Semester at Seas BxB (Staten Krown)

1

You ever feel stuck. I always felt stuck. I couldn't avoid it. My sister was Nicky Crane. If you had a sister like Patience Crane you would feel stuck to. We sat at the table. Mother was on one side and Patience Crane on the other. Realize I didn't call her Mom or Ma or anything like that. No...he was Mother in this house.

"Sit up, Chauncey," Patience told me, "Respectable young black gentlemen don't sit like that."

I sat up.

"Good boy," Patience said, as though I was her dog.

Mother just smiled at Patience in approval. I always knew Patience was Mother's favorite. It was something that I had gotten used to. Mozart was playing in the background as we ate, perfectly still. Mother had taken off her lace gloves and put laid them across her lap. She was cutting her meat...in perfect squares. Everything about Mother was perfect. She was the ideal woman, but she was dying. She had cancer. Not saying that cancer was a death sentence, but even if she didn't physically die...there was something else dying about her. She was losing her shine. Depression was setting in.

Patience crossed her legs. She was the perfect daughter. She was the perfect young woman. She had just turned 21. She was beautiful. She looked like a Nubian Barbie Doll. Her hair fell down her back and it was all hers. She was elegant to. She knew everything about elegance. She didn't even notice the roaches running around in the shadows of our apartment in the Ghetto.

My father used to tell me, "Life is vast as the ocean...so don't be surprised if you get washed away."

That is why I wasn't surprised when he bit the dust. We hadn't always been living in the Ghetto. It was easy to see. We had once been rich. We'd once been powerful. We were once happy.

My father and uncle were rich tycoons. They had gotten rich off oil. They were best friends. The first few years of my life, my mother told me stories of how I had maids to do everything for me. I lived in a mansion. We were wealthy. That was until my uncle got my father into gambling. My uncle and father did everything together. Their brotherly bond was something that my mother always wanted to break up. She knew that it was trouble. They had gotten rich together. They gambled away our futures together. They commited suicide...together, leaving their families with nothing.

My aunt, her daughter Anita and Rita, my sister Patience and I all moved to Boxy Grove. It was the local ghetto. While my aunt had embraced the ghetto, my mother denied it. We lived there and that was all. Patience and I were shipped away to private school our entire lives.

We were raised to be as though we were still rich...even though we weren't. My mother had given all she had to raise my older sister into the perfect woman and raise me into the perfect man. I was the only man she ever wanted to be around. My mother didn't trust men. She hated them with a passion... after what my father did to her. The only thing she hated more then one man was two. She hated the bond that men had together because of what my uncle did to my father.

Little did she know I was gay.

Maybe it was the fact that I was surrounded by women all my life. I wasn't anywhere near feminine. Patience wouldn't allow that. She made sure I knew what it was to be a man. I never had a boyfriend. In high school, I did have sexual encounters with a couple men trying but that was it. Hook ups...as they said in the Grove. That was all that ever could have been back home. However, now I was in college. I attended PrincetonUniversity. I was going into my Sophmore year as my sister was going into her Senior year.

"We got two invitations from Water University of Westinghouse," Patience explained, letting her long hair fall down.

"Chauncey...are you listening to your sister?" Mother asked.