The Genetic Code

Chapter 18

"I don't understand why you're being like this... Everyone else here is drinking!"

"Algebra... long division... Pythagoras theorem... There's a lot of things you don't understand. Just add this to the list."

Suzy huffs loudly and storms off, getting swallowed by the crowd again.

I scan the crowd, and my eyes land on Adela again, who raises her glass and dips her head slightly, taking a long sip, all while keeping her eyes directly fixed on me.

I ball up my fists tightly to stop the trembling, clenching my jaw, and rip my eyes away from her pointed gaze.

I look at the cooler box on the ground next to me, fluttering my eyelids close.

Why do those spots refuse to leave me alone? I thought that they'd disappear after a while, but instead, they follow me wherever I go, taking different shapes, morphing into different forms in front of my eyes... a bottle... a glass... a translucent fizzy liquid that burns down your throat, contaminates your blood and mutates your DNA. A toxic substance that slowly and insidiously corrupts you from the inside and turns you into some kind of trepid, shaking, sweating, choking monster.

I remember the first time I drank alcohol.

I was nine, we were having a Christmas dinner party, and Daddy let me have a sip of his champagne. I loved it from the first taste. Since then, I always requested for at least one glass of champagne at every event or function we hosted. Sometimes I'd even have two, or three, or four.

I should have seen the warning signs back then.

People say that the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree. Well, most apple varieties are self-unfruitful, which means their blossoms must be fertilized by the pollen of a separate variety. However, that separate variety may not always be an ideal one, which means that, even if the tree bearing the blossom itself is of an advantageous variety, the apple it bears may be diseased. Is that the fault of the apple? The pollen grain carrying the disease? The tree blossom that allowed this defective gamete to fertilize?

No matter who is to blame, the unchanged fact is that the apple is still defective.

The daughter of an 11% alcoholic is bound to acquire the taste for champagne, isn't she? It's natural instinct, the body's response to inherited predispositions, invoking the gene that might be innocuous until triggered by this first exposure to alcohol. This taste soon turns into a craving, then an addiction, then an abusive dependence. Before you know it, the body can't go a week without alcohol before showing withdrawal symptoms, from mild anxiety and shakiness to delirium tremens.

***

"Did you guys go to the festival without me?"

I turn to the source of the annoyingly whiny voice, and of course see Thalia's freckled face frowning back at me.

"You said you couldn't afford it, right?"

"Well, yeah, but..."

"I mean, just because you couldn't go, doesn't mean that we shouldn't be able to go either. I thought you would understand and have just told us to go, since you wouldn't have wanted to hold us back because of your own personal financial issue..."

She fiddles with her auburn locks, looking down at her fingers, and replies in a mousy voice, "O-Oh, yes, of course... I guess..."

"You get it, right?" I say with a plastic smile, head cocked to the side.

"Yeah, I think I do..." she says quietly, with a hurt look on her face, before walking out of the classroom.

I sit on the edge of my desk and retrieve my compact mirror, carefully reapplying my lip gloss.

"So dramatic," I sigh exasperatedly, flipping my hair over my shoulder in a large sweeping gesture.

Suzy takes a seat atop her desk next to mine.

"Come on, Kera. We've been friends since elementary. Can't you understand where she's coming from?"

"Can't she understand where I'm coming from? Do you? Especially because we've been friends since elementary, I would have thought she would tell us sooner, rather than stringing us along this whole time."

"I'm sure it wasn't easy for her to 'fess up about. That's not something you really want people to know." Ugh, I hate sympathizers. "Didn't you say yourself that you didn't want to end your friendship over something like that?"

"I was just trying to be nice. But then I woke up and realized that being nice gets you nowhere." I turn to Suzy with narrowed eyes. "Why are you defending a person whose been lying to us? Do you have something that you want to tell me too? Some secret you're hiding from me?"

"What? No!" She sighs. "No."

"Good. Then stop talking about her, and let's get lunch."

I hop off my desk and strut out of the classroom with a fumbling Suzy following promptly behind.

I'm so pissed. Whose side is she on?

The only people I hate more than sympathizers are hypocrites, and liars.

Thalia had this secret that she was hiding from us, trying to fool us like idiots.

My mother knew of my condition, or at least my potential condition, all this time, and the risk of exposing me to alcohol from young, yet she never did anything to prevent it. She just allowed it to worsen in the past two years when I could have done something about it to hinder its progress.

Now it's just a matter of time before the condition is exacerbated and overruns my Perfectly planned and systemized life.

But if all my years being trained as a Perfect taught me anything, it's how to be a hyper-compulsive perfectionist who will do anything and everything to keep my life under the regimented control I've grown to thrive in, even if it's means going against the laws of nature and principles of molecular genetics governing our world, conceived by my own ancestors.

Sorry, great-great-grannie, Grace Cordelia Rosamund, but I'm not sorry.

I'm Kera Grace Rosamund, and I don't lose, in anything, no matter what.