by Jess C Scott
Chapter 1: Trevor
My birthday wish was simple: run away with my twin sister.
We were seated on the upper bunk of the bunk bed in our bedroom. The top bunk was mine.
“Make the first wish,” Tania said, “since you’re older than me by two minutes.”
Tania often reminded me of the fact. It was how we decided I’d get to be on top too.
She was lying on her stomach and resting her chin on her hands, looking at the starry night sky from our log cabin at Pleasant Lake.
“I’d like to run away with you,” I said, as I pointed out the brightest star. I didn’t know whether it was a star or planet, but I liked how it flickered with white, red and blue hues every night.
“Where would we go?” Tania’s big eyes were shining brightly. “Do you know?”
I shook my head. “Somewhere faraway from here.”
At least I was sure of that.
Tania gave a half-hearted smile. She gazed out the window as a gentle breeze brushed her soft hair against her face. “I would like to be a movie star.”
There was a loud yell from the living room then—Dad’s voice—and the familiar violent jolt of the sound of glass shattering. Someone had once again broken a bottle on the wall just outside our room.
“Flinging the bottle,” I whispered, even though our parents referred to it as daily “wine time.”
I moved a little closer to Tania when I saw her wince. No matter how routine loud sounds could be, they always affected her. A hint of frightened tension would go over her face, like she was just on the verge of breaking into tears at any second, even though she rarely did.
“I wanna be a star—I wanna run away—I wanna be a star,” Tania muttered, almost like she was repeating a chant. “Run away with you. Yes. I would like that, Trev. I would like that very much.”
I glanced at the clock on the wall. 8:00 PM. Wine Time usually started at 6:00 PM and would go on as the sounds and yelling got louder and louder—“Shit!”—“You bitch!”—“Whore!”—the famous “eff” word—until Mom or Dad threw a bottle at the other person. It would be left to Tania and me to clear the mess and clean up the blood.
Tania and I tasted some of that stuff called alcohol, by the way, the day before our ninth birthday. We helped ourselves to one of the bottles lying around on the floor.
I poked my tongue out and made a face when I tasted it. It had a strange scent and taste and got me very thirsty very quickly.
“They’ll start throwing the bottle at us one day,” Tania said as she bit on her nails. “You see it on TV. Our parents are batshit crazy. I wish we could live like the Kazandjians.”
Tania only said “batshit” in front of me or some of her friends at school.
Mom struck her across the face the first time she said it.
“Nasty bitch running her mouth!” Mom had muttered under her breath. And Mom’s Herculean foot kicked Tania out of the way as she stomped across the hallway towards the kitchen.
I was sitting on the couch when that happened. I was watching something about a porn star’s boobs and butt implants on MTV. I recognized the blonde sweet-faced porn star in some of Mom’s Always In Touch magazines that were stacked high on one side of the couch.
Tania crawled onto the seat next to me, folding her arms across her chest with a sullen look on her face.
“Mom says ‘shit’ all the time,” Tania snarled during an ad break. She spoke softly since Mom was pretty nearby, talking very loudly and cussing a lot over the phone. “And she doesn’t hit you when you say bad words.”
“Then I won’t say those words in front of Mom too,” I said with a smile. “Okay?”
Tania nodded and leaned against me as we watched a masked man using a black marker to draw arrows on the porn star’s nose, face, and body.
I liked being close to Tania. I liked that we didn’t pick on each other. We knew we both didn’t want to. What did we have apart from each other?
In the mornings, we would sometimes gaze out at the colors of the sky at dawn, listening to the trickling sounds of the lake lapping the shore, or viewing the wonder of the sun rising out.
At the same time, I thought it was funny we lived in a place called “Pleasant Lake,” where the people around us often weren’t in a very pleasant mood at all.
Mom always had colorful pills and a vodka bottle in hand. She liked talking to herself and throwing random things on the floor or against the wall. Sometimes, she’d take Dad’s hand gun out and wave it around. She’d point it at us and cackle, “Don’t worry, kids—it ain’t loaded...” before tossing it back into the drawer where it came from.
She never did that to us when Dad or anyone else was in the house.
It must have had something to do with a back injury she had from a ski trip when Tania and I were six years old. That’s when the doctor gave her those white pills in an orange bottle, then she got more pills by herself from the store, and later on started to take them all together, washing it all down with a swig or two from the bottle she’d have in an iron grip with her right hand.
Mom was a beauty queen in her senior year of high school. She used to be very pretty. She started to dress more sloppy and pack on the pounds once she started staying at home more. I think she stopped combing her hair too. After that, her favorite pastime was walking around the house announcing she wasn’t going to “bathe that day” because she hated taking showers past 4:00 PM.
Dad sometimes said she could be featured on Ripley’s Believe It or Not for ending up this way when she actually was a former ed tech at Pleasant Point Community College, which was how she met Dad, who was an English lecturer.
He confused me too.
I would see him nicely dressed in the morning for work, looking every bit the studious professor he was. Black rectangular glasses, trimmed beard, ironed shirt, nice shoes.
Tania and I would sometimes see him at the college when he picked us up from school.
He was all smiles at his workplace, with a pleasant face and greeted all around by smiley faces. He was happy during the drive back home too—goofing around to the songs that played on the radio or whatever. Tania would howl with laughter with some of the nonsensical lyrics he made up on the fly. Like, he’d change the words “I’ll Never Break Your Heart” to “I’m Gonna Breaaak Your Heart,” or sing “Sweet Dreams Tomato Juice” to the tune of “Sweet Dreams Are Made of These.”
But he’d reach out for one of those bottles lying around the minute he set foot into the house. Very often, like clockwork, Tania and I would do our homework, then sit in front of the TV with our TV dinners, or go to our room with a peanut butter sandwich for dinner, as our parents had what they called their “wine time.”
So Tania and I had each other at least, in that Pleasant Lake house.
Later on, I still had simple birthday wishes.
I’d wish that my twin sister and I could have had a childhood.
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That’s all for now. If you’d like to read the rest of Playmates, you can find it here.
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AUTHOR’S NOTE
Thank you for downloading and reading “Owned.”
I hope you enjoyed reading about the themes in these stories. “Heart’s Blood” and “Ms. Zeri” are excerpts from longer pieces of fiction (“Ms. Zeri” is one of the characters in My Inner Goddess, a Fifty Shades parody).
I did not realize that murder featured in several of my stories until I completed my psychological thriller series, The Wilde Twins. Taboo topics have always appealed to me. I like revealing and/or exploring whatever lurks beneath the surface. The darker the subject matter, the better…
As an independent author, it is endlessly challenging and rewarding to gain new readers. If you enjoyed this eBook and have a bit of time to spare, I would be most grateful if you could post a review online. Readers’ reviews are a great way to help a book get noticed.
If you have any comments or st
ory requests, I’d love to hear from you, so feel free to contact me via Facebook or my website.
You can also sign up for my newsletter to receive updates of new/upcoming releases and special discounts.
Thanks again for reading!
Best wishes,
Jess C Scott
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jess C Scott is an author/artist/non-conformist.
She writes psychological thrillers and blogs about Singapore’s political history.
Her publishing company, jessINK, is dedicated towards creating “meaningful entertainment.”
* Erotic Fiction is where Jess explores intimacy/passion/intensity, not explicitness ;).
* Psychological Thrillers are where she explores the dark side of human nature.
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