Chatpter 29: Memories

Disclaimer: I do not own Vampire Academy

Okay Okay don't kill me. I know I said I'd update yesterday, but I was bad and stayed out way too late. Sorry for the late update, but I made it longer just for you.

TPOV

"Christian what the hell!" I cried as my brother came barging into my bedroom without knocking late on Christmas day.

I'd been lying on my bed wallowing in self pity yet again. As usual Rose had gotten all of the attention when mom and dad decided to let her get her license. I wondered briefly how they were going to swing that. They must have gotten fake documentation for her. I know they'd been trying for a long time. It was one of the reasons we never had any money. I'll bet they spent their life savings just so she could drive and get a job and go to college. They never did any of that for me.

They'd practically forced me out of the house, sending me away to school and made me take out loans to pay for it. How rude was that? I was their first born and their only real daughter, yet I continued to be punished for something I had no control over. Sometimes I wished Rose had never come into our lives or that mom would have left her on the side of the road that day we found her at the mall.

I'll have to admit though, back then I loved the idea of having a sister so when mom and dad sat me down and explained why I had to pretend that Rose was my real sister and I could never ever tell anyone how we found her, I was ecstatic. I used to dress her up and play dolls with her and we'd play house, things that Christian wouldn't play with me because he was a boy. Then it happened though. I was too young at the time to understand much of what was going on behind the scenes, but looking back on it, I realized just how much danger having Rose around had brought for us.

Shortly after we'd brought her home my parents began acting funny like someone was watching us. They were always paranoid and we stopped going out of the house. They even refused to let us start school when September came around.

I watched anxiously one day as they packed up a bunch of stuff in boxes and drove away with it. I always wondered what happened to that stuff. When I asked what they were doing, my mother told me we were moving, but I couldn't tell anyone. She then packed the three of us up in the van and drove us over to Grandma's. I remember wondering why we were suddenly living at Grandma's, but it was fun and she baked us cookies and took us to the park and let us stay up late watching movies so what did I care? I was having a blast.

A little over a month passed and Mom and Dad started taking the boxes they'd packed and driving them places. Shortly after they told us we were moving to a new house. It was thirty minutes across town and it had all new furniture. I remember Christian crying and throwing a fit because he didn't have his old race car bed with his batman sheets. I noticed that nothing in our house was the same and that a lot of things were missing like photo albums and portraits that used to be on the walls, knick knacks and some of our clothes. My bed was new and mom made let me pick out brand new bedding and curtains.

When I'd questioned them on what had happened to all our old stuff, they sat us down and explained that there had been a fire at our old house and everything had been lost. Christian cried because all his toys were gone. Rose didn't seem to have any sort of reaction, but I was pissed. All of my things were gone too, but I was too old to cry like a baby about it. It just made me mad.

A few months after we moved Dad got a new job at the new high school. We never saw any of our old friends and the only family members we saw were Grandma and Aunt Celeste. Mom said it was because Rose needed to be protected from the bad people.

It was around that time that Rose began acting funny. She's been perfectly normal for the first few months she was with us, but after the move to the new house she began having fits in the middle of the night. I remember waking up to her screaming and crying out in a language I couldn't understand. Mom and Dad were really worried when it didn't stop. It only got worse and worse and when they tried to comfort her she'd scream bloody murder like someone was killing her. I remembered doctors coming in and out at all hours of the day or night trying to figure out what was wrong with her.

After a while she calmed down. When we were older though I realized she had no memories from the time before we moved into the new house. She only spoke English after that having forgotten her native tongue. My brother didn't remember a lot of his childhood either, but his memory loss was for a different reason.

A few months after we moved mom and dad had to go somewhere and left me in charge of Christian and Rose. Rose was throwing one of her fits and I was trying to calm her down. I came out of my room just in time to witness Christian falling down the stairs. He'd decided he wanted to be superman so he'd taken a sheet and tied it around his neck thinking he'd be able to fly down the long steep staircase. I watched in horror as he got a running start and took a flying leap head first down the stairs. He cried out as he hit his head numerous times before landing with a sickening thud at the bottom. With a screaming Rose in my arms, I flew down the stairs to where his little body was lying covered in blood. He was unconscious. I put Rose down and flew for the phone calling 911 and then trying my parent's cell phone.

When I came back to where Christian was Rose was lying quietly next to him with her little arms wrapped around his bloody body. She was singing to him. I didn't understand the words, but it sounded like a lullaby. I was too freaked out to touch him. He looked dead. The paramedics showed up two minutes before our parents and everything after that was a blur. Dad grabbed Rose and we all piled in the car. Mom had gone with Christian in the ambulance.

Because of his hyper anemia he'd lost a lot of blood. He's suffered some internal bleeding in his brain and was rushed into emergency surgery to relieve the swelling. I had never felt so scared in my life. I just kept thinking if Rose hadn't been making such a fuss, then I would have been able to stop him before he did it. It was all her fault. In fact from that day on everything was her fault and I began to resent her.

Christian eventually came out of his coma, but with severe memory loss that would probably never come back. He barely remembered us and as the years went on he and Rose became inseparable. I felt like the odd man out as far as siblings went so I decided that Rose needed to pay for wrecking our family. I did everything I could to make her unhappy and to sabotage he. I did bad things around the house like flooding the bathroom and stealing mom's expensive jewelry and putting it in Rose's room and then telling on her.

Nothing worked though. Mom never got mad at Rose or punished her for any of the things I did to try to set her up. She just smiled and told Rose that if there was anything she wanted to borrow, she needed to ask first.

If I had been caught doing any of those things, I would have been grounded, spanked and sent to bed right after dinner, but no not their precious little Rosie. She could do no wrong in their eyes and it was still like that. When she and Mia had taken my parent's car for a joy ride to Canada when they were fourteen, I doubted they would punish her, but then they used that as an excuse for her not to get her license and it gave me some sort of sick satisfaction.

Dad had lit into me at Thanksgiving this year after I'd dumped the gravy all over Rose's precious delicate skin. He told me that if I didn't start accepting the fact that Rose was part of our family and always would be then I would no longer be welcome in their house. I'd gone straight back to school crying my eyes out. How could they choose her over me? I was their flesh and blood. I decided the only thing I could do was to try and suck it up and be nice to her so I'd made that photo frame in an attempt to show my parents I was trying.

I hated that no matter what I did to her Rose was always so forgiving. She never tried to do mean things back. She wasn't even going to tell on me about the gravy, but then my stupid brother ratted me out choosing Rose over me. I got that he had no idea that they weren't blood related, but it still irked me that he chose to defend her instead of me. So when he came knocking on my door, I was a little worried.

"What do you want?" I asked looking up from the magazine I'd been reading.

"Answers," he said with stern face closing the door behind him. Uh oh this could not be good.

"About what?" I asked sighing heavily.

"Did our house really burn down?" he questioned skeptically. I tried to maintain a straight face, but in reality I was shitting myself scared. What did he know and why was he asking about this all of the sudden?

"Yes, why?" I asked.

"I found boxes of old baby pictures and things up in the attic. If those things were supposed to have burned in the fire, then why are they hidden away in a big dusty crate up there?" Shit that was a damn good question.

My eyes widened. So that is what happened to the boxes mom and dad had packed up. I always wondered where they went and what they had packed in there.

I shrugged trying to act casual. "Those things were probably at Grandma's you know duplicate albums and such."

"Well why were there only two? Rose's album is missing. All I could find was this one photo." He pulled out an old photo. It had to have been taken that day we brought her home because she was wearing that dirty old dress and had that sad little tattered rabbit in her hands.

I shrugged. "You know the third kid always gets jipped on that kind of thing. It's always fun for the first kid and then you were a boy so you were their first born son, but Rose was just the third in line. Plus she came along so fast after you that mom was probably too busy to start one," I fibbed.

He looked at me uncertainly. I prayed to God he's buy my story. All I needed was to spill the beans to him and mom and dad would certainly exile me for the rest of my life. Plus, I didn't want him to hate me for keeping the secret from him all these years. I hated lying to him, but it was for his own good. He didn't need the burden of keeping all the secrets and lies that I had been for years. It was a lot of pressure and sometime I thought about just blurting things out and getting it out in the open. However, I had enough sense to know that it would only bring more danger and pain upon us than anything. Mom and dad would be furious with me and I didn't want that so I remained silent. And as much as I resented Rose, I didn't want her dead. I didn't want the bad people to find her because of my big mouth.

"Well then why did they tell us that the photos were lost?" he asked, which was a reasonable question.

"They probably forgot they were up there. They just moved a ton of shit from Grandma's and they had three kids to deal with and dad got a new job, plus all the money it had to have cost to start over again."

I really hoped he wouldn't ask anything more. I'd become a really good liar over the years, but he was smart and I didn't want him catching on. He was already too close to finding out the truth. As I'd gotten older, I'd begun to suspect that my parents had purposely set fire to the house to cover their tracks from whoever was looking for Rose. I never dared ask, but I was pretty sure that is what had transpired. Knowing that those albums were up there in the attic just proved my theory had been correct. Yet another reason I resented Rose. She'd turned my parents into arsonists.

"Why the hell don't I remember any of this?" he asked. I could tell he was trying desperately to put the pieces together, but he was missing vital information. Just a few small words and I could help him figure it out, but I just couldn't.

"Crissy, it was a rough time for all of us and you and Rose were so young. You shouldn't worry so much. It's been a long time and you guys are doing just fine now, so relax will you? You'll get gray hair and wrinkles before you're twenty at the rate you're going," I teased trying to steer him away from the topic. He was my brother and I loved him and I didn't want to cause him anymore pain.

I could see him wrestling internally trying to figure out if I was telling the truth and if he should drop it.

"Why do you hate Rose so much?" he asked. Oh brother, this was not going well.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and patted the spot next to me.

"I don't hate Rose." That was true. I didn't hate her. I blamed her for everything that had gone wrong in my life and I resented that she came into our family, but I didn't really hate her.

"Why are you so damn mean to her all the time?" he asked.

I shook my head. "You're a guy, you wouldn't understand," I told him hoping he'd leave it alone.

"Try me," he said crossing his arms over his chest stubbornly.

I huffed in annoyance. He never could leave well enough alone.

"She's the baby Christian. She's always gotten all the attention and I'm jealous. You know Mom and Dad favor her don't you?"

"Well yea, I guess, but still. Rose has never done anything to you and you keep doing these awful things to her."

"Well Christian it's time you learned a thing or two about women. They can be catty and mean and stubborn. I don't mean to do those things. It's just that when I'm around her I get so jealous that I can't think straight. I mean come on, guys are always drooling over her, she's got tons of friends and now she's dating Dimitri. I can't catch a break. I haven't had a boyfriend in two years and when I do they turn out to be pigs."

He grimaced as I said that. "What?" I asked.

"Do you really give blow jobs for twenty bucks?" he asked. My eyes widened. Adrian must have spilled the beans about what I said to him at Thanksgiving.

"Ugh," I groaned. "I was just trying to piss Rose off," I told him. I might be a lot of things, but a whore wasn't one of them. Sure I'd been with guys before, but only ones that I was dating and that I liked.

"So you don't go around charging?" he asked looking hopeful.

"No, God you guys really think I'm some sort of hooker?" I gasped not believing my own brother would think that about me. I should have figured though. Everyone was always so willing to believe the worst of me.

He shrugged. "Well you did say that to him."

"I know, but I was kidding. I'm not a whore," I tried assuring him.

"Good, I'm really glad to hear that," he said. He looked really relieved.

"So what do you say we have one of our campouts like we used to?" I asked referring to when we were younger and we all dragged our sleeping bags into the living room, watched old Christmas movies, ate ice cream sundaes and slept in front of the tree.
"Sounds like a plan," he said forgetting all about why he came up here, thank God.

"Should we get Rose?" he asked.

I nodded. I really was going to try to be nicer to her. After all it wasn't her fault that her crazy mother had abandoned her. I had to keep thinking of it like that. As much as I resented her for taking away my mother's attention from me, at least I knew my mother loved me enough to keep me around. Her mother had just dumped her off with strangers in a shopping mall.

"Do you think she's done sucking face with her new boy toy?" I asked with a smirk. I had left them downstairs a little over an hour ago.

He made a face. "Don't remind me. There's something about that guy I just don't like," he said. I couldn't understand that. As far as I could tell Dimitri Belikov was a polite, handsome, upstanding guy. Once again that is why I was jealous of her.

"You get the sleeping bags and I'll go get Rose," I told him. He nodded in agreement.

I knocked on Rose's door and there was no answer, so I opened it anyways. She was lying on her back on her bed with her IPOD playing.

"Rose," I called loudly. I think I scared her because she jumped about a mile.

"Hey Tasha, you scared the hell out of me," she said removing her ear buds.

"Did you need something?" she asked.

"Uh yea, Chrissy and I were just going downstairs to have one of our campouts like we used to. Are you in?" I asked.

She eyed me carefully before responding. "You really want me to come?"

"Sure, I mean it wouldn't be tradition if you weren't there." Her face curved into a small smile.

"Sounds like fun. Let me get into my PJ's and I'll meet you guys down there."

I left her to her business and went to change as well.

Twenty minutes later we were all snuggled up in our sleeping bags. Rose had made chocolate sundaes and Christian popped some pop-corn while I found our old copy of "A Christmas Story".

We laughed and mimicked the familiar lines like we used to before falling asleep beside the tree.

So how about that? The Ozera's burned down their own house. Do you think Christian will be placated by his sister's lies? Who feels sorry for Tasha? Up next a wedding, some more about Avery and Adrian and soon we will hear from Abe. Please review.