To Our Pinky Promises

Chapter 27

A/N: Hey guys, sorry for the long wait. I hope I can make it up to you in the next few days. I made a few changes in the previous chapter (right after they went home from the party - during their heart-to-heart talk - so if you guys would like to take a recap from there, this chapter would make so much more sense)

Anyways, I hope you enjoy this one.

~.~.~

"You remember Wayne, don't you?" Alex asked.

I nodded, "Your brother, right? He picked us up from the police station the other time."

"Yeah." Alex confirmed.

"Do you remember the crazy stories I told you about my brother?" He asked me.

"About how he punched his locker open just for the heck of it?" I asked, a bit rhetorically as I held in a snort. "Yeah, how am I supposed to forget that. It left quite the impression on me. A much different one to what I actually got from our first meet, though."

Alex nodded as if that's completely normal.

"You can say that the person who punched his locker open and the guy you met at the police station were two completely different people." Alex said, making me look at him in confusion.

"What do you mean?" I asked, trying to wrap my head around his statement.

"Wayne's an ex-junkie, he started during his high school days," Alex explained. "In other words, he was probably on something when he tried punching that locker open for the heck of it."

"Oh," was all I could manage.

Alex ran a hand through his hair as he continued. "We only found out about it after things got bad." Alex said, finally letting a part of the cat out of the bag.

"Bad?" I asked, hoping that it wasn't as bad as I thought it to be.

It was worse.

"At first, things started disappearing from the house. Little things. The souvenirs we bought from our holidays, then it was my mom's jewelries, cash from the safe, our asset ownership certificates." Alex listed, and as his list went on, the harder it was for me to suppress my disbelief.

"We thought it was one of the maintenance people who came to fix the TV in my parents' room. So we checked the CCTV and we caught my brother taking everything that was gone." Alex shook his head.

"My parents, I don't know what they were thinking - they turned a blind eye on what my brother was doing." He scoffed, his eyes rolling and ending up looking at the sky above our heads.

"Looking back now, it was probably to save their faces, their reputation. They didn't want anyone to know that their son had stolen something or maybe they just didn't want to acknowledge that something was going on with one of their perfect sons."

"Because of that, they deluded themselves into thinking that he was probably trying to start a business. That he needed the money but wanted to keep it a secret from them to prevent them from worrying." He turned to me with an indescribable look. A look that a wronged person wears. A look that was torn between crying out of despair and laughing out of the ridiculousness of the situation. "Ridiculous isn't it?"

I wasn't not going to lie. A part of me wanted to argue with him on the assumptions he made about his parents. Not to defend them, but to save him from the hate he was choking on. I can't imagine how awful it must feel to look at the people who are supposed to love you more than anything in this world and believe that they didn't.

But as I stayed quiet and kept my thoughts to myself, I soon found out why he referred to them with so much spite.

"It wasn't until things escalated that they were finally forced to do something." Alex spat the word 'forced' as if it was poison.