Say the Word(4)

My parents were drunks. I don’t say that to be mean, it’s just a plain fact. They may have loved their children, but they’d always loved their vodka and gin just a little bit more.

When most people hear the words “child abuse” they immediately think of physical violence – fists flying and blood gushing. Some automatically assume that domestic violence is sexual. A smaller percentage of people think of emotional trauma – ugly words and the undeserved, often misplaced, destruction of a child’s self-confidence.

My parents did none of those things. They weren’t bad people. They weren’t abusive. They were simply absent.

The official term is “neglect.” That’s how the lawyers and judges label it in courtrooms, anyway, right before they take you away from your parents and stick you into foster care. And maybe, if it had been just me, I’d have rolled the dice and tried out a fresh set of state-appointed guardians. But it wasn’t just me. There was Jamie to think about.

James Arthur Kincaid, better known as “Jamie” to those of us who’d shared a womb with him for nine months, was my brother and my best friend.

Jamie was a lot of things besides my fraternal twin. He was the only person who could make me smile when I wanted to cry. He was the distraction I needed whenever looking at my parents passed out on the couch, or the empty vodka bottles scattered across the stained beige living room rug became unbearably depressing. Always cracking jokes or making inappropriate comments, Jamie was the goofy, hilarious, ever-cheerful part of my day. He was the reason I got out of bed every morning.

He was also a cancer patient.

When Jamie was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, we were fifteen and I couldn’t even spell the name of the disease to type it into a damn Wikipedia search, let alone comprehend how much his diagnosis would alter the course of our lives. In fact, at that point I didn’t know much of anything. The only thing I did understand with absolute certainty was that my parents could barely pay the mortgage each month, let alone afford all the expensive tests and treatments Jamie’s illness would require.

MRI. Chemotherapy. Radiation. Surgery. Drug therapies. Hospital stays.

I wasn’t a doctor – I wasn’t even a legal adult – but I’d still known that treatments like that came with a hefty price tag. And whether thirty thousand or thirty million, any amount of money was light-years beyond our budget.

By the time we were seventeen – the year I met Sebastian and everything changed forever – we were so far in debt that most days I skipped lunch, and I was on a first name basis with Shelby over at the collection agency. She called every few months or so, when the phone or electricity bills were inevitably late, to let me know they’d be shutting off our power again.

Some people aren’t built for struggle or hardship. My parents did the best they could, I honestly believe that. But they just weren’t able to overcome their own demons, to pull themselves out of the depths of the bottle long enough to sort out the lives of their children, which were rapidly falling into chaos.

Someone had to take responsibility – even if that someone was a seventeen-year-old girl with five dollars in her pocket and a long-overgrown haircut.





Chapter Three





Now


“Lux? You alive down there, girl?” The voice startled me out of my reverie. “Aren’t you meeting with Jeanine in a half hour?”

My eyes flew open, taking in the sight of my wireless computer mouse and a mason jar full of multicolored sharpies. If the discomfort radiating from my left cheekbone was any indication, I’d nodded off with my face resting on my keyboard. With my luck, my stolen ten minutes of daydreaming would result in a permanent ASDF imprint across my face.

So professional.

Pushing strands of long blonde hair that had escaped the once-elegant chignon out of my eyes, I propped my chin in my hands and looked up at the face hovering above the wall of my cubicle. Fae, who occupied the desk space adjacent to mine, was peering down at me, her long mahogany brown hair perfectly styled into a French twist that would’ve taken me several hours and an industrial sized bottle of hairspray to pin up. Knowing Fae, who could’ve doubled as an Herbal Essences model, the sleekly sophisticated up-do had taken her ten seconds flat to accomplish.

“Sorry,” I muttered, lifting my coffee cup for a hefty swig and attempting to rub feeling back into my left cheek. “Late night. I only got about four hours of sleep.”

“I can tell. You look like crap,” she informed me cheerily, skirting around the partition that divided our cubicles to lean against my desk.

I glared at her, but couldn’t object because I knew her words were true. I’d spent most of the night tossing and turning, worried about the pitch I was giving today. There were bags beneath my eyes and my hair had definitely seen better days. I could only hope that Jeanine would be more focused on the quality of my research and the hard work I’d put into this proposal than she was on my looks.

Hah, who was I kidding?

Fae and I worked at Luster, the largest women’s magazine in the United States. Our issues showed up on every newsstand, magazine rack, and waiting room coffee table in the nation, and circulated to more than 20 million regular subscribers each month – making us the go-to source for every feminine question you probably never wanted to know the answers to.