Bullied By My Alpha Stepbrother

Amelia Forbes

I waved briefly before turning away from him and heading up the front porch. When I stopped to look back, his car was gone.

I turned back toward the house and began my ascent up the stairs. Getting to the door, my feet standing on the old mat that said ‘Welcome!’ in bold letters, I took out my key from my backpack and unlocked the door. I and my Nana had separate keys for the house. Whenever I was in and she wasn’t, I was supposed to lock the door from inside. The same went for her whenever I wasn’t in.

I closed the door behind me and locked it, leaving the key in its hole.

During my first months of living with Nana, whenever I came back from school, the first thing I’d yell was, “Nana, I’m home!”, always forgetting that she was deaf and couldn’t hear me. I began to adjust to her being deaf though, and now, I couldn’t make that mistake again.

She wasn’t in the living room when I walked in, so I headed on into the kitchen, where she was most likely to be. On getting there, I saw her sitting at the edge of the kitchen table, kneading a dress, her favorite pastime.

She looked up from the cloth in her hands as soon as I walked into the kitchen.

Hi, Nana, I communicated through sign language, walking over to her to give her a kiss on her smooth, wrinkled forehead. Although Nana was already seventy, she was still very agile, which was pretty much the reason I was sent to live with her instead of being sent to some crappy foster home. Thankfully.

Hi, sweetie, she gestured when I pulled back. How was your day?

Stressful. I drew back the seat beside her and fell into it, holding my head in my hands. Jason was being an asshole again.Têxt © NôvelDrama.Org.

Yeah, she knew about Jason. It was hard for her not to find out, judging by the fact that most times, I came home from his bullying with a tear stained face.

What did he do this time? She wanted to know.

Leaning back, I unbuttoned Adrian’s jacket and faced her so she could see the stain on my shirt.

He’s basically the reason for this, I communicated.

I think I should come to your school one of these days. Give Jason a piece of my mind, she frowned.

No, I shook my head. It’s fine.

So, whose jacket is that? She asked after a short while of silence. I don’t think it’s yours.

No, it’s not. A friend of Jason gave it to me to cover up the stain, I answered.

A friend of Jason’s, she raised her grey eyebrows.

You don’t have to worry. He’s really nice and very different from Jason. He offers me a ride home on many occasions.

Okay, Nana shrugged. If you say so.

Yeah, I nodded, pushing back my seat and standing up. I had Jason’s homework to do and his previous history one to look through, like he’d told me to just before he went home, and certify why he’d gotten a B, saying, “I can’t have my machine malfunctioning now, can I?” as he walked away from me.

I gave Nana one more kiss on her cheek, this time asking her what we were having for dinner-I was looking forward to one of her wholesome meals. Telling me we were having chicken casserole made my stomach rumble in anticipation.

Picking up my backpack, I headed upstairs to my room. I opened the door and stepped into the small space I owned to myself, with it’s small bed, definitely not anything close to queen sized, small dresser and closet.

I plopped down on the bed and pulled my backpack onto my lap. Getting out Jason’s current homework as well as his previous history paper, I stared at them. Many times, I’d wanted to rip his homework all up and toss it into the trash can. Many times, I’d wished so bad that I could, but, just like me wishing Jason would stop bullying me, it was a dumb wish.

Sighing, I got out my own history homework, in which I’d gotten an A, and began comparing his with mine, word for word, trying to figure out what went wrong.

I noticed some errors on his paper. For one, I’d written the wrong spelling of a word. Secondly, I saw a question where I’d written an entirely offkey answer. I slapped my forehead, just realizing why it was this way. I was literally asleep while I was doing Jason’s history homework.

Shaking my head at the mistake for which I was both thumped and regarded as a machine, I set his history homework aside.

Let bygones be bygones, I said in my mind.

Kicking off my shoes and shrugging off Adrian’s jacket, I changed out of my school wear into a large t-shirt-it used to be my dad’s-and denim shorts. Then I gathered my stained clothing and Adrian’s jacket and went down to the laundry room to wash them.

I put them inside the laundry machine, scented the water with some lavender oil I found in Nana’s room and then set the timer.

All the while I waited for the clothes to be done, my mind worked on, much to my distaste, moving from one issue to another and finally settling on Jason. And Kimberly.

How was I to avoid them if they kept bumping into me at school, or finding a way to do that. And, once again, Kimberly had thrown a bowl at me, knowing it could injure me badly. Things were starting to get physical the more I looked at it. Even the way Jason spoke to me today seemed as if he was just about to beat me up.

I sighed. If things went on the way they did, I was most likely to end up in the clinic anytime soon.