. They take her out of the school, of course, and send her to public school. But the kids there still tease her for being so small, and Carrie never has any friends.

Cathy starts to go a bit crazy stalking her mother. She follows all her movements from reports in the papers, and she even started writing her creepy letters. One day she even eventually sees Corrine and Bart in town, and follows them, but doesn’t do anything, which she later gets pissed at herself about.

Paul’s birthday comes, and yep, happy birthday, Paul! He and Cathy begin their affair. Sigh. You knew it was coming. He’s forty-two, and she’s seventeen at this point.

Cathy has a crazy request for Christmas, for them to all go to Foxworth Hall. Chris is totally against it, but Paul thinks it might be good for some closure or some shit. They look through records in Charlottesville, trying to find any information on Cory dying, but they find nothing. No eight-year-old boys died or were buried at that time. Then they go to drive by the house, and Carrie has a shit fit, screaming that she wants to see her momma. They get absolutely nothing out of this trip.

I guess over that same Christmas, Cathy gets the lead in both The Nutcracker and Cinderella. Of course she does. Julian comes back to town to dance with her. He tells her she’s truly ready for New York. She lets him fill her head with all these promises, and agrees to go. Paul, Chris, and Carrie are not happy to see her go, of course. But Cathy insists Paul is the man for her.

Of course, Cathy is a hit in New York. Her instructor, Madame Zolta, is kind of cray-cray, but it’s fine. She’s thrilled that Julian is in love Cathy, but that she doesn’t want him. It makes for good passion onstage. After only seven months, Cathy lands the role of Clara in a production of The Nutcracker to be filmed for tv, to be shown at Christmas. And then she gets to dance Sleeping Beauty with Julian. The family comes up to see her in the role. That night, Paul and Cathy go to a hotel, and he asks her to marry him. Aww. Ew. They decide to keep a secret until Christmas, when Cathy will be home.

Cathy and Julian get into a fantastic fight, because Cathy still won’t give into him. But when it’s announced the company will be going to London for two weeks, they try to make up. Cathy tells him she’ll dance with him, but she’ll never love him, she’s engaged to someone else. So he gets all pissed off again.

So Cathy goes home for Christmas, and before she and Paul tell everyone their news, Chris sees Cathy sneaking out of Paul’s room. Oops. Needless to say, he is not happy. Cathy tries to explain that it’s not wrong, because they’re getting married. That doesn’t help. Chris wants to know why it can’t be him. They can have a non-sexual relationship, Cathy doesn’t want kids anyway. Yeah, Chris, because you’ve been so good at showing restraint in the past.

Back in New York, Cathy dances in Romeo and Juliet. After the performance, a woman comes to see her in her dressing room. It’s Amanda, Paul’s sister. She tells Cathy what a bad idea it is to marry Paul, that them being together is ruining his reputation. Then she tells her that she saw the medical records, and the D&C is actually an abortion procedure, and that Cathy miscarried a two-headed embryo with three legs. And then she goes on to tell her she can’t marry him anyway, he’s already married. Julia’s actually alive, and in a mental hospital. She even has pictures to prove it. After this delightful visit, Amanda leaves.

Cathy is crushed, and can’t believe Paul lied to her. So she does the only thing she can. She sleeps with Julian, and marries him right before they leave for London. You know, like you do.

So. When they get back from London, they go to South Carolina to tell Paul. Paul is suspicious of her bringing Julian, and Cathy cutting off contact for a while. They have a private walk in the garden, and Cathy confesses everything Amanda told her. Turns out, maybe she should have talked to Paul before acting so impulsively. Julia was in a coma for a long time, but did actually die a month after Paul and Cathy became lovers. And the tale of the embryo is just a flat out lie. And then Cathy has to tell him, Oops, sorry, I married Julian. Paul is crushed, but tells her she actually did the right thing, and he’s happy Julian loves her.

Paul tells them Georges is the hospital, dying, so they go to see him. He sees them, and then he dies. Julian gets into a fight with Madame Marisha, about how Georges never loved him as a son, only as a dancer.

Chris comes home, and of course he’s fucking pissed about her marrying Julian. He says Paul would have been better than Julian, even though he said the exact opposite before. Ugh, Chris, just get over it already.

They return to New York, and Cathy vows to be a good wife to Julian.

Throughout all this, with every little damn thing that goes wrong, Cathy finds a way to blame it on her mother.

Finally, that’s the end of Part Two. And there’s still three more to go! They’re not as long, though.

Don’t forget I’ll be live tweeting during the movie Monday night. It’s sure to be a good time.

And speaking of Twitter, while I was writing this post, Mason Dye, the actor who played Chris in Flowers in the Attic, favorited the tweet about my last post. Ha! Cracked me up.

Also, I fixed the link to my Twitter up at the top. Whoops. Didn’t know it was broken.