Don't Let Go

03: Sleep

To be honest, most of my family cringes at my music and the fact that 98% of my wardrobe consist of  baggy band t-shirts, and the color black. It's not like I'm full goth or something, I just really like the color black and wearing clothes I'm comfortable in. Besides, black was slimming and I was always looking for different ways to make my thighs look smaller.

But to my sister, I might as well be wearing a black garbage bag with the way she looked at me and the things I liked.

But I'm over it. The 10 year old me who would follow her 12 year old sister around begging for her attention is long gone and I'm just happy I stopped caring about her opinion by the time I hit puberty.

"What do you want, Carol?" I ask sweetly, using the nickname she hates. Seeing her frown in displeasure almost makes me smile but I hold it in.

"The dishes need to be cleaned"

"And what's wrong with your hands?" I say, rolling my eyes as I stand up.

"Yeah, right" she scoffs, tossing her dark brown hair behind her shoulder.

In terms of looks, we really don't look too much alike. Carolina has a more pale skin complexion, while mine is more of a caramel color. She has chocolate brown eyes and I have hazel ones. She's a size two, I'm a size eight. She has a great set of boobs which she uses to her advantage every chance she gets, I have a small A cup, wide hips and an ass that is the bane of my existence.

There are small things that we share like the same cupid's bow shaped lips, our top lip slightly bigger than our bottom one and we have the same nose curtesy of our wonderful father. And of course, the same dark brown hair, though Carolina wears her shorter and mine touches my waist whenever I bother to actually let it out of my ponytail.

But personality wise? Zero in common. Sometimes I think that if I didn't love my sister, I'd seriously hate her as a person.

"Pretty sure none of those dishes are mine" I mumble, but I'm not stupid enough to think that matters. Around here, I'm pretty much the Muñiz maid. But I don't mind, not really. After all, I know that if I don't clean, no one will. And then our mom will start bitching and the last thing I want is for my mom to start blaming stupid shit on me as usual.

I enter the house and into our apartment, Carolina trailing behind me. My parents are sitting in the living room, speaking loudly in Spanish but I don't focus on their words and instead walk straight to the kitchen.

God I can't wait till I graduate and get the hell out of this place. I'm already 18 but what good would leaving the house now be without a diploma?

So graduating was the end date.

I can handle anything that is thrown at me as long as it means I'm able to walk out of here by the end of June and start a new life.

Just a few more months, I tell myself like a mantra. A mantra I tell myself over and over until the overwhelming need to run subsides, my clenched hand loosening from the sink.

****

The next morning I leave my house as early as possible, evading my father who is scrounging around the house for loose change. If he saw me then he'd ask for money and then I'd be out of food money for when I hang out with Kimberly and Tina after school.

I hop onto the bus, and am lucky enough to find a single seater so I don't have to share with anyone else. Normally the buses are packed but since I have the early schedule this year I get to evade the 8 am traffic. Our school has three different types of schedules: the 7:40-1:20 schedule, the 8:30-2:10 schedule and the last schedule was  9:20-3:00. I somehow convinced Kimberly and Tina to take the earliest schedule with me, which for someone like Kimberly who doesn't like to get up before 10 was like asking her to jump into a shark invested tank. Fortunately she loves me enough to sacrifice a few extra hours of sleep, plus if we have the early schedule that leaves us more time to hang out after school.