Chapter One

Fiction

The most important thing is to try and inspire people so that they can be great in whatever they want to do.

-Kobe Bryant

Neighborhoods are clusters of houses trying to call themselves a community. It’s like segregation took to the walls that we call home, deforming us into the same. Huge traps with diamond picket fences, expensive cars, trashy pools, greens beyond your imagination, and a road I call home. This is what defined my neighborhood. It wasn’t at all the same neighborhood as regular, or poor folk grew up in. No homeless walked the streets, no trash littered our roads and the grass went beyond average green.

I call Ravenwood drive home. It disguises itself as your average diamond picket fence neighborhood of emptiness. Gossip is the only arsenal here. A weapon used to judge each house by the way a person dresses, the type of men they bring home, how big their pool is, and so forth. Often it ends up burying people six feet underground. However, the real danger lies in when the women of Ravenwood drive compliment you. When they do this it is a forewarning to beat it or get out of town quickly before they eat you alive.

While the women thrive on gossip, the men here are much more subtle about their distaste in each other. Men will have pocket money wars where they invite each other out to go gambling or to dinner and compare each other’s wallets or pay for the entire outing themselves as a way to flex their superiority to one another.

My Mother and Father were an estranged couple out in this world of who has the most billions on the street to spend. Father could not afford the luxurious life of flashy cars, diamond picket fences, sinks made out of gold, or designer clothes. He always told me “A crystal answers my questions, but the clothes on our backs dictate our opportunities.”

Mother spent her hours making sure that my brother and I looked like the picture-perfect children for the neighborhood. Not a hair could be messy, or poking out in the wrong direction. It was strange. The reason we moved into this remotely rich neighborhood. My parents wanted to be a long drunk drive away from their immediate family, and this house was on a large sale apparently. While the sale of the house was part of the incentive to move, my father was offered a job for his pipe dream.

Mom left the doubt of loyalty to my child-like father. A doubt I wished true to the bottom of my pitiless stomach. At age five, I caught daddy sucking up snow in his nose like a deer laps up lake water on a dry summer day. But Mom continued to treat life like a typical rich life. Everyone’s parents did that in these parts. Faked it till they made it, or pretended life was perfect even when the inside of the home was crumbling before their eyes,

My brother being ten at the time, muttered under his breath every time he caught Dad sniffing up more flakes of snow. His words stumbling out just loud enough for a few fists to come flying at his chest. While he was being threatened and abused for his discovery of father’s obsession. The mother pretended to ignore the snowflake poison as if the issue didn’t even exist, to begin with.

My father’s dream job was to be a detective. He was currently working as a deputy police officer which meant his obsession with snowflake poison could get him denounced and fired instantly.

Days wept by. I played outside while my brother bleeds to death doing homework. Mother holding her eyes over her head in pain. If I recall correctly, fear made her do this often. These were the days we called good old days. Childhood summers, and lost paradise in our backyards. But within our own walls was what we called pain.

One day, when the sun was rising with streaks of pink across the clear sky, I wistfully wandered to the streets of Kingston as if they held all the stories my soul desired. Strangers kept asking where mama or dadda were or why I was wandering these streets alone at my age. Everyone got my silence as cold as an ice storm.

I was searching for one person. My best friend. The pink flip flops on my feet were starting to wear out from waking, and I could feel the sun’s sweat bearing down on my skin. There was a small empty can of root beer on the ground, and I kicked it tirelessly at a wired fence. Right at the bang of the can against the fence, I felt two slim fingers wrap around my frame. “ Amanda!”

“Alana , we should go rock climbing again sometime.” She suggested the words wiping a strand of sun-kissed hair away from her ocean eyes. Her home was by far poorer than mine, but she tended to be popular in school.

She’s a girl from a class that I met. Our friendship began with a conversation about the stupidity of playing tag on the monkey bars. These monkey bars were out of style even from back then. Our swings on the playground were often broken or creaked with every swing. It wasn’t until a little boy cracked his head open that the school got rid of the swings. Rather than replace the entire playground the school just got rid of the swings. Surprisingly considering how many kids like me ran around with a one hundred dollar sneakers. We both decided that if playing tag on monkey bars were stupid, we would both join in for the fun.

Amanda built her friendship with me through our lack of social skills which bonded as any two, unlike creatures could. I had her back, and she had mine. We went through the next couple of years together. Just the two of us. One is the loneliest number…. But as time would have it so too would our numbers and inevitably we would change.