Page 53 of The Endowment Effect

9

Wayward House Party

Seventeen Years Ago - Birdie

The party was lame.

Mainly because he didn’t show.

Okay, that was a lie.

Only because he didn’t show.

Birdie should’ve known better. Lucas Santos never went to parties, never drank, never touched a blunt when passed around.

He was always so damned good.

To her disappointment, the more she pushed the envelope on ways to capture some smidgeon of his attention, the more angry and distant he became.

It was driving her crazy.

As a junior, her reputation had taken a nosedive. Even though now, it was based more on fabrication than fact.

Again, her fault.

Her attempt to shell-shock Lucas Santos into noting her existence, managed only to gain her more negative notoriety amongst her classmates.

And encouraged outright lies.

She grimaced as Jimmy Wheelan threw up in one of the plants in the corner of the room as Lainey Morrison, her best and only friend, made out with Chuckie Fester on his parents’ living room couch.

Chuckie’s parents, Gloria and Fenton… yeah, that’s right, Fenton Fester, were notorious for leaving their son at home for a week at a time and then taking off to some exotic locale. Where, if you’d have listened to the Wayward gossip mill, they’d sample the latest strain of peyote or go on the hunt for the rare variety of cannabis.

Birdie never messed with any of that shit, rare or otherwise, but for some inexplicable reason, she never bothered denying partaking when accused. Just one of her many twisted attempts at garnering a particular someone’s attention, which never seemed to work and always managed to backfire on her.

Tonight was no exception. As her little sister Maisie had shown up at the party to spite her.

Maisie was just a sophomore and if Birdie’s reputation was on the baseless level of school skank and partier, Maisie’s was the opposite.

For good reason.

Maisie was the apple of her mother’s eye. To the point where it was common knowledge that Shelby Wellborn took every opportunity to malign her older daughter while bolstering the character of the younger.

In reality, the little suck-up was a master of manipulation, sitting dutifully beside her mother on the sofa for a Bible lesson, while hiding pure grain alcohol in a plastic apple juice container in a lower shelf of her bedside table. After several nips, Maisie would make sure to leave her Bible open on her nightstand, always flipping through a couple of unread pages before turning out the lights.

One morning, Birdie woke up to her mother yanking her by the arm, nearly dislocating it, while waving some book in front of her.

Dragging Birdie to the kitchen, she dumped a box of rice on the floor, forcing her to her knees, holding her down by her shoulders, and making her repeat biblical verses, over and over and over.

After hours of repeating dozens of verses, her knees screaming in pain, and her arm inflamed, she hobbled to her room with hundreds of pieces of rice embedded in her skin. On the floor in front of her bed, she found the book that had caused the episode, she didn’t dare touch it, but read the cover.

The Satanic Bible.

She glared at her sister, who sat on her bed with aTeen Beatmagazine open yet hidden inside her Bible and with a disturbing smile on her face.

That’s when Birdie finally believed her sister truly hated her.

While Maisie dressed like an overly privileged Barbie doll, Birdie’s clothes came from the local secondhand thrift store as punishment for living a willful and sinful life. Despite her parents’ desperate and selfless attempts to turn her around.

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