Tough Love (Completed)

Chapter 2

Beth - 14 years old

I stand in front of the mirror and check out my outfit. I am wearing jean shorts and a black crop top. The short is much shorter than the ones I usually wear and my crop top shows off my navel. I wonder if it's too much for hanging out with Dean and Kyle.

I can't decide so I head downstairs to the kitchen, to ask Nina, now our housekeeper, her opinion. I bought the outfit last week as part of the shopping spree for high school. It was to get back at mom for sending me off to that awful summer etiquette camp in Switzerland.

I had a plan for the summer. A plan to make Dean my boyfriend before high school starts but my mom rained on my parade and sent me off to learn obnoxious manners with a bunch of snobby girls. Oh. She didn't do it because she wanted me to know how to pick the correct fork or how to make polite conversations in half a chance if I ever married into a royal family.

No. She did it because she could not face the fact that I am growing up gorgeously and she is getting old and wrinkly. Poor poor mom, she is not the most beautiful mom anymore. If only she knew dark magic and had a talking mirror, she won't have to go to great lengths to avoid her daughter who she was jealous of.

For a long time, I couldn't understand why Nina and mom always argued about my clothes, my hair or my food. I couldn't understand why mom dressed me in rags when we can afford the entire wardrobe of the New York Fashion Week or why she shaved my hair when I was nine or why she feed me junk food or protein booster to make me fat.

I found out the answers to my never-ending questions, one night when I was twelve by eavesdropping my parent's conversation. It was a trick I learnt a few years prior. Mom was a creature of habits. When she needed something from dad she could call him every half an hour on that particular day. She would dress up to nines and she would go as far as baking his favourite apple pie. Once Dad was home she would feed him and shower him with love and slowly chat him up and make him agree to whatever twisted plan she has plotted.

When I was twelve, a few days after I started my first period, Mom had coaxed my dad home early. I waited for the usual charade and finally stood next to crack in door pressing my ears to hear their conversation. These conversations were the only time when my parents talked like a normal couple without throwing tantrum or taking a dig at each other. It was the only normalcy in an otherwise messed up family and I wanted a slice of it and hence the eavesdropping.

Mom in an unusual intelligent voice started explaining the merits of a Catholic all-girls school in France. For a few minutes, I was confused as well and when she told him about my first period and how I need to stay away from boys and concentrate on my study, the penny finally dropped. The fact that mom was portraying me like a dog in heat looking for anything and anyone to get laid was a punch to my gut.

Thankfully Dad had enough love to not send we away to some boarding in France. But still, I couldn't understand why. Why she hated me so much. Did she not want me, her daughter? Did I do something? Was she forced to have me? A million questions ran through my head to understand why. Finally, I got the answer a few weeks later when she was lounging by the pool with her minions. In a true evil queen fashion, she had a hoard of ass kissers who oww'ed and aww'ed her. When she went to her room to get something, the groupies started talking shit behind her back.

"Beth seems decent. Why does she want to send her away", a new groupie asked and to which mom's BFF groupie replied,

"Because she is scared that she will lose all the male attention. Clara has to be the centre of attention and now looking at Beth getting all the good genes it wrecks Clara that she will be replaced by a much younger and prettier Beth"