The Scarlet Letter

Chapter Three

Chapter Three

The last memory Alec had of his mother was when she drove him to school about a week before she and his father left for America. There wasn't anything particular about the car ride. It had just been . . . a car ride. Quiet . . . almost tense, really. Alec had never felt entirely comfortable around his mother because he never seemed capable of saying the right thing to her. It didn't help that he had mentioned wanting to study science instead of music when it came to choosing his subjects. He still had years before he was going to choose his subjects at the time, and he had only mentioned it in passing, but Alec distinctly remembered it rubbing his mother the wrong way.

Maryse had always been stern, even when Alec was a child. He would have been extremely surprised if he had arrived at The Scarlet Letter to hear its patrons raving about the carefree and wild Maryse Lightwood. It was in her nature the same way music and performance ran through the veins of the Lightwoods like blood. Maryse wasn't Lightwood by blood, she married into the family, however she had adapted to their ways extremely well and for as long as Alec could remember she had been planning the construction of The Scarlet Letter, even when he was no more than two years old.

It had nearly been a decade since he'd seen his parents. According to Isabelle, both of them were pretty much as he recalled. Strict; uptight; stern. "Type the word 'boring' into a thesaurus and they're every alternate word that will come up," was what she had said. Despite this, Alec was extremely apprehensive about meeting them again after so long. He had an irrational fear of disappointing them, since it seemed to be a consistent theme ever since he was a kid.

"Who cares what they think?" Isabelle declared as they walked through the streets of LA the next morning, on route to the café where they were going to have brunch with Maryse and Robert.

"Yeah, they're always grumpy," Jace agreed, "so why exhaust yourself trying to please them when it's impossible?"

"I don't know, maybe the fact that I'd like them to believe I haven't wasted the past decade of my life?" Alec responded.

"Even if they did think that, we know you haven't," said Isabelle. "More importantly you know that you haven't."

Alec ran a tired hand through his hair. He hadn't slept too well on the sofa of Isabelle's apartment. More due to anxiety over this morning than anything else. He wanted it out of the way, but he knew he couldn't just barge into the café and declare to his parents that he was gay, despite his desperation to have it out in the open already.

"I need to come out to them this morning," Alec muttered.

Isabelle looked at Alec curiously. "You don't need to do anything," she told him. "They don't have a right to know anything about your life."

"To be fair, they lost the right to know anything when they left us with Hodge," Jace added.

"No, no, no you're misunderstanding. I want them to know. I can't hide it anymore," Alec insisted. "I'm just worried about how they'll react . . ."

Isabelle blew a raspberry. "So, you want to shag boys, who cares? I shag boys, I don't hear them complaining about it."

Jace snorted. "Somehow, I don't think that's the same, Iz." He chuckled. "Besides, they do complain, you just ignore them."

Alec couldn't find the humour in his sister's words. In fact, the thought of her putting it that way in front of their parents made him feel very faint. He hated the word shag, it reminded him of those ugly white rugs and the tiny plastic bracelets that were a fad in his High School for a year. "It would be nice for them to accept at least one part of my life," he said, almost to himself.