When Different Worlds Collide ✔️

Moderation- Erik's POV

Erik's POV-

Ever since Theo started doing drugs, I hadn't liked Christmas. He hadn't shown up for Christmas since I turned fifteen. The first year he was too high to even remember that it was Christmas, and then the next he was dead. It felt incomplete and wrong to celebrate when he wasn't there with us. Our whole family felt incomplete and wrong.

I hated that I blamed myself. Logically, I knew that even if Theo wasn't trying to protect me from T, he probably would have been forced to become a part of his clique somehow. Just like I had, and just like my father before us had. T and his gang really had a way of not giving people any other options.

That was why I was so bitter about my uncles straight up ditching us and basically screwing us over. My mom didn't see it how I saw it. She has always been the type of woman to see the best in others and situations, but what they had done was screwed up and wrong. That was why it has taken them so long to come over for Christmas even though my mother has invited them over every single year... Guilt will do that to you.

You see, my parents never married. A whole marriage was just something that they hadn't even thought about. I mean, they were together, and everyone knew that they were together, so they didn't ever see the point in getting legally married. My mom got better benefits as a single mom without them being married, and they were trying to save every cent that they could on getting us out of our neighborhood.

When my father died, he had life insurance that no one knew about. It was life insurance that his mom had gotten for him as soon as he had become a teenager in the ghetto. She had known the risks of living around there while being a young black male.

Twenty-five thousand dollars... Not a whole lot in the grand scheme of things, but enough to bury him and then move out of our hood. It was enough to change our lives.

When my grandma died, she had each of her kids' life insurance paid on. Each of them had twenty-five thousand dollars for burial costs. She hadn't wanted to leave any of their loved ones with no plan.

The thing was though, she died before my mom had come into the picture. My father knew nothing of his life insurance; none of her kids had any idea that their mother had done that for them and their loved ones. Usually, life insurance is defaulted to a person's spouse. Unfortunately, my parents were never married. So... his brothers were the secondary beneficiaries on his policy. Their mother had done that for each of them because none of them had any families before she had died.

My uncles both got half of the money that my father's death left. Granted, they did pay for him to get cremated. I think that was how they justified the guilt. Fifteen hundred dollars out of twenty-five thousand went to his after-life expenses. They then picked up my father's ashes after he was cremated, gave them to my mother, along with a thousand dollars each, and then got the hell out of our side of town. My father's remains and two thousand dollars was all that we were left with... That was it.

So yeah... I was pretty damn pissed at my uncles. I didn't think that what they did was right, and it pissed me off that they were going to show up at my house and all the sudden act like what they did was okay.

It wasn't okay. Neither one of them offered for us to come live with them, even though they got out with my father's life insurance money. Neither of them offered to pay some of my mom's bills that my dad paid. No... they gave her a measly two thousand dollars out of twenty-five thousand and then left. That left my brother to have to worry about helping with bills at such a young age. They left us all vulnerable.

I couldn't even look at them. They were all chatting it up, telling everyone how well they were doing. Meanwhile, I was just hoping that T wasn't going to go back on his word and pull a Grinch move on us by taking our presents in exchange for our fee that he had waived that month.