Total pages in book: 40
Estimated words: 36387 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 182(@200wpm)___ 146(@250wpm)___ 121(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 36387 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 182(@200wpm)___ 146(@250wpm)___ 121(@300wpm)
It was a struggle learning to fit into the new dynamic, especially when dad, in order to make them feel welcome, started pushing me away. I think that’s when the eating for comfort began really. Food was my only solace, the only thing that gave me joy.
Too bad the one thing I could rely on wasn’t so good for me. Or maybe it was my choices. But what six year old is going to choose broccoli or asparagus sprouts instead of a nicely iced cupcake? None I tell you.
I’d gained twenty pounds that first year and never lost it. So therefore I was the brunt of many a joke all throughout my school life. And I shudder to think even now, had I not had my dad’s money behind me, how much more horrible that whole experience would’ve been. And it was plenty bad.
But because of my aunt, I’d learned to stand up for myself if even a little bit and had taken to speaking like her. In that brash, straightforward manner.
And maybe that’s why my stepmom had talked dad into not letting me come here again after my fourteenth birthday. I think that was the first time I’d stood up to her when she got after me about my weight.
It was a devastating blow, not being able to come here, but I got it. I couldn’t be fat, and bold. Or maybe it was the fact that for the first time I was learning to be comfortable in my own skin and we couldn’t have that.
Nope, for her, it was better for me to spend my summers at some camp where their goal was to starve me to thinness which never worked, because that twenty pounds was waiting for me back home within the first few bites of whatever real food I ate.
Whatever her reasons, it was a great disservice to me and the older woman who’d come to look forward to those visits as much as I had. In the ensuing years, some of her teachings had fallen off, but not all.
I kept the mouth and the sassy attitude and they have come in handy more times than I can count. It’s because of her teachings that more of my smiles are genuine instead of the fake ones of my youth.
I’m not all the way there in the confidence stakes yet but I’m a hell of a lot farther than I would’ve been if not for Aunt Nell. And now she’d left me my safe haven. It still brings tears to my eyes.
In the middle of my trip down memory lane I heard the sound of a chainsaw starting up and huffed out a breath. If there was one thing that was bound to put a damper on my day it would be the egomaniac next door.
I didn’t doubt for a second that he was behind this early morning disturbance. Who else could it be? Everyone else on the block was about my aunt’s age and tended to stay to themselves behind closed doors. So it could only be the neighborhood pest at work again.
I’d taken to calling him that because each time I saw him I felt bothered and annoyed. It wasn’t any one thing he did, other than the fact that he was breathing.
It’s unfair I know, and I guess as someone who’d been the brunt of other people’s ignorance I should know better, but there was just something about that guy….Grrrrrrr.
I flung the toasty warm covers back and climbed out of bed, going to my window to see what the pain in the ass was up to now. That sound was mighty close and I had a sneaky suspicion…
My mouth hit the floor and I almost jumped out of the window in my haste to stop him. “That fiend.” I grabbed my old ratty robe from the chair where I’d thrown it the night before and shoved my feet into my bedroom slippers that had seen better days and hotfooted it down the stairs and out the backdoor.
He didn’t even hear it slam over the noise of the chainsaw which he wielded from the top of the ladder he’d climbed to assault my damn tree. I was tempted, sorely tempted to knock his ass clean off his perch, but the thought of jail held me back. I had shit to do.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Our houses were literally ten feet apart and though once inside we had our privacy, there were some things that were shared between the two properties.
My beloved tree, which I’d skinned my knees on more times than I could count as a child visiting my aunty, was one of those things. Though the gargantuan trunk was on my property, some of the branches reached over to his.
He looked down at me through the protective goggles he wore, so I wasn’t sure where he was looking exactly. Knowing his lecherous ass he was probably trying to look down the neck of my robe.