Since He Left ✓

04: Accidental Discoveries

"Sometimes glass glitters more than diamonds because it has more to prove." - Terry Pratchett

****

The double wooden doors slammed shut behind me, and I knew nobody was home. Maman was at a conference, Joseph at work, and Nick at lacrosse meeting. Nobody would've  been home until at least an hour or so. I was already feeling tired, even though I hadn't done anything but spend time in therapy and at the house. Great way to spend the last day of summer holiday. The house was enormous, marble floors, silk curtains, expensive vases, chandeliers everywhere, an original Van Gough in the hallway.

 This house was expensive and I had a pretty good guess from where the money was coming from, Maman. Mom was a lawyer, lawyers get paid a lot to judge. She's had to deal with issues like; Runaway youth, adoption problems, divorce and custody, and theft. In my eyes, it wasn't hard at all, all you had to do was sit on a chair, dressed ridiculously, and discuss ethical questions.

Is claiming that your daughter has CGD right or wrong, Maman?

I walked up the stairs and went into Grayson's room. He was never the tidiest person, so mom and I had cleaned his room, not packed. I always succeeded in persuading Maman to keep the room untouched, telling her I needed time was a lie. I was only waiting for him to come back, coming home to an empty space that used to be your room isn't exactly helpful. When Grayson came back I didn't want him to think we gave up on him, accepting he was dead. So I left his things, everything as it was before he left.

The walls to the small space were light blue, with a cork board on one wall. Pictures, teared parts of newspaper articles, highlighted words and sudoku pages were all pinned to the big board. On the other side of the wall he had a small bookshelf, he fairly read but when he did he kept his books on that shelf. All genres were there; Thriller, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Non-fiction and French books. A single bed in the corner, a Metallica poster above the bed, and a window across from the door were all setup. I walked over to the cork board, and traced pictures with my finger. Grayson and I as babies, my biological father with Grayson on his lap, and Maman and I. 

No pictures of Nick and Joseph were pinned on the board, simply because my brother didn't know they were a part of the family. Grayson may have had seen Nick in school sometimes, and may have had Joseph as his substitute teacher, but he was never there to see Joseph and Maman's relationship begin. My mother's relationship had started after Grayson disappeared, he never knew Maman had married again. It would have been weird for him to come back with two new family members, strangers. Camille's decision to remarry developed rapidly, right after Grayson's assumed death.

How will Maman feel when he comes back? Her son "cheated death".

Would Maman have had a breakdown, would she apologize to me? Would she apologize for believing I'm crazy, and forcing everybody else to think I'm crazy? Would people at school feel ashamed for calling me names, for having said nasty things to me? Students at school, tended to randomly come up to me and stare at me, like I was some gross thing. I would often hear people at my highschool whisper;

"Isn't that Isla? Her brother's dead and she still believes he's alive."

"That's Isla, the crazy girl. I heard she was diagnosed with something for being crazy."

"She's strange. Don't talk to her, everybody makes fun of her."

I was pushed, yelled at, cursed at, and bullied. It was a hard time for me. Soon, other things happened and the gossip travelled elsewhere. Gossip at my school spread as rapidly as the black plague, infecting everybody who spoke of it. People would whisper in the halls, and those whispers lead to deaths. A former girl in my class, Anna, had been bullied for being transgender. She then decided to take her own life to end the harsh years of bullying, she had a ceremony dedicated to her. Funny enough, almost everybody who was the cause of her death attended, guilt plain on their faces. It must have been hard for them, even harder for Anna. People should have treated others like they would have wanted to be treated, and it looked like most desired to be respected as finely as dirt.