Trashed and Highly Treasured

Calling All Rebels

He certainly wasn’t black in my book.

“And you look like shit.”

“Ah,” his fine features collapsed in pain, and one hand dared to clutch at his right pec. His lean and tall body folded over slightly as he rested a large hand against my pastel-pink door frame, “Ouch, you hurt me so bad.”

I could have laughed, it was cute, ignoring the fact that he was and still is my brother by marriage. Him as fine as he looked in that tight shirt and god-amazing jeans would have had Carla drooling like a dog after a bone.

But my eyes narrowed and I remembered the ruthless fourteen year old, his friends and a fat and timid twelve year old girl.

I’d already made my way across the room when he rose with a smile on his face, “look who grew a back bone and..” his eyes wandered over my frame, over the years I’d shed forty pounds, grew to 5’5 and took up weight lifting, “lost some weight.”

Sisterly my butt.

My nostril flared, red bulls had nothing on me. I wrapped my palm around the cool door knob, brass and gelatin in all it’s splendor. He crossed his arms.

I slammed the door.

The rest of that hour I spent unpacking the rest of my things until my Dad arrived with his wife.

I missed my mama, her stern gaze, her suffocating-loving kisses and her almond eyes. My first night in my father’s fancy smanchy house at his wife’s fancy smanchy table I sat across from her smug grey-eyed son.

I hated him.

Loathed him. Deep in my bones and he knew it.

He embraced it.

Now get this, I’m not racist. I couldn’t possibly be since I’d crushed on nearly every ethnicity I could available at my high school. There was the soulful black boy who’d rejected me, the Hispanic boy who was gracious enough to teach me how to French kiss and the white boy who’d tapped me on my ass and told me if I wasn’t so high strung he would’ve banged the living daylights out of me.

Stephen though. There was something about him, something that didn’t rub me the right way. Five years before he had sneered at me and pointed at my faults, now he smirked at me, eyed my new body and rubbed his scruffy chin. It was worse.

I didn’t want to think about it, or acknowledge what I thought it could be.

“Angelica, how was your flight here?”

Formal, elegant, that was my dad with his caramel hued skin, neatly trimmed moustache, and dignified hair cut ever reminiscent of a powerful professor.

Who would have thought such a clean cut man would have a bastard daughter at forty three? Who would’ve thunk it huh? Did his colleagues even know that he had a seventeen year old daughter or was I secret hidden among the alcoves of memories he wished to forget?

Of course he wouldn’t know how my flight was, neither would his ultra chic wife wither her long black curls splayed against her pale paper thin skin. Both had been too busy to pick me up and instead had sent a chauffeur and a text message that I would find a spare key in the gargoyle on the back porch.

So much for the welcome committee right?

Then again saying that would have been rude. I moved bits of dry chicken breast around my plate with my fork and raised my head. For the past hour I’d listened to the three of them engage in a vapid conversation about Stephen and his first year in college and his inability to choose between becoming an architect, doctor or lawyer.