This is my first story submission so I need brutal honesty to make me better. I always wanted to write, but never had the persistence to put anything on paper. I had a great idea for this story, and I wondered if anyone thought it was worth finishing. If it is somewhat readable, I will seek an editor.
Thanks for your feedback.
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I am in love with a wonderful man, and he doesn't love me, but in 24 hours he will be my husband. Isn't that always the case in these stories? I digress, maybe I should start at the beginning.
Lillian Rodgers is my best friend in the world, and her twin brother, Ian, my future husband hates me. Growing up, I never fit in my environment. Why? Simple, I was a black inner-city kid forced to leave with white people. It was actually a joke at the prep school I attended, as I was known as the Fresh Princess of Bellaire.
How does an underprivileged chick from Chicago South Side end up sitting and socializing with Chicago's children of elite. How the hell do I know? Seriously, my parents were scholarship students at Harvard Law. Good, right? Wrong. Instead of working for prestigious law firms that would pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars, they chose to go back to hood to help the poor and the disenfranchised. Noble, right. True, I was proud of them, but nobility does not pay the bills. However, on the other hand, they had some powerful and rich colleagues. My mother's best friend was one, and my Aunt Monica was a cool play-aunt. She would take me on shopping sprees at the beginning of every school year to make sure that I had the latest fads, and her payment from my mama was one homemade sweet potato pie. Aunt Monica loved those things, and loved my mother like a sister that neither of them had.
Well, when I was sixteen years old, my parents were killed in an car accident by a teenager. There was no liquor involved, just an unfortunate accident. In their will, Aunt Monica received custody of me until my eighteen birthday. She also was authorized to released my college fund and monitored it through my college years. I was lucky, Aunt Monica loved me like her beloved niece and daughter, but she refused to let me graduate from my old high school and placed in a preparatory school where the minority percentage was below two percent. I say two percent because there were two black students in each grade. I say below because I was the only one in my class.
Then I met my best friend. Lillian. Her twin brother, Ian attended this school as well. So what you say. Yeah, I get you, but Ian was the teenager that was in the wreck with my parents. Our first meetings was not at school, but my parents' funeral. I was touched by their presence because it really was a freak accident that wasn't anyone's fault, but they did not shy away from the heartfelt responsibility. In fact, their parents, Miriam and Robert Rodgers III grieved this tragedy as much as Aunt Monica and I did. They knew it could have easily been Ian in a coffin as well, and his life was spared, primarily, according to the police due to the my father's driving. As a result, they wanted to ensure that I was taken care as well as their children. Of course, the Rodgers were everything that I wasn't: very rich and very white, but they were also the kindest people I ever met. You would think that when Mr. Rodgers told my Aunt Monica that he wanted to secure my future like his own children, he meant a trust fund. Good you say, he appeased his conscious and everybody goes home, right? Wrong.
Mr. Rodgers met with my Aunt Monica and me one month after the funeral. My Aunt Monica was rich, but the Rodgers was so rich, you did not say the word, rich, you whispered it. As we did, when we walked into the mausoleum, they called home.
The butler escorted us to his library for the meeting.
