Spectrum

Chapter 1

The police station was quiet as the man of the hour, my fuming father made his way towards us walking past the lady at the front desk who had her lips parted to address him.

Our father was a tall brooding caramel-skinned thirty-eight-year-old black man who prided in his work and children. We were his prized possessions and meant the literal world to him but our, in his words ‘ delinquent ‘ behaviour was unacceptable. 

I took pride in defying my father while my brother did everything to keep the both of us out of trouble with the law but this was one of the few times where they had wanted to pin the whole arrangement on us but with one phone call to our father, all allegations were dropped and pretty soon we were sure that they would be sued.

“ Really? “ He asked, his oddly disappointed gaze boring holes into us.

We sat there quietly at us and at this point, we were both too shocked to say anything, I had caught it and I was sure that Mason had caught it too. The look of sheer disappointment clouded our father’s eyes, it was something the both of us were totally not used to.

I had expected him to be angry, for his eyes to be blazing with unquenchable fire but all I could feel at this moment was the ache in my heart as my father turned his gaze to meet my eyes shaking his head.

He sighed “ Nial is outside. “ As he said that he turned going to talk to the officers who had brought us to the station.

Mason got up pulling me with him to go outside where Nial was waiting by the car for us to get in.

“ I feel bad, “ I voiced to my brother.

“ Me too, I’ve never seen pops so disappointed before, we really messed up, didn’t we? “ He sighed leaning into the plush seats of the Rolls Royce Phantom.

This time, we weren’t so lucky. I hadn’t realized how this would look until it was too late. My brother and I caught staring at a spray-painted house alongside underaged teens under the influence of alcohol. Luckily, we hadn’t been drinking and smoking like they were but the officers had still tried to pin the blame onto us.

Luckily, one of Mason’s knuckleheaded friends had admitted to dragging us along with them to defer the blame onto us which had almost worked for them.

The car was clouded with silence as a few minutes my father opened the door to the passenger’s side of the car.

I knew what he wanted to say to us, instead of hosting an end of highschool party and trashing his house we should’ve been focused on choosing which college we were going to attend this September.

No, Mason and I weren’t twins, in fact, he was a year older but had been suggested to re-do his third grade year with me due to the fact that the school that he was transferring from at the time was behind a year which ended in the two of us in the same grade coming up ever since.

The rest of the car ride was deathly silent as my father tapped away on his phone no doubt making sure that news of this would never reach the press.

Soon enough we had gotten to our Foxhall mansion and our father was out of the car sooner than we could open our mouth to utter any words.

Nial came around opening the door for us helping me out of the car. The rest of the night and straight into the morning was spent in the same silence as before and it was then that we knew that our father, Michael Jerome Knox was planning something, something big at that and we surely weren’t ready for it.