Afterglow

ice

Floral pastels and intricate gold detailing decorated the walls of my old room and everything was exactly as I'd left it.  Well, not exactly, as the someone had obviously been in to clean up and the hole I'd punched in the closet wall had been remedied.  Tidied up like brand new, like nothing was wrong.  

That was the family motto, wasn't it?  As long as you pretended nothing was wrong, then there wouldn't be a problem.  Emotions and communication were forbidden words in this family, and I had learned that from an early age. 

I laughed as I remembered the doctor coming for a visit to stitch up my bloodied hand after the wall punching incident.  I had been chided on not suppressing my anger towards my sister after my boyfriend had cheated on me with her.  I was told by my mother that those 'childish urges and emotions' were only going to distract me from my goals, so in order to make good grades and get into an Ivy League school, I had to pretend like I didn't have feelings.  Great philosophy if you ask me.

My mother would constantly ask me what was wrong with me if I was ever in a bad mood at the dinner table, acting as if I didn't have a right to my own feelings.  How could anything be wrong with me when I had a wonderful life with great friends and a ridiculously wealthy family? 

She didn't know about the bullying, the uncertainty, the desperation to fit in, the countless insecurities that every single teenaged girl kept burrowed underneath her skin that poked through at the most inopportune times, she didn't know about the burning desire to know something, anything, about where I came from, who I really was deep down inside. 

Was my mother beautiful?  Was my father handsome?  What ethnicity was I, really and truly?  I was darker, my skin a light gold in the winter that turned into a toasty caramel in the summer, which was my current skin color because of my time spent in the California sun. 

I would study my features for hours in the mirror and stare at people that would pass me by in stores with my parents, pretending I was shopping but really I was comparing myself to them. 

Sometimes I just looked like a white girl who spent too much time in the tanning bed, but my dark hair and dark eyes gave away that I might have been of Mediterranean descent, and it was simply the not knowing that drove me absolutely insane. 

I had begged countless times over and over again to do the genealogy DNA tests but every single time my parents refused, until the tests became so commonplace that someone could purchase them at their neighborhood Target, without a parent's consent.  

So I did it. 

And nothing else was ever going to be the same because of those actions. 

My mother's knocking at my door stirred anger deep and primal within my chest so intense that it almost shocked me.  Swallowing the hatred I felt towards the woman I called my mother, I unclenched my fists and called for her to come in.  

I had hardly had a chance to organize my things for the next day as my school things had already been sent over and I was still waiting for my final pieces of luggage to arrive. 

Bayfield Academy was a boarding school, but that was far too simple a sentence to sum up the prestigious learning facility that Holden's best friend's family owned.  I would be living at the boarding school Sunday night through Friday afternoon every week, spending the weekend with my lovely family just a few miles down the road and then starting the whole process all over again until the cursed semester was over. 

"Hey hon, Vera is here," my mother said, her outfit completely changed into something resembling what I would have worn to a cocktail party, her hemline almost nonexistent.