Page 16 of Bittersweet Legacy

“Maybe you shouldn’t stay here,” I offered reluctantly, jerking my head toward my brother.

She glanced back, flipping them the bird. “Ah, the self-proclaimed Kings of Brentwood Academy?” She snorted. “Please, if it wasn’t for their legacy and this microcosm – they’d be nothing.”

My mouth hung open in surprise. In the few hours I’d spent there today I noticed that everyone was kissing the ground these boys walked on.

“What?” she shrugged.

“I just- aren’t you afraid?”

Her smile widened. “I’m too rich to bother, and too smart to get involved. I’m literally untouchable. I’m Taylor Oppenheimer.” She replied as if it explained everything.

“Okay?”

She arched her eyebrows in surprise “Oppenheimer?”

“You can repeat it, it means nothing to me.”

“Oh wow…. Yeah, we’ll need to work on that. You won’t survive this world for long if you don’t know your history.”

I don’t plan to stay long. I thought, but I barely knew this girl, I couldn’t spill the beans.

“My family owns diamonds and not just any, we ownCarbonite, which is the most famous and most expensive diamond trader. We basically control the diamond stock.”

“Wow.”

She nodded, taking a sip of her Coke. “Yeah…”

“Are you richer than them?”

She chuckled. “You’re part of them, you know that, right?”

I shook my head, frowning at the thought. “I’d rather get shot than become like them.”

She sighed. “You’re seeing the worst side of it now Esme, and yes, I’m richer than them… I think my family might be richer than all that table put together.”

“I thought all that talk with them was power and money, you should be at the head of this table then.”

She rolled her eyes. “No, you’re forgetting one essential element in your equation… blood.”

“Blood?” I grimaced. “What are you, vampires?”

“In some ways… This town has been founded by the oldest of the oldest families, they form a blue blood clan. ‘The Patricians’.” she mocked, using quoting fingers. “You need to be decent in the three categories to make it. I might have been able to make it to the table if I’d tried hard enough but truth be told, the royalty of Brentwood is not worth the effort.”

“Patricians?”

“Yeah it’s what we call a person of noble or high rank; aristocrats.”

“And you’re not?”

She shook her head. “No, here comes the five-minute story. As you can probably tell, I’m part-Filipina. My mother was a middle-class woman from Brooklyn who met a low life wannabe gangbanger and he got her pregnant when she was 17.” She sighed. “Then he had to get himself shot. My mom fought with her family when they asked her to get an abortion and she moved out. She took care of me really well, you know, despite the meagre means and then when she was 25, she met Jonathan, my dad, and it was love at first sight. She didn’t know he was rich; he didn’t care she was a maid.”

“It’s a legit fairy tale.”

She smiled brightly, and I envied how happy she was. “It really is. Dad adopted me as soon as they got married and I’ve been a legit Oppenheimer since I was eight.”

I liked her even more now I knew that, because whilst I had the ‘blue blood’ I’d been raised normal and it somehow made me feel better to know someone else with a similar background.

“What’s your next class?” she asked, extending her hand to me.

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