The Stray Boy & Me

II: Chaos much?

          I HOP OUT of bed the next morning to the glare of the morning sun gleaming through the window pane, completely failing to recall how I had let a random guy spend overnight in my garage.

I begin my ordinary routine, singling out the perfect holiday panties to uplift my holiday mood and disentangling tacky clutters of brown hair sprawling down my scalp.

It was only when I'd hopped into the shower that I sensed something downright bizarre. It's strange of how from where I stand, I can easily sniff the freshness of open-air and the distinct fragrant of the field of Dianthus my dad has grown in our garden outside.

I peer through the frosted glass to discern the source of the smell, and only to have reality slap me hard across the face. I had thoroughly forgotten the event that occurred last night.

The window had broken and beneath it are bits of earth and fallen leaves that has stockpiled into one rowdy clutter.

I immediately glance over to the clock on the counter beside the shower stand. It reads 7.30a.m. I scold myself internally. Dad must have already gotten home upwards of an hour ago and the boy from yesterday must still be loitering somewhere in the house!

I sloppily dress myself in dowdy attire and swiftly jog downstairs to come across a familiar sight. Devlin is sitting formally by the dining table across dad, who is staring dead into my eyes.

Devlin, or Dee-Vee; how I prefer to refer to her, is dad's soon to be wife. The story began when daddy divorced my biological mother merely several years after I was born of an unfathomable and untold cause. Ever since then, he's been very fond of this Dee girl and constantly brags about her; going around, telling people exaggerated compliments about her features.

He worships her, and that peeves me out so much, especially considering the fact that she's just another young and pretty airhead with a clever mouth.

A mouth with its own brain and history of tasting a variety of over a thousand different saliva from a thousand different men—or woman, who knows?

Certainly, the fact makes me want to graze her face with a razor and smack it brutally with burning metal, even when she technically did nothing wrong, yet.

I know, my passionate intention to jeopardize her glamorously snobbish life is a little exaggerated, but I can't tame myself in terms of that.

Their marriage is going to take place very soon, in fact a couple months from now I believe, and they're both extremely ecstatic about it. They had readied a fabulous villa, dress and everything else I can't think of; good for them.

Despite that, I never really am pleased towards the fact that Dad is going to wed another woman and have her enter not just his, but our life as a family.

Yet it's not just solely due to my overwhelming loath I have towards Dee that I never want her in the picture. It's also of the fairly distant age gap between the two. Dad is way older in his forties and Dee is barely ten years older than I am, yet she persistently bosses me around whenever Dad is not attentive.

I still cannot register how Dad could fall for an utterly whiny and spoilt five-year-old soul engraved in a woman's body. Someday, the both of them will become legally bound together.

Yet regardless of that, she will never be my 'mom' and I won't ever consider her a part of our clan.

Dad clears his throat as I awkwardly stand before them, biting my lower lip upon the tension.

"Don't you have anything to say, Harper?" dad asks. I shake my head in response with a convincing grin stuck on my face.

I discreetly reach one hand to the back of the kitchen drawer in search of the garage keys which I'm certain I had slid somewhere in there the previous night.