Home For The Holidays

That’s when I knew that I was not dealing with your average everyday home-wrecking skank; this bitch was devious, heartless, and an expert in her craft of deception. It was then I started on my course of destruction.

I planned to eliminate this blighted parasite from my family if it was the last thing I did. It was going to be a long one, time and energy and maybe money well spent along the way. Plus, you know, schoolwork. But wait, I still haven’t told you about Jared.

“Oh shit, what the hell are you plotting now?”

“Drake, language.” I looked from mom to dad and back and grinned at him before getting to my feet and walking over to kiss his head. I’d been lost down memory lane for a while, and dad had been studying me. Time to go hide out in my room before I give myself away.

As I said, my dad knows me very well, and it would only take a few well-placed questions from him, and the jig is up. I can’t let anything spoil my surprise, though, not after all the hard work I’ve put in. I rubbed my hands together as I headed up the stairs, where I ran into Tessa, who was on her way down.

“Your brother and I are going to be married, so you’d better get used to it.” She was feeling brave and looking smug. I looked back down the stairs where the coast was clear.

“There are no witnesses if your ass end up at the bottom of these stairs; you sure you wanna be talking shit to me?” I fake rushed her, and she screamed her ass down the stairs. Man stealing twatwaffle.

I was already turning the corner on the landing when I heard her peanut gallery made up of mom and Tom asking her what was wrong. I’m not worried; my dad would skin all of them alive if they even look at me cross-eyed.

Samantha

I opened the door of my childhood bedroom, which mom had kept as some kind of shrine to in the years since I’ve been gone. This is supposed to be my last year at college, but I had no intentions of coming back here to live after that was done and still don’t, but it’s my haven when I come home on holiday and will be for the next few days at least.

I laid back across the bed and picked up the little handball I’d left there earlier. I do some of my best thinking and plotting when I lay like this, tossing a ball in the air. This time though, I was reminiscing about the last year or so and the changes in my life that my family were not yet privy to but will be before the holidays are over.

Where did we leave off? Oh yes, the fateful kiss that was used to end my brother’s marriage. I didn’t bother telling my sister in law what I suspected at the time that her friend had indeed set her up. The truth is, I didn’t have enough evidence and needed more. Had Deidre not still been in love with Tom that part, I might’ve been able to gloss over, but because she still hopelessly believed there was a way for them to work things out, I knew I had to start there at least.

It was painstaking work finding this guy since all Deidre had given me was a first name, and since the guy was not on her friends' list, I couldn’t find him that way. I found a couple of guys with his name on Tessa’s friends’ list, but it turned out that none of them was the one. It would’ve helped if I got my hand on that picture, but since only Tom and whoever had sent it to him were in possession of it, that was a dead end.

In the meantime, I picked apart every aspect of Tessa’s life from as far back as her book of faces history would allow me to snoop. Three months later, when I returned home again on break, I had to swallow my anger and pretend to get close to my brother so that I could have access to his phone.

That had been a rough time because I’d had to hurt Deidre, who thought I was siding with my brother and the walking incubus because of all the time I spent with them at their new place, and of course, I couldn’t tell her the truth. Once I got into my brother’s phone after a night of drinking when I’d talked him and Tessa into a drinking game and then proclaimed the hell dad would rain down on his head if I went home in that condition, and they had to let me stay on the couch.