Consequences of Deception (2 page)

Four and a half years later

I’ve been called into service for my family yet again, forced to show up and smile at some celebratory formal affair for God only knows what. It seems like here, in Silicon Valley, there’s always a reason for the elite to throw parties.

It’s ironic that I’m forced to show up when no one ever really notices that I’m even in attendance. It’s painfully obvious that my ‘family’ doesn’t want me around, so being forced to spend time ‘together’ is bizarre.

As for tonight’s festivities, it’s the usual. Rich people dressed to the nines guzzling top shelf liquor, all while pretending to care about what, exactly, the party is a celebration for. The men talk business while the women talk shit, which is to say that, it’s a total snooze-fest. This is just one of many parties that I’ve attended in the last eighteen months since Celine mandated that I attend, and I’ve loathed every single event. I haven’t wanted to come to even one of these stupid parties, but since my father died four and a half years ago, I’ve been living with his brother, Stephen, and Stephen’s wife, Celine, and what ‘they’ say goes. Of course, when I say they, I mean she.

My father was killed in a fire at our vacation home during my senior year of high school and as you can imagine, losing him rocked me to the core. I was hanging onto life by one finger after that, and it only got harder to keep breathing when I found out that I had no choice but to move in with my uncle and his wife. To this day, I don’t understand why my dad’s will gave my uncle guardianship of me. Every single day, I think about how short-sighted it was of my dad not to have assigned another guardian to me, especially considering the fact that my mother had already died, which meant that my father knew better than most just how fragile life is.

The reading of the will happened without me and when Stephen told me what it said, I was devastated. I had been so sure that my father would have assigned guardianship of me to Killian. My father had loved him, and I was stunned that he chose to leave guardianship of me in the hands of Stephen and Celine as opposed to Killian. Certainly, my father had a better relationship with him than he had with Uncle Stephen after Stephen married Celine. Like most things in life, there’s a lot of ‘coulda, shoulda, woulda’, but once the will was read, there was no way back.

The Uncle Stephen I knew as a little girl and the man I know now are like two entirely different people. Don’t get me wrong—he’s the last surviving member of my family and I love him. If the choice were mine, our relationship would be solid, but the way he acts when his wife is around makes me want to run away and never look back, and I don’t see that ever changing. When I was a little girl, before Celine’s arrival, I was incredibly close to my uncle and I loved when he was around. Then he met and married Celine and within just a few months he had become her whipping boy and all of her opinions had become his. From the moment that I met her, Celine has been cold and aloof to me, if not downright abrasive.

I’ve tried desperately to hold onto the belief that the ‘real’ Stephen is still in there somewhere. But the truth is—I’m losing faith in his humanity a little bit more every single day. Where he used to show me some kindness, if Celine was otherwise occupied, now he avoids me like the plague. I can’t remember the last time he actually spoke to me for more than thirty seconds.

You would think that I would be used to the fact that he’s not what he used to be, because Lord knows I’ve had plenty of time to adjust, but Stephen had his own special place in my heart, and in a lot of ways, having Stephen lose interest in me so soon after my mother’s death was another crushing loss. I was devastated by his defection, but it didn’t change the reality. I used to pray Celine would go away and things would go back to normal, but that never happened and now, we’re here.

There was a spark in Stephen a few years ago and I thought he was coming out of the perfume induced fugue that she had him trapped in, but right around the time my father died, that spark was gone. I have no illusions about Stephen getting away from Celine at this point. She’s a permanent fixture, and I think the best parts of him are destined to stay memories.

Celine is an oddity—no two ways about it. She absolutely detests family—both the idea and the reality of it. It makes her difficult to be around at best, and a nightmare to deal with at worst. The only reason Celine allowed Stephen to maintain contact with us before my father died was because of the family business, Evans Investments. Evans was started by my grandfather in the sixties and was inherited by my father and uncle when their father died fifteen years ago. They each received an equal portion of the company, an exact fifty/fifty split of everything. Celine might hate family, but she loves money enough that she didn’t force Stephen to walk away.

When my father died, his half of Evans Investments came to me. Stephen controls my shares until my twenty-second birthday—ten days from now. I’m counting down the seconds until the moment that I can walk away from Celine and Stephen’s rules. It’s been an absolute disaster and only my faith, that one day I will be free, has gotten me through.

I knew as soon as the contents of my father’s were explained to me that I was going to be miserable living with Stephen and Celine, so I tried to focus on the knowledge that my senior year was almost over. I told myself that I could survive anything for a few months before I could make an escape back to the house I’d grown up in. They never had children of their own and they weren’t interested in having any, so I felt certain that they wouldn’t want me to stay around. I was completely flabbergasted when Stephen agreed with Celine’s, completely out of left field, edict that I was “too fragile” to go away.

I thought that I would be able to make him see reason, but it quickly became apparent that he wasn’t going to change his mind. They refused to agree to send me to college anywhere out of state and since Stephen was in control of my finances because of the trust my father left, I was trapped staying in San Jose for college. I had secretly planned to get out of their house and move back to my childhood home the second I turned eighteen, but the cage around me was locked when Stephen sold the house.

I was forced to attend the university closest to their house so that I could live “at home”, which is how I wound up being in a position where I’m actually forced to show up and smile at stupid events like this, whenever I am told to. The college thing, I could have dealt with, if it weren’t for the fact that they totally interfered with my degree choice. In addition to forcing me to go to a local college, Celine also adamantly refused to let me get a degree in Elementary Education. I’ve dreamt of working with children since I was in Kindergarten, but Celine said it was a silly job for someone as ‘unprepared for life’ as I am—and Uncle Stephen let her make the decision.

Instead, I graduated with a degree in Liberal Arts. It’s four years of my life flushed down the drain because I’ll never use it, but at least it got me out of the house every day. After I get my inheritance, I’m going to go back to school to get the Elementary Ed degree that I wanted.

Because Stephen and Celine hold the purse strings to the inheritance my father left me until I’m twenty-two, I’ve also had no choice but to do her bidding and turn up at events like these like a damn mannequin. With my college graduation last weekend and my twenty-second birthday coming in ten days—the end is in sight. I’m so close to being out that I can almost taste it on my tongue. The very moment that I can access that money, I’m getting as far away from Celine as possible. Her tongue is like a knife and I’m done with her slicing away at me like a butcher.

Uncle Stephen got caught up at work tonight, leaving me to come with Celine by myself and be tortured listening to her drone on and on about how ‘unfortunate’ I am. Celine is my harshest critic, constantly finding fault in everything that I do. According to her, I’m an unattractive girl who’s a
dim bulb,
on top of everything else. My 3.92 GPA in college did nothing to change her opinion, not that I expected it to.

She’s impossible to please and I really don’t care to try, to be honest. I do what I need to do to get through each day until I can get away from her. I have no illusions that she will ever change. When I gain control over my finances and am able to sell Stephen my shares of Evans, it’s likely that I will never see either of them again.

I don’t care at all about Celine, but the little girl inside of me still misses her uncle and wishes that he’d come back. Stephen is the last piece of my family that I have left, but I expect that soon, he will be just as lost to me as they are. What hurts the most is that the idea of losing me doesn’t seem to hurt him at all. Considering that I’m the last surviving member of his family, you would think I’d be important to him.

Pushing the sad thoughts about Stephen away, I survey the room. I’m in my normal spot, otherwise known as the quietest corner of the room, trying my hardest to fade into the wall behind me. As usual, Celine chose my attire for the evening and it’s absolutely wretched. This is a black tie affair so, of course, I’m dressed up, but the dress is horribly unflattering and makes me look like a little girl with no sense of fashion. It’s bubblegum pink with long sleeves, a high neck and it poofs out at the waist before ending just below my knees. Basically, I’m dollar store Princess Barbie from hell. Add in the satin pink ballet flats, the giant shiny bow on the back of the dress and the super un-chic nude pantyhose, and I think you can understand why I feel like an eighties movie reject.

Trust me, I know eighties movies. My mom’s favorite decade was the eighties, which is pretty obvious because of the name that she chose for me. My full name is Sloane Renee Evans, and if you guessed that she got my first name from the movie ‘
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’
, you’d be right. She told me that she fell in love with the name the first time she saw the movie, and she promised herself that if she ever had a daughter that was the name she would use. When I came along, there was never a question as to what my name would be, so my dad always joked that they got lucky the name fit me so well.

My mom was the best kind of mom—supportive, happy, and so loving that you couldn’t help but smile when you were with her. She was also the most amazing singer that I’ve ever heard—hands down. Her talent was immeasurable, but she gave it all up to be a stay at home mother and wife, something she told me, quite frequently, was a decision she had made with a happy heart.

The day she died had seemed like any other day. We harmonized together in the car as she drove me to school, singing Cindy Lauper’s ‘
Time After Time
’, which had been my parents’ wedding song. Unbeknownst to my father, mom had been planning an anniversary party for him and she and I were going to sing the song. I remember being so excited about it, partly because I loved singing with her, and partly because I knew that my dad was going to be so happy to hear us both singing their special song.

Mom rained kisses on my face when she dropped me off at school just like she always had. I never knew that anything was wrong. After she got home from dropping me off, she called my dad to tell him that she had a headache and wasn’t feeling right. He rushed home only to find her lying on the couch—already gone. It wasn’t until the results of the autopsy came back that we knew, for certain, that she’d had an aneurysm.

My mom was beautiful and incredibly fashionable. Some of my favorite memories of her involve the hours I spent in her closet playing dress up and singing along with her. I know for damn sure that, if she were still alive, I wouldn’t be wearing this pink wildebeest nightmare from hell. I certainly wouldn’t have an unwanted Liberal Arts degree either. It’s so sad to think about how my life would have turned out so differently if my parents were still alive and Celine had never had a say.

Looking around at all the people in the ballroom, I shudder—literally itching to run away from this ridiculous party. I recognize pretty much everyone in the room, but I don’t
know
them, at least not anymore. As time has passed and I’ve stood quietly in the shadows of these rooms, I’ve come to realize that very few in this group really know anybody, to be honest. There are exceptions of course, but for the most part, it’s completely plastic and superficial.

The girls that are my age avoid me like the plague. I’ve discovered, over time, that it’s a mix of disgust with the way I dress combined with Celine telling people that I have social anxiety and ‘special needs.’ I didn’t have social anxiety before that, but I did after I found out that she had been telling people that. Over the course of these last few years, Celine has boxed me in horribly, and each of my ‘true friends’ fell by the wayside one by one. People look at me like I’m some poor pitiful freak of a girl and it infuriates me. I can’t wait until I’m away from that house and out from under Celine’s thumb. I’m going to dress how I want and befriend every single person that I meet.

Seeing a splash of color heading my way, I smile. The only friend that has stayed entirely true to me after my father’s death and Celine’s rumor starting campaign is my friend, Demi Tate. Demi has been my friend since the first grade and she only lives a few blocks from Uncle Stephen and Celine.