Belladonna gripped her fork. Her head was churning and the same with her hands.
“Belladonna, can you try to explain to me why you’d do something… so mean to your sister?” Granny Watanabe patted her snarled curls while she whispered in the soprano pitched voice that made Belladonna’s ears buzz. “She was worried about you.”
Irene crossed her arms over her small breast. She could feel her chest expanding and then falling back down, it was happening in a manner that made her throat hitch. She just wanted to let the tears discharge and let the agony fade away.
Belladonna shrugged unsympathetically, merely making Irene’s off-the-edge mood intensify. Her diminutive fist clenched and her body began to tremor as it did when her mother disappeared to Africa with her tender father, leaving her and Belladonna alone with Gran. Irene loved Gran. She’d never not love her. She just loved her more in small portions, so her madness wouldn’t drive her to near lunacy or absurdity.
“It’s not my fault Skyler said what he said. She’s the one that ran outside in her panties, not me,” She gored her chicken and jammed it into her mouth, “She looks like a child and acts like one too.”
Irene flinched at that.
She was always called a child even though she was sixteen and nearly a woman grown. She always stood her ground and she knew things only adults knew about.
She never understood what made her so childish, perhaps her childlike appearance or maybe her innocence to some aspects of the world…but it got irritating on an everyday basis hearing people your own age act like your younger.
“I thought you were getting hurt, you…you…bitch!” Irene grabbed a handful of rice and threw it in the direction of her flaxen haired sister. “No wonder everyone hates you!”
Belladonna looked at the rice that covered her pale pink Juicy Couture tracksuit and simpered at her sister.
“Just like I said, you act like a kid,” she wiped herself off and said without any sign of emotion, “This is why everyone hates you.”
Irene’s hazel eyes permeated with hot tears and her malnourished body began to tremble. She clutched her timeworn teddy-bear Dracula to her chest, who was named after the long-haired, pointy-chinned, cold-eyed, Vlad Dracula, the impaler.
How dare she say everyone hates me? Irene thought as she scampered out of the immense dining room and up the shabby carpeted staircase, her white nightgown swirling around her petite legs and her dainty feet awkwardly stumbling over each other.
When she was at the top of the steps, her eyes were already bloodshot and her heart-shaped face ruddy. She’d never felt more horrid. She opened her door and secured herself inside. With all the illuminations dead and the scab her sister reopened bleeding far and wide.
Irene knew everyone hated her. She was weird, ugly, dreadful, useless, nasty and most of all short.
Besides Aqua, she was the shortest person in Grieves WhiteWater, the small town her family has lived in since the late fifties. Everyone made fun of her frizzy black hair. She dyed it red to feel special. But when they caught sight of her blood-red curls they called her a freak and said she was even uglier.
Of course she’d never be pretty. She was the shadow that trailed behind her gorgeous, blonde, curvy, sister.
She was nothing but this…
“Why are you crying?” a voice in the darkness murmured, it was proud and well spoken, as if they had their whole life to perfect it.
Irene’s eyes adapted to the darkness and when she scanned the room, she found herself staring at a lanky male. She observed the shine of his ebony hair, the depth of his blue eyes and the curve of his egotistical smirk.
