I had been born and raised in the same place. For all my seventeen years I never lived anywhere else. Everyone in my school we kids I had known my entire life, some of them being my best friends. Now my father wanted to take me away from the life I had always known, during the most important year I would ever have in school? Who pulled their kids out of school right before their senior year? My father, that’s who.
So here we were, a new town, a new school, a brand new life. My dad was acting as if we had won the lottery. We were eating out every other night with business partners and their families. It was an absolute nightmare and I was ready to just go back home and go back to the life that we were living before. At least back then, even though we didn’t have the money, we were happy. No one in my family really smiles anymore.
“Yeah,” my father spoke up amongst a sea of people surrounding a table not quite big enough to hold us all. “We love to get away to the lake for the summer.”
“Since when?” I threw my napkin down against the table, knocking my glass of fake champagne I was served over. “When is the last time we ever went to a lake?”
I pushed my chair back and made my way from the table. I was tired of listening to my father lie to these people, trying to make us seem like we were just poor a few weeks back. I knew that this job was important to him, but my father was becoming a liar and I was losing all respect I had once had for him. Just because you are sitting at a high class table, with only the best of the best surrounding you, doesn’t make you royalty. Just because you have on a black tie and a suit, doesn’t make you someone special. We were not special and we did not belong at this mans house, eating off his fine china and enjoying the presence of his company.
I made my way through the house, searching for a bathroom, but there was nothing in site. A house with hundreds of rooms should have a dozen bathrooms or so you would think. I finally settled on what appeared to be a guest bedroom, but you never knew with rich people. It looked like a cheesy hotel room trying to look fancy, but it could very well be someones room.
Looking around at the cheesy art, I tried to calm myself back down so that I could return to dinner. I knew that I had made a fool of myself and my father was probably out there apologizing for me. In a way I felt bad, but he needed to sweat a little, be reminded of who he truly is and where he came from. He deserved every second of it. Doesn’t make up for my fit throwing, but it was still something.
Flinging myself back against the bed, I closed my eyes and pictured home. Hanging out with my friends at the mall. Watching movies with my next door neighbor Ian, even though when we were in school we pretended to hate each other. All of those things that I took for granted everyday were suddenly all I ever wanted. I was not going to be able to get that in the one year of High School I had left here.
“So you throw a fit and then you hide,” a voice snuck up on me, causing me to nearly fly off of the bed.
“I am so sorry,” I began, standing up and straightening out my dress. Not that I cared about the dress, I hated looking all fancy like, but I didn’t want to look a mess in front of my father’s new boss. “I just needed to get away for a moment and I couldn’t find a bathroom. I am sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he laughed, making his way over to the bed and sitting on the edge. Lightly he tapped the bed with his hand. “Have a seat.”
I sat down beside him, nerves building up in my stomach. I felt so bad for the way I had acted in his house. Now he was going to fire my father or something. I was sure of it. We were going to go home, but my father’s dreams were going to be crushed in the process.
“You know,” he began, looking around the room. “This is one ugly looking room. Sorry that this is the one you had to end up in. We do have nicer rooms.”
“If it is ugly,” I began to ask. “Then why do you have it looking this way?”
“The wife,” he sighed, before flashing me a smile. “She likes to think she has the decorative touch and well, I am just to scared to tell her the truth.”
“You must really love your wife,” I smiled, thinking about how long they had probably been together. He seemed to be in his mid-fifties and I believed that was about the age his wife probably was. “If you are willing to live in this to make her happy.”
“I do love her,” he nodded, his eyes locking with my own. “Though I feel that she does not love me back.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked him concerned. It was sad if he did not think that his wife loved him. “She must love you.”
“There was a time in which I thought she did,” her gave a remembered smile, as if he were dreaming of the past. “Then I came into money and well, she fell out of love with me and in love with the money.”
“You can’t believe that to be true,” I suggested, though I could tell by the look in his eyes that he was serious.
“I am,” he frowned. “Take this party tonight. We are all dressed up in expensive clothes, eating expensive food, being the best of the best in this town and where is she? In the center of it all. I bet they didn’t even notice that I slipped out.”
Mr. Andrews, my dads boss, owned this company with his wife. She was the one my dad said was the face of the company. Mr. Andrew’s did all of the hard work and then she took the credit for all of it. That had to be a sad life for him to lead, now that I think about it.
“There must be something there,” I tried to find something good in their relationship. “Some romance of some kind.”
“Not a thing,” he shook his head, trying to give me a smile, but I could see right through it. “We don’t even sleep in the same room anymore.”
“Why did you tell me this?” I asked him, tilting my head to the side and trying to look in his eyes, see if maybe I could read what was going through his mind.
“Probably because for the first time in a long time I felt like I was not the only one who did not want to be here,” he answered honestly, standing up from the bed and heading toward the door.