Summer Vacation

Chapter 10

10

The ride to the beach was a short one. We were going to Virginia Beach and staying at the beach house that Tyrell’s family owned. I looked at him and smiled. His family was very well off financially; Tyrell and his brother have never wanted for anything, but Ty was still an amazingly sweet guy with a down-to-earth personality most of the time. He didn’t flaunt the fact that he could have anything he wanted.

When we first started talking, I have to admit that I was a tad bit jealous and awestruck by his parents’ house. They lived in the type of house most people dreamed about; and made my house look like a shack in comparison. It wasn’t a mansion on a hill or anything like that, but it was in a fancy neighborhood with watch guards at the entrance. The first time Tyrell took me there, we were supposed to go swimming and he gave me a tour of the house on the way through it; I was impressed and amazed by everything. They had a large kitchen and a separate space for eating and they had a separate, formal dining room as well. We had walked past a formal sitting area that I decided looked too expensive for me to even walk on the carpet before he even showed me the rest of the house. He showed me the study, the game room, and the entertainment room all before we had left the first floor. The upstairs of that house was probably bigger than my whole house. They had three separate bedrooms, and a sunroom that looked out on the pool in the backyard.

When he said we were going swimming at his house, I thought that he lived in a neighborhood with a community swimming pool. He actually meant at his house. His parents had an in-ground swimming pool inside their privacy fence along with a grill, a small table, and outdoor lounge chairs. It seemed like everywhere we went, there were really expensive things everywhere. I was later informed by Tyrell, that his neighborhood did have a community pool, but his parents wanted something more private.

I only saw the house twice before Tyrell left and moved in with his older brother Jermaine. Their parents had gone through a divorce not too long before and decided that each of them would get a child, which meant that Jermaine would be moving halfway across the country to Kansas City. Jermaine wasn’t having that so he moved out as soon as he turned eighteen. He got a job working full time at a pizza place downtown and bought the apartment. It wasn’t the most ideal place to live but it was his and he wasn’t being shipped halfway across the country for the last part of his senior year. He was going into his sophomore year of college now and somehow he was still managing school and a fulltime job, but people do that all the time.

Jermaine was two years older than Tyrell, but Tyrell moved out a month after Jermaine did anyway. He threatened his parents with emancipation if they tried to stop him. His parents didn’t want to risk losing complete contact with the last son they still had on good terms, so they let him go after he promised to call both of them every week. His dad was hurt the worst. He lost three of his most beloved people within a few months, but at least Tyrell kept in touch with him. He didn’t want to live there anymore because his parents were never the most attentive parents and they were extremely verbally abusive when they threw parties or drank, which was more often than not. Jermaine had been taking care of him since before either of them was in double-digits. He had welcomed him into the small apartment and once Tyrell had gotten a job working at the grocery store, they moved into a two bedroom apartment so they had their own space.

I spent a lot of time there with Ty, Jermaine, and MJ, Jermaine’s girlfriend. MJ’s real name was Emma Jean Thompson, but I didn’t know that until about year after I met her and I heard Jermaine use her full name. I got used to being around them all really quickly. Being around Jermaine made me realize how much alike he and his brother were. They had some of the same mannerisms like taking their shoes off as soon as they entered the apartment and smoothing out their haircut when they’re nervous. When Jermaine and Tyrell were together it was very obvious that were not only brothers but close friends. MJ and I were good friends too, even though she was three years older than me; we had to be, we were all at the apartment too much not to be.