Page 5 of Summer Haze & Tokyo Craze
Jackson: And from me.
I raise my eyebrow before I type back my answer. I expected a bunch of question marks or confusion – not for my brothers to be buddy-buddy with her.
Adam: How do you guys know her?
Reed: Dude, she's everywhere. One of their models was at the same shooting as I was, and she came over for lunch just to check if everything was going okay.
Adam: That’s impressive.
Jackson: Really, you should take a page out of her book.
Adam: If I could, I would.
Tanner: Sure.
I take a deep breath and grind my jaw, leaning my head back against my seat. I’m so sick and tired of this discussion.
Adam: Say the word and I’ll have you join the company as executive. Then you’ll see me more than enough.
My fingers fly over my phone and I shake my head at them. With a sigh, I pinch the bridge of my nose. I love my brothers. I really do.
But I’m so fucking burnt out.
I'm the oldest of my siblings, by quite a bit.
Our parents had me very young. I remember one evening when my mom and I had a heart to heart over a glass of wine. She and my dad got together in high-school – a love story right out of a romcom movie. She was the cheerleader captain, he played in a rock band, an unsupervised party involving a truth or dare and they were inseparable.
After a few months of dating, my mom got pregnant with me during her last year of high school. She didn’t tell me much about that time, but the fact that we never had contact with any of their families speaks volumes.
Mom told me that they were in over their head, so desperate and scared they’d intended to adopt me out, but she said once she had me in her arms and I grinned when I looked at her face, she just knew she couldn't do it.
Dad felt the same. So they married and made it work.
It wasn’t easy. Even I remember times all we had to eat was rice and canned beans for weeks. Bile rises up in my throat when I smell beans, even today, thirty years later.
But then dad found his calling.
Music was always his passion, and for the longest time, he tried to get his big break-through, all while working full time. Then he realized that finding amazing musicians and recognizing talent was even more in his blood than music itself.
It didn’t take him long to be hired as a talent scout for a music label in the city and he quickly worked himself to the top, signing all kinds of now-famous actors, musicians, and bands. When he felt he didn’t get paid what he deserved, he bid the company farewell and founded his own, finding to his joy that a lot of artists stuck with the company for him. Once he was gone, so were they. A lot of them are still with Croney, even all these years later.
And my dad’s job made for such an awesome childhood.
He might have been busy, but he took me along to gigs, to movie castings and theatre plays. I even visited a few movie sets with him and we had a blast visiting all these amazing worlds.
Before long, Mom was able to quit her job to stay home and take care of me. That’s when they decided that they were finally at a point to have more children.
Within a few months of that decision, she got pregnant with Jackson, whose ability to lie with the best poker face I’ve everseen, made him pursue acting. I remember how excited I was to finally get a baby brother.
Reed, who we called ‘angel face’ as children, followed two years after. Then Tanner. And finally, five years later, another oops child: our sister Zoey.
She's just gone off to college, which is the only reason I'm even going to Tokyo for so long. I wanted to be there for her while she lived at home.
She was barely two when our parents died in a car accident. A fucking drunk driver who was on his phone.
I tried my best to do it all. Taking over Dad’s company, raising my siblings, but it meant sacrifices. I couldn’t go to Tanner’s football games when the board called yet another meeting to try and take the company away from me. Couldn’t go to Zoey’s dance recitals when Jackson was about to leave for college and needed money for tuition.
It sucked. It still does.
