THE MAYFAIR MOON - The Darkmoon Saga I

Chapter 1 - Sisters

No one used the f-word more than my step-dad, Jeff. He was a poor excuse for a man, but my mom, Rhonda, "loved" him. Despite the drunken tantrum, it was a quiet night in our house. Jeff rarely bothered me or my sister, Alexandra, anymore. He backed off after Alex blackened his eye last year.

I sat in the center of my bed with a book on my lap and music playing low beside me. Alex left earlier in the afternoon; she'd begged me to go with her to play pool, but I wasn't much into pool. Neither was she. She went because Zach Anthony went. Besides, I knew why she really wanted me to go. She'd been trying to hook me up with a guy named Brent. "But he's hot," she'd mentioned on more than one occasion. "And he's a good guy." He probably was hot and a good guy, but she just couldn't get it through her thick skull that I wasn't looking for another loser boyfriend to fill the "holes in my heart". My ex cheated on me not even four months ago—days after I gave my virginity to him—and I had more important things to worry about than guys, like my mom and her poor man-picking skills that I worried might've been genetically passed on to me.

I heard my mom shuffling around in her room across from mine: hangers clanked violently in the closet; drawers opened and slammed shut so hard the dresser banged against the wall; her footsteps were heavy as she stomped back and forth, rattling the windows and the exposed lightbulb above me in the ceiling.

"What are you doing?" Jeff yelled.

"Why do you care?" my mom demanded. "Your girlfriend is getting warm in there on the coffee table."

Mom always referred to Jeff's beer as his "girlfriend". The only thing I could give him credit for was that it took more than sarcasm to get him to hit her. Not that that was saying much, but it was a small sense of relief for me. My mom, to be honest, couldn't keep her opinions to herself. Like right now, as she went on and on about his drunken ways. Sometimes I wondered if she was a masochist—why else would she stay with him?

I was used to the argument dragging out a long time before Jeff's inner loser took over, and he got physical. Some might say she deserved it (my stepbrother said that once—Alex blackened his eye, too), but no woman deserves to be hit.

"Why don't you back off," Jeff said with a slur in his voice. "Crazy, nagging bi—"

"Nag?" My mom sounded shocked. I could picture her mouth open in total disbelief, her hands propped on her bony hips. She was so used to Jeff calling her a "bitch" that it didn't faze her anymore. But "nag"—no way she would let him get away with that.

The rest of what she was saying, I ignored. It was always the same argument with the same outcome: drawn-out fighting, which usually ended in lengthy make-up sex that always forced me out of the house faster than the actual fight ever did.

I hoisted my canvas backpack on after tucking my book away inside it, then raised my bedroom window and slipped out into the humidity. It felt nicer than inside, where the heat of the day lingered. We lived in a tiny white house just outside of Athens, Georgia, in a small town called Watkinsville. From the road, the house looked like a dirty speck in an endless yellowing pasture. No trees hovered nearby to help shade it from the blistering southern summers. I hated that house. It was Jeff's house.

Our neighbors were spaced out here and there. Jack and Janice Bentley lived across the street—Janice had a cat-hoarding problem. Old Man Chester lived just around the curve past the proud and famous Jacquelyn Morose, who had the pinkest house in Northeast Georgia. And then there was Mrs. Willis, who lived next door. Unfortunately, she lived directly next door, as in about twenty feet away on the same acreage. We also shared the same mailbox post and driveway with her, and our business was her business, too. One of those. There's one in every neighborhood, isn't there?