Storms 01 - Family Storms

from our home.
    “Remember this, Sasha,” she had told me during one of her more sober moments, while we sat on the beach and stared at the ocean. “The world is divided into two kinds of people, the gullible and the deceptive. It’s only good and sensible self-defense to be distrusting and be a little deceptive yourself. This isn’t paradise yet. We’re always in one danger or another, no matter where we are.”
    I didn’t understand all she was telling me back then, but I could feel her pain and agony. It washed away her beautiful smile and smothered to death the softness in her soul. I know she drank anything alcoholic because she hated herself, hated what she had become even more than she hated my father. She was choking on her own venom. I cried for her often then, cried more for her than I cried for myself.
    Ironically, her death had brought me to the lap of luxury. Not only did I now have far, far more than I had then or even could have imagined having, I had more than probably ninety-nine percent of girls my age. After having once been a pitiful creature on the streets, I found myself now being envied by girls and boys whom I had thought were princes and princesses themselves.
    I challenge you to try to do what I have trouble doing even today. Try to imagine a nearly fourteen-year-old girl having to sleep with her mother on the beach in a large carton, a girl with nearly no clothes, old shoes, who couldn’t go to school, a girl who had to wash herself in public restrooms, a girl for whom finding a quarter or even a dime on the sidewalk or beach was like finding gold.
    Then try to imagine this girl being taken out of a hospital room full of welfare patients and brought to a private room where she was given a private-duty nurse, treated by the best specialists, and then brought flowers and gifts she could only dream about receiving while walking past store windows.
    Imagine this girl being taken to live in a mansion that could only be approached by a private road, a uniquely styled house with a tower that made it look like a castle. Notonly did the property have tennis courts, an indoor pool, and an outdoor Olympic-size pool but also a man-made lake big enough to accommodate rowboats. Imagine her being given a room that was larger than the house in which she had once lived, a suite with a walk-in closet that looked as if it was half the length of a basketball court, filled with clothes and shoes many of which had never been worn more than once and some of which still had their price tags attached.
    Imagine her having her own private physical therapist to help get her strong and well again. And being provided with her own private tutor to get her ready to go to school again, but not just any school, a beautiful private school with only the children of the very rich attending, and with classes small enough for each and every student to get personal attention.
    If you can imagine all that, you can see me now years later, a high school senior bedecked in only the most fashionable styles and trends, a high school senior who is constantly told she is exotically beautiful, something her mother was and she always dreamed she would be. You can see me as an honor student, popular, who on her seventeenth birthday was presented with her own red BMW hardtop convertible.
    How often I have sat by the window in my suite and looked out at the well-manicured grounds, the pool and tennis courts, and closed my eyes, feeling sure that when I opened them again, I’d be back on the beach, sitting beside my ragtag mother, staring out at the sea, both of us left dumbfounded by how quickly hardship and misery had grasped and tightly held the two of us.
    But when I opened my eyes, I was still here, still the ward of a very wealthy foster family, gliding through life without a worry in the world.
    Kiera was off in her charm school college now. Her parents had yet to learn it, but she had told me she thought she was close to becoming engaged to an English boy, Aubrey Woodhouse, whose famous architect father had been knighted. She e-mailed me almost daily, describing her social life and sharing her most intimate love secrets. I knew how hard she had been working at making me again feel like her sister. I imagined she was doing it because she needed my forgiveness and because, despite what a brave and often arrogant facade she had, she was basically a very lonely person, lonely and especially afraid that I would replace her in her