Here's the next chapter hope you like it and thanks to my two reviewers for reading my story and I hope you will continue to read it! Please do review!
I slammed the front door shut behind me and entered my home, my parent's small apartment in a big apartment complex on the slummier eastern outskirts of town. We had lived there since I was born and it was ok I guess, as a child I had loved it, having no brothers or sisters the playground outside the houses full of kids were where I got raised by the older children and looked up to by the younger. Now there weren't many children left in the neighbourhood, we had all grown up more or less.
As I walked over to my room the familiar smell of my dad's hair grease and my mum's cheap perfume mixed with the distinct smell of liquor and cigarettes. I figured my parents had had a party yesterday, they often did.
I got along fine with my parents better then most kids on the east side did I guess. They had been so young when I was born just fifteen. I had figured out long ago that I wasn't planned and probably not even really wanted, but I had always felt if not exactly loved by them then at least respected and liked.
They had done their best with me and with each other and for that I was eternally grateful to them, they were both still young, dad just turned thirty-two a week ago and I didn't have a problem with them partying, we just stayed out of each others personal lives as much as we could.
I loved the fact that they'd never forbid me to do anything or punished me for staying out all night or not doing y homework. The first night I got home drunk my dad just helped me to bed and my mom put a bucket next to it for me to throw up in and then they let me be, they didn't even wake me up for school the next morning.
All those small things made me like and respect them as persons but I can't really say that respected them as parents or that I felt loved and wanted at home, but I was aware of the fact that many of the other kids growing up on this side of town gladly would change places with me and that made me feel if not lucky then at least content with my situation.
I scanned my messy room for some clean clothes and once I had found some I stuffed them in a backpack and started picking up some makeup from the desk under the windowsill. Standing there I looked out the window at the playground below, it was totally empty. The wind made the swings move back and forth slowly giving the view a ghostly quality. I felt a chill slowly creep up my body and I removed my eyes from the swings. Instead I stood there watching as the leafs started whirling up against the sky feeling that the autumn really had come, the winds were changing and suddenly I felt that it wasn't just the winds.
Everything seemed to be changing. I didn't feel like a kid anymore, I even felt older and more mature then my parents sometimes. I turned abruptly from the window when I heard my mom's footsteps from the door.
"Oh, it's just you baby" she said yawning "Danny thought it was a burglar so he sent me" she raised her eyebrows and laughed a little.
She had always called me baby and somehow that made me a bit irritated, I knew she didn't really love me like a mother should love her child and that nick name was mocking even the thought about a loving mother- daughter relationship. She walked over to me the floor squeaking under her bare feet.
"So what'ya doing today baby?" she asked touching my long hair tentatively, her breath smelled of beer and vodka but I was used to it, I always associating those scents with my mom.
"Going back to Curly's" I answered walking back to my desk and grabbing some of the makeup I had been sorting putting it in the back pack. I heard my mom yawn again behind me and I rolled my eyes at her hangover thinking bitterly that she deserved it.
"Alright baby, call if ya need anything or come by" she said and smiled faintly at me, I felt my lips curling into a smile against my will. I had always had a hard time being angry or bitter about my parents, mostly they just left me not feeling anything, just numbon a good day.
Walking up the Shepard's front lawn I was greeted with screaming and shouting from inside, I could make out Curly's, his mother's and another male's voices through all the racket but I couldn't hear what they were arguing about. I tentatively opened the door and stepped in.
In front of the stairs Curly stood holding his cheek with one hand glaring furiously at his mother who stood in front of him her hand still raised from slapping him. She was a beautiful woman with exotic dark curly hair and wild grey eyes but the way she was staring at her son I was almost scared of her.
"I will not have that kind of talk in this house Curly" she said calmly but angry her eyes still fixed on her son who was now clenching and unclenching his jaws while boring his eyes into the man standing by his mother's side.
I recognised his step dad Leonard, a corpulent middle-aged man with yellow fingernails that couldn't keep his eyes of off any female that was in the same room as he, whether it was his wife or his stepdaughter or me.
"Fuck it Miriam, I will not have this fucking hood in the house!" he screamed at Curly "And when that other fucking JD gets out he's out of here too" he was looking at his wife now and I saw her eyes flashing at him.
Perhaps she wasn't the best at showing it but she loved her kids and she wouldn't kick them out even though she acted like she didn't care most of the time she really did care. I bitterly thought of my mom and how she was the exact opposite, thinking about it like that I couldn't decide who was better of, me or Curly?
"I'm sick of taking care of that mother fucking Shepard's kids!" he was really upset now, gesturing madly with his arms "Ain't my fault you couldn't keep you legs closed"
Curly was furious now practically spitting fire as he took the man by the collar of his shirt and pushed him backwards a few steps. "Don't talk to my mother like that you bastard!" he spitted out between his teeth. Lenny snarled but soon got control of the situation being a lot bigger then Curly and preyed his hands of pushing Curly hard against the wall making a picture fall down hitting Curly in the head. The air was knocked out of him and he tried to breathe while rubbing his forehead were a small trickle of blood was seeping out of a small cut.
"Don't you ever touch my son again you…you…" she couldn't think of anything to say as she looked at her husband poking him with a threatening finger in his chest "This is my house; don't forget that or you can just get the hell out of here!"
"As if I want to stay here anyway with a bitchy whore and her bastards" he retorted and turned around snorting angrily, he walked briskly past me not even seeing me while he mumbled;
"I can do so much better then you you slut"
I was a bit shocked at the whole scenario but walked over to Curly where he was now sitting on the first step of the stairs touching the cut in his head carefully, his eyes were still flashing with anger but they were a bit dazed and thoughtful.
His mother was standing next to him watching him but not really seeing him, she seemed to be deep in thought too.
"If only Tim were here" she stated in a muffled voice as she sighed and walked off.
I saw Curly's shoulders tense at that and I immediately knew that the argument had something to do with his brother. I saw his chest rise as he took a deep breath and stood up to face me, all resemblance of feelings were gone from his face and left was only his hard and cold mask with the empty eyes and the bitter smirk. He wiped off the small amount of blood from his forehead with the arm of his hooded sweatshirt.
"You feel like partying Stacey?" he asked as he threw an arm around my shoulders drawing me close to him. He smelled so good a mixture of cigarettes, hair grease and lemons. I nodded knowing he wouldn't rest until he was passed out drunk tonight anyway.
"Sure baby" I answered shrugging of the uneasy and dishonest feeling I got by using that nick name for Curly, after all I wasn't like my mother I didn't use that name unlike a really did love someone. I swallowed the growing lump in my throat and followed Curly out the door and into the cold autumn night.