My closet is not full of skeletons.
My soul is.
So… I’m not easy to live with or be friends with.
But Rory––Aurora––likes me the way I am, even when I spin at a destructive speed, dismantling everything in my path like a tornado.
She likes me drunk on the dark of my soul, taking unpredictability to a different level, and removing every ounce of normality from my contrived existence.
She is unique in that regard.
Sunk in thought, I trace the length of the freshly squeezed lemonade, wrapped in condensation, with my finger, studying the world contained in the tulip-shaped glass, the bottom muddy with pulp and granulated sugar, left unstirred per my request.
Nona is fully aware of every pinch of weirdness percolating the minds of my five alter egos.
Like Rory, she never questions it.
She’s also paid to keep her mouth shut, and her loyalty is aging better than my body, but this is about more than hush money to put up with my disruptive nature.
Her life grows around mine like matted strands of ivy crawling up the walls of a dilapidated house.
She’s been with me from the beginning.
Much younger back then, she held me in her arms as I was entering this insane world and becoming part of my dysfunctional family.
Life and death linked hands that day and danced as I––a tiny body, and a pure new soul to be damned––expanded the Gallo family.
It was a hot summer night in August––a Thursday, to be exact––when I stepped into this world at around nine in the evening.
Three more hours, and the wall clock to my left will mark that time of day, closing the circle.
Twenty-one years have passed since I was born.
I’m twenty-one today, andhestill thinks I’m too young.
It was a sweltering, humid day in New York––the entire month of August was––and my mother left nothing to chance.
Her hair, makeup, manicure, and pedicure looked impeccable, done by the best beautician on Long Island.
All her life, she kept her hair long like mine.
Hers was a lighter shade of brown, while mine looked like dark-roast coffee beans from the start.
The genes responsible for her light-gray eyes collided with the ones dictating my father’s dark-green gaze, and I ended up with two popsicles between my dark eyelashes, shifting their color like the sea kissing the tip of Italy’s boot every day.
She always wore custom-tailored clothes or brands altered to fit her growing bump.
You wouldn’t catch her wearing anything off the sales rack, and I bet my freshly squeezed lemonade that she wanted sex from my father up to the moment she was due to give birth.
Word is––staff likes to gossip––that my father didn’t fall for her tricks.
She liked his women to be voluptuous on certain parts of their bodies, but a protuberance around the midriff wasn’t one of them.
So my mother wore her best clothes that day and almost had a cigarette in the morning to assert her never lost independence and nonchalantly show to the world, and mainly him, that a baby would never change her life.
Despite being accurate about the latter, her failed efforts only mangled her existential crisis and hardened her soul.
All was in vain, as my father didn’t want to participate in the ceremony that day.
