The Virgin and the Whore

Chapter 5

               

Chapter 5

I stared at myself in the reflecting walls of the elevator as it went up to the penthouse.

It wasn't a glorious sight to put lightly. I looked like a bum, I smelled like an ashtray, so it was normal that most people didn't guess that I was worth a few millions.

My father had a wing at the hospital he worked named after him. He made significant break-through in his field and he was amazing at his job. And he had pretty impressive life insurance and a sizable trust fund from his father. I had inherited all of it. No one in his family needed his money. They were already loaded.

Most people didn't know about this though, about how much money I was actually worth.

I stayed in the dorms because it was more convenient. I was right on campus. I could wake up later. I didn't care about sharing a bathroom. Either way, I was lucky, my best friend was my roommate and we didn't have to clean a toilet.

I could have stayed in the penthouse. My penthouse. My father had bought it when he'd gotten his job at the hospital. My mother lived here. I grew up here. It never really felt like a home though. It always kind of felt cold and empty, especially after my mother's death.

I changed things up a bit after my father died and I was the one in control of decorating. At first I wanted to turn my father's room into a crack den. I wanted to buy fifty cats and then just lock them in and let them marinate in their own stew of pee and poo. I wanted to take a sledge hammer to the walls.

But that would have had a significant impact on the over all quality and value of my penthouse so I refrained from turning it into a meth lab.

Also, it was kind of ridiculous for me to be so angry over my father's death. He wasn't an especially bad father. He was just the kind of father you would expect from a brilliant neurosurgeon. He was out saving lives every day. He wasn't supposed to play catch with his son. He was supposed to be at the hospital working. And it wasn't like he had any control over his death. Given the chance I was pretty sure he would have tried to prolong the inevitable.

I bought plants. I bought a whole bunch of plants after my father died. I went to a florist to figure out the kind of floral arrangements I would need for the funerals and I just thought that cut up flowers felt so sad. They were dead and I didn't want dead things. I wanted alive things. I remembered that my father had said the same thing for my mother's funeral. So I bought a bunch of flowers and plants and then I never had the heart to get rid of them so I kept them and like any good crazy hoarder I started to buy more and more and now the whole penthouse felt like a greenhouse. It was nice though. And the whole place was just filled with natural light because of all the glass walls so it sort of worked out nicely.

When the elevator finally reached the top floor I entered the access code into the pad and walked into my home.

There were shoes there that shouldn't be here. And a suitcase.

I sighed, shook my head and followed the sound of the television in the living room.

The blond head was facing the opposite direction but I didn't need to se a face to know who was sitting on my couch. "Jesus, Dick, what are you doing here?" I asked.

Dick, or well Richard Titchen the Third. My uncle. My eighteen years old, yes-he's-younger-than-me uncle. My grandfather was a rich old bastard who had eight ex-wives and was probably on the way to lucky contestant number nine.

"Jesus' Dick. Nice nickname. I dig it," Dick nodded, his eyes fixed on the TV, switching channels.

I called him Dick to annoy him but usually we all called him Trey, because he was the third Richard which I found kind of weird, but hey, I wasn't the one making up the rules in this dysfunctional family.