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It might seem boring or even weird that a sixteen-year-old would talk about this with strangers but in all honesty it's better than to tell any of my relatives.
They are not very well known for keeping secrets or being understanding.
The first sign things were going south was that they stopped sleeping in the same bed. Dad bought the house next door and completely renovated it into a man cave. I was six at the time so I found it completely awesome and so did my fifteen-year-old brother, Ethan, who I latter found out had an unhealthy addiction to drugs at the time. No wonder my mom was chasing him down on New Year's Eve with a small plastic can.
As everyone could imagine, it was weird living into a house where fights occurring in two a.m in the morning were a wake up call for my brother and I.
I should probably tell you about Ethan since he was the thing that most bugged me about our parents' divorce. He had a pair of big blue eyes and dark coffee hair and even though I hated thinking about it people often say I looked like his identical twin (which is stupid since twins with different genders can't be identical). The point is that my brother was a charmer. He used to bring girlfriends to our house all the time and I'd remember those pretty leggy blonds parading my house in shorts. They all found me adorable with my blond curls and big ocean eyes. Ethan didn't like me a lot when I was little, I think. He used to make me do his chores like washing the dishes or vacuum-cleaning. He'd pay me back with sweets. At the time when I was around seven I was developing an allergy and one of the doctors suspected it had something to with chocolate so my worrisome mother banned anything remotely connected to enjoyable food to go near me. I hated it with passion so Ethan decided that he'd bribe with whatever means necessary. We had a good thing going until one day he just decided he didn't want to talk to me at all. He stopped playing silly Barbies with me, he stopped pretending to be dead until I was on the floor sobbing (damn him it worked every single time) and he stopped letting me use his face as my canvas whenever I felt artsy. At first I pegged it as him growing up with university coming up and all and mom hounding him for the drug tests.
My little brain registered something was wrong when one day my dad took me to our family lake. I don't mean to say lake house, my father actually owned a freaking lake and a lot of the land surrounding it. We had a house there but no one was up for cleaning it so I rarely stayed over night. So, it wasn't so weird for my dad to take me to the lake since I had gotten his addiction to fishing. It was funny to know Ethan hated going anywhere near the lake except when he had his parties out there. So my bigshot father found some free time to spend with me. He was almost never home but going fishing was our thing. We took the boat out and I jumped into the lake and he shouted after me that the fish would eat me, mistaking me for a worm and I laughed so hard until the sun started setting. He forced me out of the water with a promise to get me an extra big burger on the way home all the while talking in French over the phone. I hated when he did that since I thought he sounded possessed.
It was all good until we got back to our three story house- not the mancave, the one I was living at- and he told me to put up an overnight bag and get my school stuff for the next day. He told me mom was staying over at my grandma's and I had to go see her. I responded that I didn't want to and I'd rather stay home with him since I see mom everyday but him twice a month. He smiled sadly and told me I didn't have a choice so the stupid eight-year-old I thought nothing of it and happily did as I was told, exicted to see Grandma Rose. Dad waited for me in the car to dash across the front lawn and ring the bell until the door opened and he took off in his Bentley, leaving me confused on the front lawn. My grandma was gloomy and didn't even greet me. I asked if Ethan was coming over for dinner since I was still thinking nothing was wrong until the old bat barked out a laugh and called me naive.
I found my mother smoking in my grandma's kitchen, her hands shaking as she talked on the phone. I didn't catch everything she said but I understood she was talking to a lawyer. She didn't even looked at me before storming out of the house the minute the conversation was over, crying through the whole thing. My grandma was no better, she smoked, she cursed under her breath and she drank. I stood across from her on the balcony, swinging my legs back and forth. I had asked her a few times what was wrong but she paid me no mind until I burst into tears and told her I wanted to go back home to dad. That definitely got her going because she told me my dad had been lying to all of us the past seven years. She told me I had two siblings which my father had been keeping on the side and that one of them was only eight months younger than I was while the other was three.
After that pretty much everything was a blur. The perfect picture of my father had been shattered, there were no more fishing trips to our lake, no more Ethan waking me up late at night to watch scary movies and get me scarred for life seeing someone getting chainsawed, and no more fancy trips to the big city nearby with my mom to shop as much clothes as I wanted.
Later I found out that Dad had transferred all of our family's money into an offshore fund that was registered to a shady company and had left my mom with me and not a single penny while Ethan had said in court that mom had been cheating on dad and had seen her stealing money from dad which was a complete bogus. He fought with mom and they haven't talked in eight years now. I hadn't talked to my brother in six, ever since I told him I hated him for doing something so cruel to me and mom.
After the whole divorce fiasco was over, under which I mean was the whole town seeing police coming over to my grandma's and my dad's two houses to prevent the two from starting an actual fight, we moved to the city. Some cheap shrink had told mom I was suffering from severe depression from all the humiliation in school- third grade was a nightmare- she had decided it was time to go. In the big city our Auntie Daniella gave us a small apartment her husband and her owned where my mom had to worked eleven hours a day. I usually stayed home crying in bed and on my good days my aunt and two cousins forced me out of bed and took me to the park. Daniel- who was fourteen at the time- and Chris who was my age were a great help. I loved them to death.
When I was eleven we moved to Spain with my mom's new husband and we stayed there five years until we came back a month ago. Ever since then I've been thinking more and more about Ethan who was meant to be twenty-five by now. I sit down and wonder whether he has a serious girlfriend, where he works or if he's okay and as much as I want to look for him I know I can't because my mom still feels betrayed. I talked to my father two weeks ago when I told him I was admitted to a fancy boarding school in Britain where I got a partial scholarship and wanted him to help me financially. He just brushed me off, telling me not to bother him and his new wife and their thee kids.
What am I supposed to go? I want to see my big brother more than anything without making my mom feel betrayed.
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