Chapter One

As a child, I had a pretty hard life. My parents placed my brother on a pedestal and labeled me as the troubled child. I could understand why they thought this of me. As a kid, I jumped out of a second story window and couldn’t walk for a week straight and also cut across my thumb as a dare. Although I got into trouble quite a lot, I would say I was trying to enjoy my childhood, but no one seemed to agree. The day my mother died, I was doing somersaults in the kitchen and bruised my ribs and the day my father died, I had graduated from a private middle school not long after. During all this time, we housed a maid named Kiyo who seemed like the only person to pay me any mind. She would bring me little gifts or snacks with the salary we paid her and she said she’d done all this because my brother hadn’t needed it. For some reason I always felt guilty accepting these gifts from her in secret. After my brother sold off the house and my family's possessions, I lived out my days doing whatever odd jobs I could find until my brother, by the good graces of his own heart and certainly not his narcissism, gave me some money to do as I pleased with. The most plausible option was to put myself through school to which I succeeded at. Not long after my graduation, I accepted a position at middle school as a math teacher. On the morning of my departure Kiyo helped me on my way out. Neither my brother nor I could take her with us, but I was grateful that she had been the last person I’d seen before leaving to start my new life.