When I got back home, Aunt Vikki told me that Pyotr had called. He apologized for not checking up on me earlier because Dominika went into labor right after I had left. What a perfect timing. And then the whole baby thing crowded his overpopulated mind. I couldn't blame him for that. I also had a similar issue and didn't have the heart to even think about him either.
Robert came back from Las Vegas in a good mood as if he just returned from a fishing trip with a big fish. He was one of the board members of a shipping company. Robert married my aunt after he lost his heart to her during a business trip to Moscow. My dad said my aunt was really close to my mother before she moved away. Dad wasn't one to talk about my mother much. She died giving birth to me. In fact, I was supposed to be dead before I was even born, and by being alive, I was her murderer.
If she hadn't had me, they could still have another child later and would have lived happily ever after. I used to question why my mom didn't give up on me when she hadn't even seen me yet.
I tried to imagine the pain that raged through her — how I refused to leave her body while trying to split her in half. And not until she shed her last tear and took her last breath that I was brought into the coldness of this world. But she was gone. Maybe the occurrence of this death and birth that had taken place at the same time was what made me feel different from other people.
At dinner with the family, I stayed quiet and only answered when my aunt asked me. The foods were prepared by the maid. You wouldn't believe how costly it was to hire a cook in this country. I was self-conscious to even eat. Piper was chatting away easily with her dad. And before we knew it, she was asking permission to go to some friend's party.
"I promise I will be back like a Cinderella," she said.
"Then I should ask John to drive you," Robert said. "You don't want to drive that late."
"No, dad! That's embarrassing!" She made a face. "Jason is going to be there, too, right Jason?"
She nudged her twin brother with her elbow. Jay nodded vigorously.
"Yeah, it's a celebration of my team winning the rival high school the other week," he said. "Our coach will join us too, so you don't have to worry."
"Well," Robert said, scratching his double chin in consideration and then nodded. "Alright, you kids can go, but don't break my trust or do something stupid. I won't bail you two out of jail the next day, understand?"
"Yes, sir!" Jay said and mirrored his sister's big grin.
"Honey!" Aunt Vikki turned to her husband. "You're spoiling them again!"
"Oh, mom!" Piper whined. "All my friends go!"
"I'll take care of Piper," Jay added reassuringly. "If she's a bad kid, I'll make sure to change the password of her Candy Crush."
"Hey, since when you take the role of a big brother so seriously?" Piper scoffed. "It should be me to keep you on the leash."
Jay reached his hand out and tousled her hair. Piper shrieked, shielded her head and kicked him under the table.
"Don't fight at the table! You're not five anymore," my aunt hushed them.
"So, when is the party?" my uncle-in-law asked.
"This weekend," Piper turned to say excitedly.
"Oh." Robert looked at his wife. "Honey, did you tell the kids yet?"
Aunt Vikki shook her head.
"Tell us what?" Jay asked.
"Actually, we were planning our anniversary this weekend," my aunt said a bit shyly.
"Oh my god!" Piper gasped. "Your anniversary! I totally forgot."
"Will we do it on a cruise ship again?" Jay asked curiously.
"Well, no, your mom and I just want to have a getaway vacation this time," his father said. "We've always wanted to have a quiet time for once. I'm thinking of Fiji or Hawaii, but we haven't decided yet."
"And now I'm a bit worried about leaving you kids for a whole week," Aunt Vikki said.
"No, mom, don't be! We're old enough to take care of ourselves," Jay said with a puffed chest. "Remember that one summer you left to Florida and we didn't burn down the house or anything?"
I pushed my broccoli into my mouth as I listened to the conversation. The taste was a bit blunt for my liking.
"I'm just afraid when the cat is away, the mice will play," Aunt Vikki said.
"Geez, mom!" Jay groaned. "You need to quit using all that cheesy sayings!"
"I think you two should go. You deserve a break," Piper said in encouragement. "If there is anything wrong, I will hold Jason responsible."
"Hey!"
Robert chuckled and then looked at my aunt. I knew he was the first to give in.
"Maybe we should let them learn how to be independent, darling," he said. "Strict parents only produce rebellious kids."
"But honey, Nina just got here not that long. I don't think it's a good idea to leave her like that," she said. Suddenly, everyone's heads turned to me as if they just remembered I was there.
"Oh," I said. "Don't worry about me. I'm totally fine with that. Pyo—I meant my dad let me stay home by myself all the times."
"Yes, mom, she'll be with me all the time, anyway," Piper said. She was lying through her teeth.
Robert had a slight look of discomfort when he heard that, but only I noticed. I wondered if he was thinking I would be a bad influence to his daughter. Aunt Vikki seemed like she was in a deep thought. I kept my eyes on my hot buttery pasta.
"Oh and Nina can also come to the party with us," Jay said all of a sudden, making me look up from my plate. "So she won't get bored at home, you know."
I narrowed my eyes at him, but Jay pretended not to notice. After a long while later, Aunt Vikki nodded.
"Alright then," she said at last. "But you will have a lot of rules from me, are we clear?"
The twins nodded back, simply overjoyed.
After the meal, I went up to my room and started doing my homework. I finished an evolution paper for Bio II and a printed report for European History. Now I was trying to tackle five problems for my math homework. I thought that math was probably the reason why teens go into depression, but Mr. Oliveira made it funny. He talked about limits, logarithm, and linear like they were beautiful women. It was hard not to be inspired by his passion with math even it still frustrated me the way Allecra frustrated me.
Thinking about that one girl always made my heart beat a little faster, and I hated myself for that. Then I realized I had to write a diary entry for Mrs. Smith's class. I didn't know what to write about.
As I was thinking, I heard a knock on the door. I opened it and found Jay standing there.
"Yes?" My tone was sharp, even I hadn't meant to.
Jay looked nervous. He scratched the back of his neck, but when he didn't say anything, I yanked the door to close.
"Nina, wait!" he said, stopping me. "I just want to talk to you about the whole party thing."
"Don't worry. I'm not going," I said. "You and Piper can go ahead and have fun."
"No, it's not that," Jay said, licking his dry lips. "I—er—sort of told my friends about you coming from Russia, and they asked me to invite you."
"So that you can display your Russian gay cousin around?" I said without breaking my stare.
Jay's eyes grew wide and his ears went red.
"No! God, no! That's not what I meant!"
"Well, tell them I can't go," I said and started to close the door again when Jay arrested it with his strong hand.
"No, please, Nina, I know we haven't been on a good term lately. But please, do me a favor. I already said you would join us," he pleaded, looking at me with his big cow-like eyes. "They just want to make friends."
"Why?" I asked.
"Look, I'm sorry for how I have been acting around you," he said. "I knew I'm a total jerk but I was just a little upset that—that—you—"
"You're a homophobic beef brain, you know that?" I said.
Jay looked at me, blinking.
"A homophobic what?" he said and tried to muffle a laugh. "Nina, where did you learn to curse like that?"
"From the children books I read while I was learning English," I said. "And there is no amount of cootie shot in the world could cure you of this phobia, I tell you."
Jay burst out laughing. Watching my cousin in his ridiculous hysteria, I had to press my lips together to hide my smile. I sort of agreed that my cursing ability would make even a five-year-old roll eyes.
After Jay got his breath back, he wiped his tears and looked at me again.
"I'm so sorry for everything that wedged its way between us, Nina. We could have had a lot of bonding time together if I wasn't much of a beef brain to you."
"A homophobic one, don't you forget that," I said.
"Yes, yes, I know!" He put his hands together like he was praying. "But please, you're my cousin. Let's rejoice and start over again. I will be more open-minded this time, and I swear, you won't regret it, please!"
I looked back at him. Jay tried to appear miserable and all sincere. I yanked the door close on his face. But after a few seconds, I opened it again.
"I'll think about it," I said to him. "Now, goodnight."
Jay's face, which had looked disappointed just a moment ago, began to light up again.
"Thank you, Ni—"
I slammed the door shut.
~*~
Klara's email arrived this morning. It was more entertaining than a copy of People magazine, with all the juicy gossips from my old school. Not that I cared about that stuff, but she also wrote that Yuliya and Erik were getting together. She even capitalized the headline. Well, Erik was my ex-boyfriend. He was nice at first, but when he started complaining to his friends that I didn't satisfy his needs, I right out dumped him in the face.
Yuliya's family was the world's professional old-fashion people. Erik would have to satisfy his needs all by himself again.
In biology, I handed my report to Ms. Peterson.
She looked at it and smiled at me.
"The Flaws of Evolution?" she said with a raised brow. "Sounds like an interesting topic. I'm looking forward to hearing your presentation, Nina."
"Wait, I have to present it?" I asked. Jordan giggled at the horrified look on my face.
"Don't worry. You're going to do great, Nina," the teacher said and turned away. Jordan patted my back.
"Didn't know you were shy," she said.
I wasn't shy, but sometimes people didn't know the difference between being shy and not wanting attentions.
"So what false image did you have of me?" I asked her.
"You have no false images, but you're like a chameleon," she said. "You don't want people to know much about you. But my mom told me that quiet people are strong people."
Klara used to tell me the same thing when she first met me. On that day, when a cockroach crawled over her desk, she instantly turned opera singer. I found an empty plastic cup and covered the cockroach with it then inserted a paper underneath. She looked at me like I had single-handedly taken down a fire-breathing dragon. I was scared, too, but sometimes when you look past your fear, even if you are frightened down to your tail bone, you can do what is required of you.
Ms. Peterson was talking about female genes.
"Inside of each one of your cell, there are two meters of DNA— two meters in every single cell!" she said as if she had never heard anything as wonderful.
She rolled down a cut-out picture of the chromosome, showing twenty-two of them that found their matching pairs except for the twenty-third ones. Without a doubt, I knew what the pair was, the sex chromosome.
"It isn't lined up in order like what you see on the picture. In reality, your DNA gets tangled up worse than a headphone in your bags. You got twenty-three chromosomes from you mom mixed with twenty-three from you dad," she said, pointing at the image. "We learned that two Xs make you female and an X to a Y makes you male. For a male, sex chromosome is always active for life, but for female, one of her X chromosomes has to be deactivated for proper development."
"Why is that?" someone asked.
"It's just the natural thing for our species so that women can survive to adulthood," she said. "If you could look at a woman skin and really see where the X chromosome has been inactivated, you will see stripy patterns all over her body."
"Really? Why don't I see any patterns on my skin then?" another girl said as she turned her hand over in front of her.
"Of course not! You couldn't see that on humans unless you're like a Calico cat," the teacher said. "Haven't you noticed that only female Calico cats have more than one color on their coats?"
"If women really have patterns, then that's another way to link them to cat personality, mysterious and make no sense," Michael said and started laughing until one of the girls stuffed his mouth with a paper ball.
"Just shut up."
And the whole class burst out laughing, including the teacher.
~*~
In science class, my heart raced again because I knew whom I was going to put up with. I walked in and took my seat by the window. Allecra hadn't arrived yet. More students kept pouring in as the clock ticked away.
Without meaning to, I found myself glancing at the door more often than usual. To distract myself, I took out my notebook, but I wasn't in the mood to write anything, or that I just couldn't think straight (no pun intended). Instead, I started doodling an ugly little cartoon girl, wearing a black jacket with wild hair. A flock of seagulls flew over her head and a bubble that screamed, 'It doesn't make sense!'
I giggled to myself.
"What's that?" a voice said beside me. I jumped up with an uncharacteristic gasp and turned to see pools of stirring galaxies. Allecra's eyes twinkled as she was peering over my shoulder. I could feel her breath on my heated cheek. My heart beat all the way to my throat.
How could I not sense her coming? I almost always sensed people when they invaded my personal space. It was like built-in radar for me, but Allecra Knight seemed to make all the functions in my body jumble like parched peas.
She leaned in closer to look at my doodles, and her perfect jawline distracted me for a minute. Before I could cover the page with my hands, Allecra scooped the book up faster than I could move.
"That's me, isn't it?" she said, still looking at my cartoons. My face had gone from red to ghost white. She was going to kill me, wasn't she? Then Allecra did something that surprised me. She pulled out her black ink pen and drew another bubble next to one of the seagulls then wrote, 'Booo hooo hooo!'
"That's more like it," she said.
Was that her way of saying 'sorry' after brutally mocked my poem? My lips turned up into a betraying smile. Allecra turned around and handed my notebook back.
She gave me a small smile, which made me drop the book. It bounced off my chair and skidded on the floor under the desk.
We looked at each other and then wordlessly bent to retrieve the book at the same time. Our heads tilted. I didn't know how it all started, but the next thing I knew, my lips were brushing against Allecra's neck. We both froze with my lips rested there on her skin. My nose caught the unique scent of her fragrant blonde hair.
I jerked myself back from her. Allecra was staring at me. Her eyes seemed to get brighter than usual. My face reddened like ripe cherries.
Then she picked the book up and handed it to me again. We sat back on our chairs as if nothing had happened. No one in the class seemed to notice anything. They were laughing and chatting away among themselves. But my face was still hot.
Did I just kiss her neck? How the heck did I end up kissing her neck?
I had never found any real attraction towards a girl before even I was gay. It was unmistakable that something about Allecra bewitched me.
I didn't dare look at her again. We both sat in silence until Mrs. Cowell barged into the room and apologized for being a little late today.
As my mind kept rewinding the moment my lips were on Allecra's skin, she was just staring blankly ahead. When my eyes fell on the side of her neck, I got a glimpse of her strange tattoo peeping out of the collar of her jacket. Then a bright flash burst into my retinas out of nowhere. It was like when you look up at the sun and the brightness attacks your vision. I closed my eyes in pain. I saw some glowing patterns on a smooth back of someone. I saw two pairs of glowing eyes and heard my own piercing scream. I dropped my head in my hands as a wave of dizziness hit me.
"Are you okay?" Allecra's voice sounded close by. As soon as she said it, the scene began to clear away. I waved my hand to reassure her that I was fine.
"Just a headache," I said. When I opened my eyes again, I found Allecra staring at me. There was a look on her face that I couldn't seem to understand. It wasn't only a concern but also something else.
When the bell rang at the end of the class, she simply stood up and walked away without another word.