4: 4
At that, my mother's face went cold in an instant.
"What kind of ungrateful child are you?"
"We worked ourselves to the bone raising you, putting you through school, all that time and money spent on you!"
"You finally make something of yourself, and now you start keeping accounts against your own family?"
My father's face turned hard too, and he snapped at me.
"You ungrateful brat, we raised you for nothing!"
I lifted my eyes and looked straight at them.
"You cut off all my living expenses the year I started high school."
"My tuition, my living costs, all of it I saved a dollar at a time from summer and winter break jobs."
"For college tuition I took out student loans, and I spent every spare hour working just to get by."
"So what exactly did you two raise?"
That line pushed my mother over the edge.
Her hand shot up, and she slapped me hard across the face.
The crack of it rang through the private room.
Then she turned, eyes red, and walked out.
My father went right after her, without so much as a glance at me.
In that big private room, only Sharon and I were left.
Sharon frowned, her face full of impatience and blame.
"You went way too far, Joy."
"Mom and Dad didn't have it easy raising you. Even if they slipped up sometimes, they had their reasons. How could you talk back to them like that?"
The cold went all the way through me.
"Their reasons?"
"All three years of high school, you always had the newest brand-name sneakers, the newest designer bags."
"You went to a private college, eighty grand a year in tuition, and they didn't so much as blink."
"How is it that for you they can afford everything, spoil you at every turn, but when it comes to me, it's all reasons and hardship?"
She was the biggest winner in all that favoritism.
She enjoyed everything I paid for.
And now here she was, looking down on me, accusing me of not being grateful.
Sharon flushed red under it.
Her face went from pale to blotchy.
She gritted her teeth, then stood and stormed out too.
The room went completely quiet.
Slowly I raised my hands and took off the black coat I'd worn for seven years.
I folded it neatly and set it on the chair.
Tenderness that was never mine, longing that was never mine.
From now on, all of it returned.
I sat there a moment, then got up and left.
Messages kept popping up on my phone.
In the family group chat, my parents had sent several long voice messages in a row.
I didn't have to open them to know they were cursing me out.
I didn't tap them.
The last message came up. It was—
【You have been removed from the group chat】
Right after, a private message from my mother.
"If you can't figure out what you did wrong, then for the rest of your life, act like you don't have a mother, don't have a family!"
I suddenly remembered something from a long time ago.
Sharon was the one who'd made this family group chat.
The first thing she did was add my father, add my mother.
The only one she left out was me.
I watched the three of them chatting in there day to day, sharing their lives.
I begged, small and pathetic, for a long time before they grudgingly let me in.
I never belonged there to begin with.
Getting removed now was just going back to how it always was.
And in that moment, I finally worked up the courage I'd been saving for over twenty years.
I sent the one question I'd wanted to ask from the bottom of my heart.
"Why don't you love me? Aren't my sister and I both your daughters?"
The message went through. For a long time there was no reply.
So long that I thought she'd never answer.
Then the screen finally lit up.
A few short lines that sentenced twenty-some years of my life.
"You were born a curse come to collect a debt."
"The day I got pregnant with you, my mother died. The day I gave birth to you, my father passed too."
"You brought death on my parents, and I was still willing to raise you. I've already done more than my share."
I stared at the screen, everything in me gone to ash.
So all the unfairness I'd lived with my whole life.
It wasn't that I wasn't good enough, wasn't obedient enough.
It was only because the day I was born was unlucky.
But back then I was just a helpless newborn who understood nothing.
Why should I carry the deaths of elders I'd never met, carry a lifetime of their bias and hate?
I didn't reply with a single word.
Three days went by in a blink.
On departure day I packed my few things and headed for the airport.
Right before boarding, Sharon added me back into the family group and sent a message to smooth things over.
"Mom and Dad aren't mad anymore, they just can't bring themselves to say it."
"As long as you handle the job placement thing for me, this is all in the past, and we're still family."
I looked at the fake words and let the corner of my mouth curve up.
Family.
Something I'd never had, and never wanted again.
This time, I left that family group myself, the one that had trapped me for years.
The plane took off. I was headed for a place two thousand miles away.
From now on, Joy Shepherd loved only herself.
And lived only for herself.
