Cortello - D'Angelo (New)

p r o l o g u e

adrian

Celebrities are just people. That much is made clear is made clear as I scroll through Instagram and see post break-up pictures of a celebrity couple. "Post break-up" being used very loosely as these pictures seem to have been taken while the break-up was happening.

They start off tame, just them talking, and the last picture has her with mascara running down her face and him with an arm around her. The only reason anyone would know it is a break-up is because one, they decided to have this happen in a public place so obviously there would pictures and two, because of the pictures she addressed the break-up publicly on Instagram a day after it happened. These pictures are a week old.

Still, my point stands. Celebrities are just people and to have their life publicised by people who have nothing better to do than follow other people around is just not right. Especially when the people being publicised are minors.

I know of the couple in the picture. Shanaya Cambridge and Avery Cortello. Both seventeen and in an on-again off-again relationship from the time they were fifteen. A constant cycle of breaking up and making up. The media never fails to make it a public spectacle everytime either of those things happen.

I'm not a hypocrite. I don't preach about how celebrities lives are publicised only to be one of those people feeding into the publicity. The Cortello family and subsequently the D'Angelo family are the only celebrity lives I oh so religiously follow. Not because I'm weird either. I have valid reasons why, well a valid reason, but this valid reason is so huge it's equivalent to one thousand tiny valid reasons.

Brothers. They're my brothers. Half-brothers if you wish to get technical, but my brothers no less. Whether or not they knew of my existence, I had no idea but I know of theirs. They've never tried to make contact so I assume the latter. The thought that they didn't want to know me and that's why they've never tried contacting me has crossed my mind on very many occasions but as it kept happening, I realised it made no difference either way. Now why is that? It is simply because the largest presence I had ever had of either of them in my life was on my TV screen so it isn't like I'd be missing a relationship with any of them, all of them, whatever.

It isn't like I want a relationship with any of them either. I was perfectly content with the relationships I already had in my life. It's just that after finding out that, hello, I'm related to celebrities it had been hard not to check. Now I do it because it's ingrained into my daily life. Wake up, go to school, come home, stalk your brothers. That's how it goes.

Dad neither encourages nor discourages that little...habit. A funny little story, actually, on how I came to know this information. Imagine this, eight year old me snooping in the attic. She finds a photo album. Inside said photo album is an abundance of pictures of mostly little boys ranging from different ages. As the pictures increase, you see the number of boys increase as well as all of their ages. As you progress you see a little girl enter the picture, no pun intended. Naturally young me asks her parents who and why and what and gets all the honest answers she was not expecting that implodes her little mind.

At eight, I didn't fully grasp what that meant. At ten when mom was pregnant with Tyler, I didn't understand the amount of love I could have for someone who shares a smidge of my DNA. Then I started thinking about all the love in my life missing for brothers I never met. Again at ten, I realised I was not missing anything because, exactly, I never met them. They're practically strangers, literally just people out there who share a little bit of my DNA that I was genetically inclined to love because we share DNA. This was around the same time I used to wonder why they never reached out and never contacted, even when Tyler was born, or when he...died and when mom-