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My brother dragged me up to the head table while I fumed.
The day my acceptance letter came, my parents had already thrown me a party back in the village.
So today's celebration dinner was just for the relatives on both sides.
Aunt Belinda came over leading that man.
"Sophie, don't go throwing a fit at your aunt now. I treat you better than my own daughter, I swear."
I figured that was garbage.
"Here, look at how much thought he put into this."
Belinda pushed the heavy man forward, right up in front of me. There was a little cart beside him too.
"Oh my, that phone of yours looks older than mine."
I dipped my head slightly.
On the table sat the smartphone I'd used for five years.
A hand-me-down my mother had discarded.
The screen had a few cracks running across it.
Aside from being a little slow, everything on it still worked fine.
My mother's face went a bit stiff. "We deliberately didn't buy her a new phone, so she'd focus on her studies."
One of the relatives praised her for knowing how to raise a child right, said that was the only reason I'd gotten into an Ivy.
I glanced over at my brother, playing his game beside me.
The phone in his hands was one my mother had bought him three days ago.
All because he'd lagged in a match, lost, and cried out of frustration.
That same afternoon my mother came up with an excuse, saying he'd worked hard all semester and deserved a break now that the holiday had finally come.
The heavy man's name was Jordan Whitney.
He lifted two boxed new phones from the cart and set them in front of me.
"These are for you."
Belinda made a big show of it. "These are iPhones! Some model or other, seventeen thousand apiece!"
"Sophie, look, you two aren't even together yet and he's already this generous with you, already so thoughtful. See how much he cares?"
Beside me, my brother's head snapped up the second he heard "iPhone."
He wanted one!
Jordan kept setting things down in front of me.
An iPad, a laptop, a necklace, earrings, and a bracelet, all from designer brands.
Piling up in front of me into a little mountain.
Jordan said, "I know you girls like your bags, so I picked out this Louis Vuitton myself."
My mother stared at it, wide-eyed. "Oh my, this is too much, we really can't accept... take it back now."
The relatives murmured among themselves, tallying up how much the whole pile was worth.
My face darkened.
Not one person cared what I wanted.
If anything, the way Jordan threw all this at me carried a kind of arrogance, like he was trying to buy me down and couldn't understand why I wouldn't give in.
I grabbed the cart and swept every last thing back into it.
"Didn't you hear my mother? It's too expensive. Our family can't afford to take it!"
I watched my mother's face twist up like she was constipated.
