One night, when I was about twenty-one my brother, Charlie, who was fifteen months younger than I, and a bunch of his hoodlum friends, were having a party at our house. My parents were vacationing in Florida. I was pretty much there to supervise and make sure nothing happened to any of my mother’s stuff. The house had an open floor plan with a small kitchen and an island that separated the kitchen, living room, and dining room.
We were all sitting around the table having conversation and drinking; I believe the game we were playing was quarters, you know, that game where everybody sits around the table taking turns bouncing a quarter into a glass of beer. Every time you get the quarter into the glass of beer you have to drink the beer and remove the quarter. Everybody always seemed to get pretty messed up from this game.
Andy sat at the other end of the table from me. He was a tall, skinny, almost dorky kind of guy. He was one of my brother’s friends, and he was picking on me.
,
“Raggy,” he taunted. That was what my brother's friends called me. “You’re a bitch, and you should go hang out with your own friends. That is, if you have any of your own friends.”
He pissed me off so badly that I picked up a beer from the table and threw it at him.
“I hate you, Andy, you are an ass,” I said to him.
He could not believe what I had just done. The look on his face was priceless. Meanwhile everyone around the table was laughing so hard. Little Fella, a tiny shit with black hair and little weasel looking eyes, was rolling on the floor, because I actually stood up for myself and fought back instead of sitting there and taking the bullshit that I always had to endure from those boys. Then there was Raylean, Andy’s girlfriend. She got mad at Andy for being mean to me and walked out of the house. He didn’t seem to care that she left, because the only thing they ever did was fight. Then, on the other side of the table, standing over towards the kitchen, were Matt and Charlie.
Everybody though what had just happened was so funny, except my brother. He was so angry at me, and I mean he was outraged. Charlie didn’t like it when I picked on his friends or was mean to them; he put them before me all the time. The blond curly mop of hair began to bounce up and down, and his big sea-green eyes popped out of his head. The veins in the sides of his neck began to pull and pop out; this was what happened to him when he was angry. He came at me from across the table, knocked over his chair and started to chase me around the bar, screaming at me.
“Renee you’re a bitch, and I am going to knock the shit out of you!”
“Don’t you touch me, I am going to call mom,” I screamed back.
“Go ahead; I am not scared of her. She won’t do anything anyways.”
When I finally reached my bedroom, I went in and locked my door.
All of a sudden there was a loud sound as though someone was smashing something and I heard my brother screaming.
“Open this fucking door, or I will smash it down!”
All of a sudden, there he was my brother coming through my bedroom door. I would not open it for him, so he knocked it down. He ripped the thing from its hinges and came in after me. He had a cigarette in his hand when he grabbed a hold of me. He was in such a rage by then, he slapped me hard across the face and threw me down on my waterbed. I was so upset. When I finally stopped crying from the pain he caused me, I went out into the other room and kicked all of his friends out of the house.
“Find some other house party, and destroy their shit.”
I called my parents and told them what happened, and my mother told me to stay away from him and not to fight with him anymore.
Well, all we ever did was fight when he was around, because he thought he was everybody’s boss. What he says went, you know? Well I showed him. He and his friends all left and went to party someplace else, and I was home alone with nobody. I hated being home by myself; it was so lonely and scary there. The darkness on my dead end, country road was like being in the woods with no moonlight to guide you. It is a good thing for electricity. So I cuddled up and watched television for the rest of the night and suffered by myself.
After my parents came home from Florida, I was cleaning my room and changing my bed. Then I realized there was a cigarette burn in my sheets from the head of Charlie’s cigarette that night. I was so mad because Mom had just bought them for me for Christmas. They were blue and gray with a splash pattern with hints of pink. My mother also made me matching curtains and pillows.
“Mom," I screamed, "look at what he did to my sheets! He ruined them. I can’t ever have anything without that idiot destroying my stuff.”
“Renee, don’t be so upset. You can hide it by tucking them in.”
“That is not the point, Mom, I can’t have anything, and it's not fair.”
Those sheets really met a lot to me because she made them for me. And you know what? He did not even get into trouble for ripping my door off the hinges. But he did get into trouble for smoking in the house and hitting me. My parents did not smoke or allow it in our home. There were no exceptions to the rule. It smells, and my mom would not stand for it.
“If I ever catch you smoking in my house again,“ she told Charlie,”You will wash every wall, and you will have to find some other place to live.”
He just walked away with his little macho strut and his blond curls bouncing around his shoulders. Without a care in the world. That was the thing, he never cared, at least not for me. It was always this way until one night in 1998 when Charlie and five of his friends were killed in a car crash.
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