“Victoria has a lot on her plate,” my mother would say. “Social things you wouldn’t understand.”
I understood perfectly well.
I understood that Victoria’s time had value and mine did not.
The car situation said the rest.
For Victoria’s eighteenth birthday, my parents bought her a pearl-white BMW 3 Series with leather seats. Forty-two thousand dollars.
She wrecked it six months later while texting.
She walked away without a scratch.
They bought her another one. Silver this time.
“The white one had bad luck attached to it,” my mother said.
For my eighteenth birthday, I got a bus pass.
“You’re leaving for college soon,” my father said. “No point wasting money on a car.”
I did not bother reminding him that Victoria was attending a community college three miles away and could have walked if she had needed to.
Instead, I found a used bicycle at a garage sale for fifteen dollars and rode it to my two part-time jobs in every kind of weather while Victoria’s BMW gleamed in the driveway.
The thing about being invisible is that eventually you stop fighting it.
You learn to expect less. Need less. Occupy less room.
