Chapter 16: Sarah's a what?
'Wait… is she saying…' The pieces, bizarre and impossible, began to crash together in my mind. The age. The braids, a childish style made severe. The apartment. Sarah's presence. The term Oppa, all things from my past.
My eyes widened to saucers. I stared at the beauty in front of me, and desperately tried to superimpose the memory of a little girl over her features. The gap-toothed, perpetually sunny grin. The messy twin braids. The sparkly, butterfly-covered t-shirts. The little girl who used to follow me around, chattering nonstop, who I'd push on the swing, who called me 'Oppa' with unadulterated hero-worship.
The images refused to align. They were two completely different people from two different planets.
"You're… Ophelia?!" The name exploded from me, a mix of disbelief and utter confusion.
Instead of answering, Ophelia's shocked expression curdled into something hot and ugly. She shifted her glare from me to her mother, her dark-lined eyes blazing.
"Why did you bring him here?!" she lashed out, her voice rising, sharp and venomous. The cool, detached girl was gone, replaced by a volcano of furry.
Sarah's happy smile faltered. "What do you mean, honey? Your Oppa was in need of some help, so I decided to have him stay with us for a while. Just like when he used to come over for visits to take care of you when you were little. It'll be nice!"
"In case you haven't noticed, Mom," Ophelia spat the word, "I'm not a child anymore! I don't need a babysitter! What were you even thinking, asking a grown man to live with us? Do you have any idea how bad that looks?" Her voice was scathing. She momentarily flashed me a look of such pure, cold contempt that it felt like a physical slap. It was a look that held not a single shred of memory of swing sets or shared ice cream. "Who's to say he doesn't have any… dirty thoughts towards us?"
The accusation hung in the pristine hallway air, vile and shocking. My face flushed with a mixture of hot embarrassment and cold anger. "O-Ophelia?" I managed, the name feeling alien on my tongue.
"Shut it!" she snapped, her focus whipping back to me. "I don't want to hear my name coming from that mouth of yours. Coming to live with us? Let me guess," she sneered, her voice dripping with sarcastic pity, "you finally became the failure you were always destined to be, right? Now that you've finally hit rock bottom, you come crawling back here like a—"
"OPHELIA! That's enough!" Sarah's voice cut through Ophelia's tirade like a whip. The warm, melodic tone was gone, replaced by a steel I had rarely ever heard. "Is that how you speak to your own Oppa? To family?"
"What?! It's not like I said anything wrong!" Ophelia shot back, but a flicker of something fear? Or perhaps hurt? passed behind her eyes at her mother's tone. "Honestly, it's not like you ever care to listen to anything I say, anyway!"
"And what is that supposed to mean?" Sarah's voice had dropped, low and dangerous. I was taken aback. In all the years I'd known her, through my own teenaged stupidity and mishaps, I'd never seen Sarah Noona's mood sour like this.
The warm, nurturing aura around her seemed to chill and contract. For a bizarre second, I thought I felt a metallic tang in the air, like the scent of blood.
"You never care to listen!" Ophelia yelled, her composure fully shattered now, tears of rage glistening in her eye's.
"Ophelia, lower your voice this instant! You'll cause a scene!" I pleaded in a whispering tone, glancing down the hall where a door had cracked open slightly before quickly shutting.
"I thought I told you to shut it!" Ophelia wheeled on me again, and I stiffened. For a split second, as her furious gaze locked onto mine, I could have sworn her eyes glowed, a faint, unnatural crimson flicker deep within the dark iris. Or perhaps it was just a trick of the hallway light catching her scarlet contact lenses and the sheen of her angry tears. My imagination, strung out and overstimulated, was probably playing tricks.
"You know what?" she said, her voice suddenly going dead calm, all the fire snuffed out into something colder and more final. She turned her back on us both. "You both can do whatever the hell you want! I don't care!"
With that, she stormed back into the apartment, letting the heavy door swing shut behind her.
I stood frozen, in place for a moment before I glanced slowly at Sarah. Her shoulders were trembling slightly, her knuckles white where she gripped her tote bag strap. The hurt on her face was profound, a raw wound beneath the layer of maternal irritation. She looked suddenly older, and terribly alone.
'I never knew their relationship had reached this level…' The thought of such filled me sadness, after all, I knew just how Loveland their relationship had been back then. Besides me, Sarah was the only person Ophelia had clung to like gum but now, it seemed like the both of us were suddenly seen as her natural enemy instead, which I found inconceivable.
The perfect image of the loving Lee family I'd carried in my head was cracked. 'And I even unintentionally just made it worse.' i suddenly felt guilty.
' Huh?'
All of a sudden, my vision flickered. The familiar, unwelcome blue-and-white interface shimmered into existence, not for Ophelia, but hovering right beside Sarah Noona's strained profile.
[POTENTIAL TARGET: Sarah Lee]
Age: Not available.
Status: mid-sized company CEO.
Psychology State: Hurt, Saddened.
Mission Difficulty: "Current number of missions surpasses one, difficulty cannot be assessed."
I blinked, my personal turmoil momentarily hijacked by the system's intrusion.
The systems statement surprised me when I saw her status for it seemed like my prior conjecture was correct, her company really had increased by leaps and bounds, the hurt and sadness part I could understand.
But the cryptic messa
ge about multiple missions was baffling, though. 'Well, that's a first.'