Hades

Chapter 2. Hades

"Yo, sweetheart!" My mother's voice thundered on the other end of the phone. I had to move my cell phone away from my ear. She had a gift for speaking loudly as if she had swallowed an amplifier, and I often didn't need to put it on hands-free mode while doing other tasks because I could hear her too well that way already. "Have you already eaten the soup I brought you?" 

I glanced at the bowl of untouched soup on the kitchen counter.

"Yes, Mom. It was delicious." I lied. I didn't really have much of an appetite.

I called her Mom even though she wasn't really my biological mother. When I was four or five, I was too busy shaving Barbies or eating dirt in the park to ever wonder if Victor and Yolanda, as they were called, were my biological parents. However, once I turned nine, I suddenly began to wonder about the obvious difference in our physical features and after insisting and insisting, I was finally told the truth.  Even every time he recalls it, my father Victor goes so far as to say that "Either he would tell me the truth  or he would travel to Egypt only to jump into the Nile and be eaten by crocodiles rather than continue to put up with my questions." Yes, exaggeration was one of his greatest qualities. So, barely ten years old, I discovered the truth in the origin of this family. That I was abandoned at just a few months old on their doorstep. However, unlike what you might think, the news did not hurt me, but I took it as just another fact about myself, just as my weight, my height or the color of my hair were simple facts for me. It didn't matter to me that we didn't share the same blood, because for me they would always be my real parents.

My mother was a tall, full-figured woman with a dark complexion, dark eyes and curly black hair. My father was also tall, with slightly tanned skin, brown eyes (slightly lighter than his wife's) and wore glasses. He had a bit of a pot belly and short, gray hair with receding hairline. He always said that in his youth he had long blond hair that made all women fall at his feet, but I knew that was a lie, not only because of the dark color of his eyebrows, in addition to the rest of the hair, but because I had seen photographs of him and my mother in their twenties and my father had hair as dark as my mother. In fact, the first time I saw the photo I couldn't help but wonder what Yolanda would have seen in him, because despite the fact that he didn't have a very remarkable physique she always said he was the "John Travolta of her heart", but when I stopped being a hormonal teenager and started to look at more than just the physique I knew my mother had fallen in love with Victor's big heart and charisma. Although on more than one occasion she had to arm herself with patience.

"I fell in love with you as soon as I saw you, but I had to beg your mother for a whole week for us to stay with you" my father told me after finishing the story of how they found me. Before he had barely finished speaking, Yolanda gave him a reproachful look and slapped his arm, somewhat irritated. I knew it had been the other way around, but I had to admit that I loved those moments when my father made her angry. It seemed incredible to me that after so many years they were still together. 

Unlike them, I was a girl of no more than five feet tall, too pale for my taste (seriously, I couldn't get a tan even if I got full sun all summer long. The only color I could get was lobster red) with blue eyes and orange hair with slight blonde highlights. We were so different that when I was teased at school, supposedly for being adopted, I had to pop the question and get to the dark truth. 

"Are you going out with Aaron tonight?" mom asked. I laid down on the couch. I had slept very little and had just woken up from a nap. I had been on edge all week because of what had happened that night. 

"No, he's meeting some friends to go bowling."

 I could feel my mother grimacing on the other end of the line.