Once we reach Sun’s room, I knock three times like always, so she knows it’s me. When she opens the window, I let Luan climb in first, pushing him up just because. He would’ve managed to do it all on his own, but with my help, I could have my hands on his ass.
Before I even make it inside, I can hear Sun talk to Luan as though she’s known him all her life. They metonceyears ago.
“You’re turning twenty-seven?” I hear my sister ask all surprised. “How are you older than Grey? You lookyounger.”
“I don’t know.” Luan chuckles. “It’s got to be your brother’s scowls that make him look eighty.”
I don’t look like I’m eighty years old. Right? No. I don’t have gray hairs or wrinkles, and I’m in great shape, thank you very much.
“Enough of that,” I say and turn to my sister. “Clearly, I don’t have to introduce either of you.” I take my boyfriend’s hand in mine, then pull him right toward my sister’s bedroom door to leave. “Say goodbye, Sunshine.”
“Goodbye.” Sun waves after us like we’re leaving to go to war. “It was nice meeting you!”
“I like her,” Luan says as soon as the door closes behind us. “Woah. I knew it was going to be fancy in here, but what the fuck is this!” He waves a hand around, causing me to look around the hallway like I didn’t grow up here.
When I was younger, I didn’t know that the way I grew up was extraordinary. I didn’t know that most people don’t live in houses as big as the one I lived in. Sure, I knew houses looked different, but then I used to think there was only ever one family living in an entire apartment complex and I got so jealous because they must’ve had so many floors. All because I grew up with a silver spoon in my mouth and nobody ever taught me how to be humble or to be thankful for what we have.
The older I got, the more I understood. I understood that there are people out there who are homeless and have absolutelynothing. But since I was never taught how to be grateful for what I have, I didn’t care until I started college. I didn’t care about any of this until I watched other students struggle and worry about how they’re going to pay their tuition. On more than one occasion, I anonymously sent people at St. Trewery envelopes filled with the money they needed to pay their tuition, housing, or simply afford food.
Still, whenever I’m inside the house I grew up in, it’s like all of my knowledge on how poor some people are vanishes. When I look around and see Lux Touch tiles, pure gold picture frames, statues, and paintings that cost more than a heart on the black market, for whatever reasons, poverty doesn’t exist in my brain.
I don’t understand how some people can havethiswhereas others have nothing. And so when I’m here, it’s like I think the whole world is rich, even though I know it’s not like that. I don’t see why this house would shock anyone, because to me, this has always been mynormal.
But right now, watching Luan look around with huge eyes that are about to pop out, even though he grew up rich himself, I no longer see this as normal.
Instead of having bought the hundredth far too expensive painting, my father could’ve used those hundreds of thousands to donate to homeless shelters or any charity that would help poorer people. He could’ve chosen to help people in need, but instead he poured, and is still pouring, all that money into useless shit that nobody needs.
“Let’s just go find my mother, okay?” I lead him down the hall and into the entrance hall where my parents usually host huge dinners like my father’s fiftieth birthday. We have a dining room, but it’s on the smaller end, meant for only a small family and not twenty people all at once. I think I’ve had more dinners in anentryhall than I had in our actual dining room.
Getting to the other side of the mansion, I lead Luan upstairs to where the bedrooms are. Sun’s room is on the other side of the house because she’s a girl. It was my father’s way of saying my brother and I shouldn’t get too close to our sister because her privacy should be valued.
It’s a great thing at first, but when you consider that my father happens to be very sexist, it’s not that great anymore.
When we reach my bedroom, I hesitate to open the door for a moment. Inside of that room is everything that shaped me into the person I am today. This room hides secrets that I never thought I’d ever share with anyone.
It’s where I watched my first hockey game on TV and fell in love with the sport at such a young age. It’s where I spent hours crying in my bed because I thought something was wrong with me. It’s where I sat at my desk and wrote letters to my future self, asking if the pain ever ends, if I’ll be normal again.
This room holds so many memories that I never think about anymore, not until I open that door and let Luan inside.
There is hockey equipment all over my room, neatly put aside thanks to one of the housekeepers, but it’s around anyway. Most of those sticks and pucks that lay and stand around are ten years old or even older. There are sports magazines on my desk, mostly ones I cut my favorite ice hockey players out of to pin them onto a bulletin board. That board was a vision board to me; the one goal I wanted to reach in my life.
Luan walks over to my desk, looking at the picture frame. It’s the only one I owned back then. “That’s cute. How old were you in that picture?”
“Fourteen.” It’s a picture of Sun and I together. It was my first hockey game as team captain. We won, and Sun ran onto the ice to congratulate me afterward. She wasn’t allowed to do that, and although everyone was trying to get her off the ice, my mother used a moment to take a picture of my sister in my arms. We were smiling at the camera. She smiled because she was proud of me, I smiled because I felt alive again in that moment.
“Oh, what I would do to see justonepicture of you with no tattoos.” Luan sighs dramatically long, turning around to look at me. “Do you have one?”
I narrow my eyes at him, ready to say no, but he gives me puppy dog eyes that I cannot say no to. So instead I nod toward my desk. “Last drawer on the left.”
Luan grins at me, then turns around and kneels, opening the drawer. There are a million pictures of my siblings and I when we were kids, or me at hockey camp, school photos, all in order. My mother put that book together before I left for college. She even wrote down the dates from when the photos were taken. Luan’s going to love that.
He takes out the photo book, then looks around himself as if to find a cozy spot to put it down and enjoy digging deeper into my childhood.
“Baby, you can go on the bed,” I say with a little amusement in my voice. “No one’s going to murder you because of it.”
He jumps up onto the bed in seconds, lying down on his stomach with the book right in front of him. “I hope you know I will scream when I open this book and the first photo is you smiling.”
Of course that would make him scream. “No, the first photo is me five seconds after being born.”
