Oranges & Roses

Could I Be Normal?

Unedited.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

“Have a seat.”

Lan gestured at the unmade bed. I hesitated for a moment, wondering if this should be weird but in the end finding it not to be. I sat and tried not to crack a joke about how this was starting to feel like visiting a shrink’s office. Her room was much nicer than one of those though, clearly maternal with the flowers and extra large bed to accommodate the multiple children who decide to come running in in the middle of the night when there was a thunderstorm.

It was so normal. I kept saying that, over and over again in my head. I had to have said it out loud at least once now. How many other people noticed how normal someone else’s life was? Then I got thinking what type of person would notice that about someone else. That had to be odd, right?

“Your life isn’t normal,” Lan muttered. “Stop freaking out about it.”

I frowned up at her. “What?”

“That look on your face…” she was combing through the compartment under the TV, “you are a very expressive person. Gives away everything you’re feeling…here.”

She handed me a marble notebook and the frowning continued. “No one has ever said that to me before.”

“Really? Ronnie mentioned it. In fact, you’re pretty much the only girl he’s ever really talked about. And that includes our primary teacher back in Colombia who he had a crush on.”

That…did not, at all, match up to the Rey I knew. Not wanting to go down that road of thought just yet, I turned back to the notebook in my hand. “What’s this? And please tell me it’s not your version of the sappy movie.”

She chuckled. “No. Open it. I’m pretty sure you’ll figure it out.”

I cracked it open and found she was right. I did know what this was. I had one of my own. “Do you…really want me to read this?”

“I wouldn’t have given it to you if I didn’t. Go ahead and flip through it. There’s something else I’m looking for that I wanted to show you and then I’ll give you the full story so you’re not left wondering what exactly it was I wanted you to know.”

The room stayed quiet as I flipped through it, never staying on one page for long. In the beginning, it was a bunch of ramblings, nothing really coherent about it. The handwriting was awful, much like a child first learning how to write. You couldn’t complete read it, just catch random words in the mass of chicken scratch.

As I got further into the book, the handwriting became more legible, the thoughts more fluid and rational.  By the end…

Lan sat down next to me and I looked up at her. “You were in rehab?”

She nodded. “The thing is, when one twin is stable, the other is questionable, at least for us anyways. My brother cleaned up his act, got his GED, went into the military…and I sorta fell apart. I started running with the wrong crowd, the crowd he just happened to jump out of. It lasted for longer than it should have and when Ronnie came back from boot camp, I was pregnant.”

Oh that’s not…good. “How old were you?”

“Eighteen.” She saw the look on my face and nodded. “Yeah. I got looks, I got lectured by random little old ladies…it was horrible. Tiny’s biological father wasn’t much of a stand-up guy and pretty much abandoned me for the duration of the pregnancy. My brother wasn’t happy to say the least and when he finally caught up with him, let’s just say my brother was lucky he wasn’t dishonorably discharged for conduct unbecoming. Tiny was born and I was staying with our cousins, Ronnie thought I would be fine while he was away for some training…”