The Guide to Depravity

This is the first page of a book I started writing a few days ago.

I wasn’t always a deviating person, I guess my instinct to run came around when I found out my dad was getting remarried. He’d always been the one to say he’d wait, and he was the first one to move on.

It’s funny actually, I thought my parents would get back together. We’d be a happy family again.

When my dad moved on, he decided that it was time to finalize the divorce with my mom and they’d each take what they wanted from the marriage and go their separate ways. What I did not know was that my little brothers and I were part of that package.

My parents argued day and night about who got which kid and why. They never thought once to ask us who we wanted to go with, it was the judge in charge of their divorce that threw the idea into their heads.

We had exactly a week to choose who we wanted to live with. Imagine being fourteen years old and hearing that you and your two younger brothers have to decide which parent you love the most, I mean that was basically what they were saying, right?

My youngest brother, who was five at the time, chose to go with my mom. He used his miniature person logic and said, “She’s the one that I actually came from, so she’s the one that I should stay with, too.”

My other brother, eleven at the time, also chose to go with my mom. He claimed it was because my dad’s new fiancee looked evil, but I know he just didn’t want to hurt my mom’s feelings.

I was stuck. I didn’t want to leave my little brothers to have to have a babysitter, but I didn’t want my dad to not have any of his kids. I didn’t want to hurt my mom or my dad. I didn’t have any idea what to do and I panicked. I chose to go with my dad.

“Marcel, are you sure this is what you want?” My mom asked, hugging my little brothers to her. “You’re just going to leave Dillon and Adolf?”

“Don’t try to change her mind, Mary. Marcel chose me, it’s final.” My dad interrupted what I was going to say before I even had the chance to form some words to say to console her.

There are some rules to this whole divorce and splitting up the kids thing, like visitation rights. I can go visit my mom and brothers whenever I want to, and my brothers can come stay with my dad and I whenever they want to. It’s going to be more fun than I initially thought it would.

So, it turns out that my dad's fiancee lives in California, and we have to move there to live with her. Dad says she has a big house. I've never seen a house bigger than the two-story one that I lived in with my mom, so this should be exciting.

"Does she have, like pets or kids or something?" I ask my dad on the way to the airport.

"Two sons and a daughter."

Author's Note

I wrote this at five in the morning with no sleep from the night before.

Reviews

[barleygirl]

This is an amazing story that's told with such fresh honesty, it feels like a true story. I've never read anything that took into account how a child feels during divorce, in such a cool, analytical way. Usually things are all emotion-packed & manipulative. The part that really hit me is that the narrator had to choose, not only which parent, but also whether to be with siblings or not. That's such a tough decision for a young person to have to make. I'm glad the story ends on an "up" note, but if this is leading into a longer story, a book, then it might have been more captivating to suggest a little hint of trouble to come. Also the backstory on brother's name Adolf feels a little out of place in this story.