Hi. My name's Chloe. I am...well, i'm just a girl, really. Nothing more, nothing less. The comments i get most often is 'girl next door', 'she's such a nice girl' and 'her parents must be so proud'. Which i hate, of course.
It all makes me sound rather....goody two-shoes and sickeningly perky and one of those girls ya just wanna slap cos they're too smiley and well-behaved. I hate those kind of girls.
Even though, i know i'm one of them.
I wish i could be different. I wish i could be cool, and confident, rock some rebellious tattoos or get myself a piercing that would give my parents a heart attack. I wish i could turn heads like those girls in the skin-tight dresses and high heels.

But thats just not me. Never has been. I mean sure, i like playing around with makeup, and i can scrub up pretty well when i make an effort but i'm at my most comfortable when i'm in my grubby jeans and Converse kicks, hanging out at a skate park (though i suck at actually skating and most resemble a newborn giraffe when i attempt anything even close to a skilled kickturn).
My mum called me a tomboy. And i guess i am. With a slight, girly edge. I've tried to be different, but the one time my best mate, Leslie, put some false eyelashes on me, it felt like a couple of horny spiders were attacking my eyelids. It was not a pleasant experience.
I couldn't even keep the damn things on, i mean, how DO you get them to actually stick?

Mascara and a flash of lippy is about all i use. Maybe a bit of moisturiser in the morning.
I mean, it is important to look after your skin.
My mum drummed that into me early on. Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves. Lol. She loved saying stuff like that. You know those odd sayings that you have no idea where they originated from. All that glitters is not gold, was another one. What does that even mean? Nonsense. Utter nonsense.

But that was her all over. She had a real good sense of humor, y'know. Loved to mess about, goof off and make me or my dad laugh. Though it rarely worked on dad. He was always sober as a judge, rarely smiled. Maybe he was just a serious guy, just born that way. I could never understand that though. Nor how someone like him could have fallen for a carefree fool like my mum.
I wish i could have known them when they were my age, would have been interesting to see the love story unfold. Because all i saw was a facade of normality and happy home life covering up a stagnant, decomposing sense of unhappiness between them. They tried to keep up appearances when me or Max was around but you could see it. How far apart they'd drifted.
Towards the end, my dad didn't even try to hide it. Sometimes i wonder if he actually started to despise my mother, the way she was, the loose, easygoing way she tried to parent me. Which, in his mind, was the wrong way to parent.
He ran our house with a rod of iron. Which was more than three-quarters of the reason why Max went off the rails so splendidly, i think.
He just got tired of it. The constant 'do this, go there, study hard, play harder, save for your future. Plan, plan, homework, study, school, success, success, success' that was drummed into us for years. I just did as i was told, kept my head down, studied hard in the hope that dad would let up a little if i showed him i was on the same page. But he never did.
I think it made him happy though, even if he did keep pushing me to advance past the straight A's i got in school, the commendations for 'exceptional academic work'. The top was never enough for him. Even when i hit the ceiling of what i could accomplish at school, he kept pushing me to go fiurther.
Join the maths club, the chess club, the spelling bee.
I did manage to wiggle out of all three of these coercions on the argument that i didn't want my schoolwork to suffer. In reality, the idea of joining any of these clubs bored me to tears. I wanted to play football (even if i was terrible at it), or paint backdrops for the drama club.

Or better yet, join the debate team. Okay, the last, i did actually do. And yes, it did impress my father.
But it had the added appeal of actually being quite fun. I love a good debate. Of varying subjects from the serious 'is the earth actually round or is it a conspiracy to bedazzle the flat-earthers, to the bizarre 'if a zombie bites a vampire, does the vampire become a zombie or does the zombie turn nosferatu?'.
That debate was added by me. Yes, i know. Geek. Major geek. I love supernatural stuff. Conspiracy theories, superhero movies, pop-culture references and anything thats a bit lame or the hobby/interest of the types of guys who live in their mothers basements.
Thats me.
Except i'm a girl. A tomboyish girl. A straight-A student, tomboyish girl. Who has a heart of gold, a good sense of humor and who loves eating fish and chips on the beach at sunset.

Jesus. I sound like i'm filling out a dating profile. Which...i am totally not, by the way.
Ugh. Dating. Haven't really done much of that. Haven't really had the time, with school, 'planning for my future' and doing whatever my father wants me to do.
None of which leaves time for, or involves anything to do with boys, parties, or anything constituting actual fun or teenage rights of passage.
I mean...smoking? Nope. Never done it. Drugs? Are you kidding? My father would pitch a fit. Staying out after curfew? Hell no. I'd be grounded for months and then i wouldn't be able to go to the Debate Club, and that would be a travesty. Without me they'd be stuck on flat-earth theories and Scientology comspiracies FOREVER! Without me, there'd be no random, strange questions to break up the monotony.

I have been kissed, though. Twice actually. I did manage to sneak that, at least, into the teenage experience. My first was Bobby Moore (no relation to the famous West Ham United footballer in the sixties and seventies). He was playing with a Tarzan action figure in the sandpit at primary school. I had the Jane. Together we fought battles against evil corporations trying to tear down the rainforest and kill our gorilla family.
He kissed me on the lips and left sand in my mouth on my ninth birthday. A week later he moved to South Africa with his parents.

The second boy i kissed was called Jacob, an american exchange student, who came to my school towards the end of my fourteenth year. And to my disappointment, he looked nothing like the hot werewolf in Twilight. Instead, he was a pale, brown-haired boy with black-rimmed glasses who liked Andy Warhol art and Led Zeppelin. Music that i seemed to like too.
Though i'm still not sure wether my affection for him increased my liking for the LZ or whether i was a genuine fan. I only know a couple of their songs, the most famous ones, so i guess the latter.
He joined the debate club two months after he arrived and we were working on a list of new questions for it when he suddenly leaned over and gave me a peck on the cheek. I remember freezing on the spot, a warm, cloudy feeling filling me, my mouth going dry, my eyes involuntarily meeting his. He smiled and i felt my insides turn to goo. Next thing i know, his lips were on mine and i was experiencing the most amazing kiss that up until then, only movies and songs had spoken about.

We didn't speak when we finally came up for air. Then, or after. We just seemed to click and stay stuck together, our eyes meeting across the school corridors, hands held in private moments, a silent understanding of the connection we had passing between us every time we were alone together. He didn't tell anyone. And neither did i.
My heart broke when he returned home to the US.
The day he left, he cornered me in our usual spot in the debate room, after everyone had gone and he stared at me with concerned eyes as mine began to prick with tears. He knew how i felt without me even saying it, and he leaned toward me and whispered in my ear; never a lip is curved with pain that can't be kissed into smiles again.

At the time, i had no idea where he'd gotten that from and convinced myself he'd spoken from the heart. For me. I found it years later while browsing the internet, and learned that it's a quote by <span id="dscexpitem_-495899725_7"><span data-bm="79">Francis Brett Hart, an american short story writer and poet. It's a quote that i still love to this day.
He kissed me gently after he whispered that in my ear and then he was gone, leaving only a trace of his scent behind to taunt me. I think i was already in love with him. I think a part of me still is.

It's been years since iv'e seen him but even now, i sometimes think of him and wonder what he's doing, if he ever thinks of me, remembers our time together. Now that i'm here, in his country, i can't help but scan every face, every street for a glimpse of my lost love.
But he's not why i'm actually here. And i have to get my mind of my teenage fantasies and back onto what bought me to the US a few months ago.

Max. My brother. It's been so long since iv'e seen his face. He....disappeared five years ago, a year before Jacob and the happy kissing incident. My parents didn't care. Or rather, my dad didn't. He said that Max was a loser, that he'd never make anything of himself and that it was better for everyone that he was gone. But it wasn't better, and it isn't.
I'm not better, without him. In fact i'm worse.
I should have seen it coming. He'd been getting into almost constant trouble for months. Ever since he met Charles Ashworth, or Charlie 'Ash-breath' as everyone called him. He was sixteen and smoked twenty a day, at the very least, hence his nickname.
His family was 'troubled', so my father said, his father a drunk and his mother a...well, i won't repeat the word my father used to describe a woman who sells herself or money.
Charlie was the local bully, rumored to be the leader of a gang or something.
Max saved him from getting a kicking by some other teenagers in our area and Charlie took him under his wing after that.
They used to hang about in the park, smoke and drink alcohol, talking (and more) with girls from my school. Charlie didn't go to school. He was 'above' all that, apparantly. He always said he wasn't going to let the governement control his existence.

Max and our dad had always had a testy relationship but after he started hanging out with Charlie, staying out after curfew, coming home smelling of cigarettes, weed and booze things got worse. They fought like cat and dog, and i had to crank the Queen up to almost maximum to tune them out. I generally stayed out of it, though Max would sneak into my room to whine and moan about the 'rentals and i totally agreed with him that they were being unfair, though it was more my mother than my father. She tried to mediate but would always end up being yelled at by Max and my father, both so in the end she stayed out of it too.
The day Max went missing, he told me that i should stand up to our dad more. But conflict wasn't something i could handle. It made me edgy and flustered though i always tried to do the right thing, if i had to, at school, to stand up for others when i witnessed them being bullied.
It just wasn't right and i guess i got my sense of right and wrong from my mother. She was kind, and she passed on that trait to me. Iv'e been </span></span><span id="dscexpitem_-495899725_7"><span data-bm="79">criticized for being too nice, so many times, but the worlds already shit without me adding to it by being a mean girl.

I never saw Max again after that day. Heard nothing. My mother filed a missing peoples report at the police station but they didn't bother doing much. He was a trouble-maker, they said, likely ran off to 'find his fortune' or some shit. Which is total bull. He wouldn't have just left me like that.
Except that he did.
After a year my mother had become like a shell of her former self. She rarely smiled, had become as serious as my dad. As for him, he banned any mention of my brother and lived as if he'd never existed. I think i began to hate them both, then. My father for being so cruel and unforgiving that he drove my brother away and my mother for being so weak as to just give up searching for him, and refusing to stand up to my father.
But i also hate myself. Because i couldn't stand up to him either. And now i'll never tell him how i feel about the nazi camp he raised me in because they're both dead.

According to the kind, blue-eyed policeman who sat me down when i came home from school, my parents car had veered into the oncoming traffic, as they drove home from an afternoon at the theatre, my fathers attempt to appease my mothers suffering unhappiness.
There were no drugs or alcohol in either of their systems, no medical reason for why they had driven into the front of a truck. Had my mother just had enough, and decided to take my father with her? Had they been arguing, distracted until the sound of the horn blasted through their yelled insults?
I'll never get an answer.
I dealt with their deaths as i did the rest of my life. Quietly, calmly and feeling as if i were a robot alien that couldn't cry. I didn't know where Max was, whether he was alive or dead, even i couldn't contact him about the funeral. But his abscence was noted, if only by me and it became harder and harder not to think about him.
He's the only family i have left.

I made the decision to search for him, and i got in contact with Charlie, who still lived in our area and who had progressed to becoming the local drug dealer. He'd always had a soft spot for me, but he'd never hassled me out of respect to Max. So when i begged him for information he gave it up like vomit after a heavy night out.
Turns out he has a cousin in California, who's in the same (drug) trade, and he'd given Max this guys address after my brother had expressed a desire to see more of the world. He owed the guy, so Charlie said.
I spent just enough time in england, so that i could sell my parents house (which only fetched a modest £124,000), and then i dropped out of college, aid goodbye to Leslie and booked a plane ticket, making my way here, to America, the land of dreams.

California was beautiful. But i was so wrapped up in my need to find Max that i barely registered it. He wasn't there. Charlie's cousin, Sam was suspicious of me at first when i turned up, and i half expected him to shank me right there and then but after a call to Charlie, he bought me a chocolate milkshake and told me that he'd like my brother. But that he wasn't cut out for the drug trade, so he reckoned.
The first rule: never take your own product and apparantly Max had been dosing on coke for a couple months before Sam told him to get out of the business. He knew someone in a small town called Hathian. Owned a fishing trawler. Was always needing men for a helping hand as most never lasted long, so he sent my brother here, with a paid ticket, and four hundred dollars in his pocket.

I thanked him and left. And now i'm here. A year and a half after i started looking for Max. Booked into a hotel on the outskirts of town. Not sure where Max is or if he even made it here. Please god, let me find him. I can't do this without him. I can't be here, in this strange country, with these strange people, speaking strange slang, without him by my side.
I need him. I need my brother. I'm coming for you, Max.