My Best Friend Brother

Scarlett POV I glanced at the tattered book cover of my favorite novel and tossed it into my beach bag with a towel, a bottle of water and my SPF 35 for my sadly pale skin. It was a hundred degrees—about right for a typical Texas July—and lucky 14-year-old me had a friend with a swimming pool. It was going to be a great day. Or so I thought. But more on that later.The trailer court I lived in with my dad used to have a pool years ago, but now it was neglected with a shallow green pool of muck hosting a few beer cans floating on top. Last time I stood at the edge and peered down, I swear there was a dirty diaper in there, too. Gross. I considered the book again and then pulled it out and returned it safely back to the little shelf in my closet where my few valuables were kept. I didn’t want it ruined from a wayward splash. This was a special book to me and I credited it with saving my life in a sense. “Let me explain. The best gift my mother gave me was naming me Scarlett after the bold, beautiful and unstoppable heroine from “Gone with the Wind.In fact, it might be the only thing she gave me—I can’t recall anything else other than a few of the usual emotional scars of abandonment. That feeble excuse for a parent left me and my dad when I wasn’t even two years old, so I had no collection of embroidered blankets, birthday cards, jewelry or other sentimental things a daughter could expect from her mother. Things that my best friend, Annika, had in droves. Sometimes I envied Annika and her shelves of fancy trinkets, visual evidence that she was loved and adored. But would I trade my cherished moniker for all of it? Would I choose to live life as a dull Jessica or a tedious Samantha or—god forbid—a weak, needy Melanie? “Not a chance. As soon as I was old enough to read, I got my hands on a worn out paperback copy of Gone with the Wind from a library sale for fifty cents, and I read it cover to cover. And then I read it several times after throughout my youth in between obsessive marathons of Anne of Green Gables and Jane Austen novels. When kids at school made fun of me for my shoddy thrift store clothes or because I lived in a trailer park, I held my head high and imagined this was how Scarlett must have felt when she worked in the cotton fields to save Tara after the Civil War. She did what she had to do to pull herself up and out, and I decided I would do the same in my life. “That book helped me keep my sanity and aspire to a better life than my parents had. I guess a striking difference between me and Scarlett O’Hara was that didn’t plan to marry someone wealthy in order to gain access to the cleaner, nicer parts of society where people didn’t park their cars on the front lawn—half of them nonworking. I made straight A’s throughout school knowing that education was my ticket out of this place. “ So, even though my mother was a loser of a parent and was probably drinking herself to death somewhere out west, maybe something inside of her knew I would need that name and the resilience and strength that came with it. Maybe she guessed it would give me the fortitude to dream big and work hard to make something of myself, and eventually move out of the rusty mobile home I shared with my dad—a man who stopped dreaming altogether the day she left him. My name was one of two things that helped me survive growing up poor and motherless. The other was my best friend, Annika, and her family, the Bashirs. I grabbed my beach bag, slipped on some cheap flip-flops, and headed out the door for the hot, sweaty walk to their house knowing I would be rewarded with a cool dip in their crystal clear pool—no beer cans or dirty diapers to be found. As I hiked toward their part of town, it was easy to spot how the scenery changed, the socioeconomic differences pretty clear. I lived right on the border between the dust covered trailer parks on the outskirts of Fairview, Texas and its wealthy upper-class neighborhoods with manicured lawns and security guards stationed at the entrances to their gated communities. I was part of the ten percent of the student body who really didn’t belong there, but I learned quickly that money didn’t always buy you acceptance. They Bashirs were from exotic and colorful India by way of civilized and stoic Britain, and practiced a narrow, esoteric sect of Islam. I found them fascinating and interesting, but according to the mostly white, Baptist population in our town, this meant they were outcasts, too, despite their wealth and status. A couple blocks down the street and the dirt path transformed into a sidewalk, unofficially marking the line between the Haves and the Have-Nots. I could walk this path with eyes closed and step up on that sidewalk at just the right second. Annika had rarely walked the distance to my place—one time to be precise, when she insisted on seeing my room. I’ll never forget the expression on her face when I opened up the rusty door to the mobile home—it always got jammed—and led her down the narrow hall to my sparse room, the size of a match-box. She could see how embarrassed I was and never asked to come again. I appreciated that about her.