If I Fell

Chapter Two

Crinkling my nose slightly, I pushed the sunny coloured scrambled eggs across the plate with my fork.

My mom had always loved scrambled eggs, I’d even been taught the “family recipe” though I didn’t believe our eggs were that much different – that had a total double meaning I wasn’t going to acknowledge – and every time I tried to make them, well, they were more burnt than sunny. While mom loved scrambled eggs, they made me feel almost nauseous just by looking at them.

Pursing my lips, I dropped my fork onto my plate with a sigh, cupping my chin with my hand as I reached for the tea on hand at the same time. I’d gone through a period of having coffee overloads, but it tended to make me a bit on the twitchy side so I opted for tea instead these days.

Apparently mom hadn’t even noticed the sound of my fork clanging against the plate, because when I turned my gaze to her, she was completely focused on the newspaper in her hands. There was a frown between her light brows as she read some article behind the glasses she wore that I always told her made her look like a librarian.

Despite the previous comparison to a librarian – the one at my school more or less resembled a dinosaur with opposable thumbs and white hair – she was a beautiful woman, and we looked nothing alike. She had flaxen hair whereas mine was dark, her eyes were a soft brown while mine were blue, she was almost six feet and I definitely was not. Talk about being polar opposites.

For a long minute I stared her down, but my telepathic powers apparently weren’t up to snuff quite yet. Give me some time. “Interesting?” I finally questioned, taking a sip of my tea.

“Hm?” she returned vaguely, her eyes not leaving the paper.

Rolling my eyes, I stood up and picked up the plate of eggs mom had given me this morning before scraping them into the garbage. Unlike most of my friends’ houses, we didn’t have a maid running around the house cooking for us or cleaning up.

Well, we weren’t that different, to be honest. To accommodate for the fact that both my parents had worked full-time jobs, I’d had a nanny when I was growing up. But that had been ruined when my dad and said nanny had ran away to live in a villa in the south of France together. How pathetically suburban was that. Now we didn’t have anyone in the house full time, though mom had a maid that came through the place once a week.

As I’d been trained from a young age, I quickly put the dishes in the dishwasher, keeping the shining surfaces of the kitchen clear.

Seeing that my mom still hadn’t looked away from the newspaper in her hands, I heaved a great sigh, leaning against the breakfast bar where she sat across from me. Still she didn’t look up.

“Are you all ready for work?”

Bingo. That did it.

Instantly her eyes perked up from behind her glasses, looking up to me before darting down to her watch. “I’ve got to get going soon,” she murmured, folding the paper up neatly before standing up, “I’m supposed to be in meetings all morning.”

Nodding, I watched as she smoothed the skirt of her neat feminine suit that completely depicted her role of CEO at our family’s ancient Real Estate Firm.

I honestly didn’t get it; I barely even knew what she did at the place. All I knew was that somebody far down in the family tree had started the company, and with the family money that had been passed down to her there was no need to work. But she seemed to like to work, so why not, I think she loved it, actually. That I could understand, having no purpose in life would get wearing, I would assume, though countless members of my friends’ family would beg to disagree.