2019-07-14 - Trailer Brat to Street Rat

“Mom didn’t want you.” A childish voice pronounced as Lex stepped through the front door, drawing her attention center and forward as she dropped her backpack to the floor just inside the house.

Lex stared at the little brat that was supposedly her half-brother. She wasn’t sure exactly how old he was, but he seemed somewhere in the ten-to-twelve arena, and had an air of superiority that rivaled an entitled Chihuahua. To be fair, he was a decent-looking kid, and had even seemed tolerable enough when her new ‘family’ had first picked her up at the bus stop, but since then…. well, if ‘shared maternity’ were anything like ‘shared paternity’, she’d be insisting that their relation was a false positive.

Surely this little beast couldn’t share her blood? Then again, she’d felt the same way about her actual mother for some time now. Why not add in a few half-spawn? And unfortunately, there were a few. This one, and a younger girl. The little girl, other than light hair instead of Lex’s dark, looked like an unnerving reincarnation of Lex’s six-year-old self. She was less annoying than the boy, but the resemblance was almost as agitating. Almost.

“You know how I know she didn’t want you?” The kid tailed her as she started up the staircase of the entirely-too-perfect house, apparently unshaken by her failure to respond to his initial baiting. In fact, he seemed dead-set on following her straight to the office that they’d turned into a make-shift bedroom upon her arrival.

“She told me. She told all of us, before you even got here. You were an accident, so she left you with that old lady so she could start a good life, without you.” He managed to nail that ‘keening’ sound that the bratty kids used in the movies. God help her. She’d grown up in Gray Harbor, and as foggy as the unpleasant memories were becoming, they were still preferable to… this.

“Paul,” Lex finally snapped, stopping in the doorway to the office-turned-bedroom to turn and face the kid. It didn’t help that she wasn’t that much taller than the boy, despite being at least twelve years his senior, but she’d had many additional years to master both her glare and her tone. “If you don’t leave me the fuck alone, I will throw you over that banister,” Lex pointed with a black-painted fingernail toward the banister and staircase in question. Then, in case her message hadn’t gotten across, “And I’ll make sure you die.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Paul snapped back, though there was a flicker of doubt in his eyes that gave Lex hope. “They’d put you in jail.”

“They’d put me in prison, you idiot. But it’d be worth it. Wanna try me?” Her eyes narrowed in mild satisfaction as the boy’s lower lip began to quiver just slightly, and she allowed herself a slight smirk when the kid turned on his heel and ran back down the stairs.

She’d seen him before the bus stop. She’d seen all of them, for the last dozen or so Christmases -- since her mother had started sending family-picture Happy Holidays cards back to Gray Harbor. First, it had just been Lex’s mother and some blonde guy that grandma had said was ‘mama’s new friend’. But then the years started to pass, and a baby boy appeared in the pictures. By the time that Lex had photographic proof of her half-sister’s birth, Lex herself was old enough to understand that her mother had 'left her' to her grandmother’s care a little after Lex’s second birthday. The people in the Christmas pictures were ‘mama’s new family’.

Lex remembered staring at those cards, and the year she turned twelve, she had decided it had all been for the best. Her life with Gram wasn’t bad, and how would her mother have met and married her very own Prince Charming if she had to explain the kid she’d had when she was sixteen? Life in Gray Harbor was all Lex had ever known, and however much she looked like the woman who Gram said was her mother, she didn’t remember her.

Yeah, it had all been for the best. Or it would have been, if Gram could’ve hung on for a few more years. The old woman had died of a heart attack, according to the paperwork, and Lex herself was beginning to believe it. It made sense, after all. More sense than the weird nightmares that she had for the first few weeks.

Either way, it didn’t matter. Gram was dead, and sixteen-year-old Lex had been left in the custody of her only other living relative – her mother. The stranger that she looked like, with the new family in the pretty Christmas pictures.

She had to find a way out of here. Fast.