Emerald

By: Candace Marie

Family Jewels novel

Chapter One

The Garden District

All my life I've been different from everyone else. To outsiders, it looks like I've got the perfect life. I have three half-siblings. My older sister Pearl who is the apple of everyone's eyes. She the school valedictorian, on her way to becoming a doctor. Then there are my younger half-siblings the twins Pierre and Jean Andreas. I live in one of the biggest homes in the Garden District. Out of all of my siblings, only I look different. Only I have ruby red hair and emerald green eyes. My three siblings all have the same cerulean blue eyes and flaxen blonde hair. They all look like dolls. Then there's my daddy, who my siblings take after. The truth is my mother fell into a coma not long after I was born, and less than a year later she was dead, leaving me with my father and my stepmother who was also my aunt.

My aunt and my mother had been identical twins, much like my half-brothers, so all I had to do was look at my aunt to know what my mother would have looked like. Still, I wondered would my mother had looked at me with the disdain Aunt Ruby showed me daily. Every time she looked at me, I saw the disgust and the shame in her eyes. Sometimes, it was as if I didn't have a single ally. My aunt was a famous artist, and regularly I would have to attend her art galleries with my siblings, her way of showing off, I always thought. My father was in real estate, having taken over my grandfather's business years ago, after he had married my mother.

My father often talked about the way he had met my Aunt, but sometimes on really special occasions he would tell me something about my mother, my real mother. Even though he advised me to think of Aunt Ruby as my mother, I couldn't help but wonder about her, and about the name she had given me. Almost as if she had known what would happen to her she had given me her maiden name for my middle name. Had my father loved my mother? I didn't know, all I knew was that he talked about my aunt as if she was the one great love of his life. I knew she was missing from mine, and secretly I visited the lone stone that simple read:

Gisselle Andreas

Beloved Mother, Wife and Sister.

I didn't understand why my mother had to die so young, and yet Pearl's was to live. Our lives, and everything around them served as a source of contention for Pearl and I. We were in the same grade and school and both carried high GPA's. One of us would become Valedictorian, and the other would become second. I was always coming in second, this time, I vowed I would be first. I hadn't been born first, hadn't been the daughter of my father's first love, always since the day I was born, I was coming in second.

I awoke on a hot sultry summer morning in our home in the Garden District, in New Orleans, Louisiana. I knew that half of this house rightly belonged to my mother and me, half of the fortune that my father and aunt had as well, though Daddy had made investments and Aunt Ruby had her art. My mother and my aunt had both been half-Cajun, half-Creole. My mother had been stolen from my grandmere and sold by my great grandpere to my grandpere. My aunt however had stayed in the Cajun world. I myself had never been to the bayou to find out what had made my aunt the woman she was today.

In all honesty although my aunt and I had the same shade of ruby red hair and the same emerald green eyes, we didn't get along. Anyone who didn't know the story assumed I was her child for I did look remarkably like her….and her twin sister. I looked much as my aunt and mother must have looked like when they were seventeen years old. Pearl and I attended a private school, we always had. I rolled out of bed and looked into my vanity mirror. I looked at my reflection and imagined it was my mother staring at me. What would she tell me, I wondered? I was sure there were differences as I had my father's nose and ears, but really who noticed those things? My father had told me that my mother was very concerned with her appearance, and from that day on, I had become concerned with mine. I looked at my eyebrows, making sure they weren't growing too close together and began to pluck the delicate red hairs from my eyebrows.

I heard Pearl in her room next doors. The funny thing was as I had been given my mother's old room, so had Pearl. Our mothers had had adjourning rooms from the time Aunt Ruby entered my mother's life. How a part of me wished she hadn't! When I was really little I used to that Ruby was my mother, but I could always see the shame in her face. She had stolen her sister's husband and she should be ashamed. Any time I did anything wrong or got into trouble, my aunt always told me, "You are so much like Gisselle!" It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her good, that I would rather be like my mother than her anyway. I often wondered how my mother would handle me. I finished my makeup and turned to my wardrobe choosing a particularly low and clinging emerald green top with a pair of clinging black pants. On my feet I wore a pair of black cowgirl boots and on my head a matching green cowgirl hat. I always made a statement.

I heard Pearl getting up and getting dressed. Even I had to admit that Pearl was beautiful, like some kind of Sleeping Beauty only she had everything she could possibly want, and more. She had brains, she had beauty, and she always won. The worst part she was always so nice about it that it would make me feel bad for even competing with her. When we were both younger we had been in dance classes, and always she would be the Briar Rose, the Cinderella while I was stuck playing one of her stepsisters. That's how I felt around Pearl, as if she had been made too perfect, and I had been made with one too many flaws.