remonstrate

verb

1. make a forcefully reproachful protest

Two days before my birthday, I was down in the kitchen late at night, looking for a snack to eat. I had been finalising plans for the App to go live on the morning of my eighteenth birthday. It was great gift for myself. Smiling at my silliness, I rummaged around the large fridge for the fixings for a sandwich. Peanut butter, strawberry jam and thick slices of fruit bread. I set the sliced bread to toasting, then accidentally dropped my knife on the tiled floor. I quickly picked it up and limped over to the kitchen island where I'd placed everything.

"Shouldn't you be in bed, Missy?" Came a voice.

"Aaaah!" I screamed and turned to find Mrs H watching me with a smile on her face.

"Um, I was hungry?" I explained. I don't usually help myself to food in this place, especially since I still feel like I don't quite belong here.

"P and J sandwich I see." Mrs H came over, collected my toast that just popped up from the toaster, then shooed me to sitting on a stool at the kitchen island while she made my evening snack.

"Will you need a glass of warm milk to go with this sandwich, Lily?" She asked.

"Oh, yes. That would be perfect." I got up to get myself a milk when she waved at me again.

"Sit, sit. I'll get it for you, or else you'll drop something else and wake the whole estate up."

"I would not, Mrs H! I'm the very picture of a perfect lady." I complained.

"Here's your milk. Now tell me. Do you have everything you need for beginning university next week?" I smiled and nodded while taking a drink form the glass she handed me, then a bite of the toast sandwich.

"Yes, all sorted. I have text books for three year one classes to buy from the campus store, once they open again after the mid semester break. Then I think its just turn up to orientation on Monday morning." Just three days until I begin my second round of university career. I found it neat that the second semester began just a few days after I will turn eighteen.

"If you need anything, you let me know. Grant and his Dad and I..."

CRASH!

We both turned to the direction of the front foyer where the sound of breaking glass or ceramics was heard. I followed Mrs H as she went to investigate. What we found both surprised me, yet it didn't at the same time. Eyva, in a tight little bandage dress, was holding onto the side table looking down at the floor where an expensive vase had smashed on the floor, giggling. She wasn't alone. Someone from her little social circle was sitting on the floor near the open front door, giggling her face off as well. They were both drunk.

"What are you doing here, Ms Eyva?" Mr Denault asked as he arrived moments after us. Eyva stood up and looked at the head of security and stopped giggling, or at least tried to stop. In between snorting a laugh out her nostrils, she told him off.

"I am the lady of the house. Who are you... hahaha. Who are you to tell me what to do?" I decided that I needed to gain Eyva's attention and keep the staff safe from her wrath. She had already deemed me public enemy number one, so what was a little more angst towards me?

"Eyva, are you drunk? Aren't you meant to be at your Grandma's house?" I moved in front of Mrs H as I didn't want her getting hurt.

"You! You trailer trash! You ugly slut, if I get my hands on you..." Then it looked like she just realised she could get her hands on me and stepped forward and swung her hand.

SLAP! It wasn't a light handed swing either. In her drunkenness she really let it swing, and in my stupidity, I let her. My head rang and my face stung. I held it quietly and turned back to see an ugly smirk on her face.

"That's for taking my daddy away from me." She raised her hand again but I caught it before she could hit me again and pushed her away. She banged into the side table she'd just knocked the vase off and picked up a shard of broken pottery laying on top, cutting her fingers in the process. Her friend at the door stopped laughing and screamed as Eyva lunged towards me with her make-shift knife.

"Oh, my goodness!" Mrs H cried out and pulled me away from my step sister. Mr Denault caught Eyva's wrist just as Wallace arrived down the stairs.

"EYVA! What are you doing?" He called out, leaking his intense power throughout the whole foyer.

"Daddy, my wrist, he hurt me. Wuuwuwu. (Crying) Make him pay. I want his job!" She screamed as she tried to break away from the security chief's hold. "Daddy, she did it. She made me do it. I hate her, Daddy." And it went on and on. Wallace saw the whole scene, looked at the mark on my face, the way Mrs H was carefully holding me, the broken vase shared in Denault's hand and Eyva's cut up and bleeding fingers. He then sighed.

"Take her to her room. Have her maid Mavis clean her up and give her a sobering soup, please. She's not to leave her room until I say so." He waved Denault away with Eyva and stepped towards the girl at the door who looked much more sober than before.

"Miss Moore. I think it best if we arrange a driver to take you home. Are you in any way hurt?" She shook her head as he helped her up off the foyer tiles and waved Mrs H to come over and help tidy her up. Mrs H arranged for her husband to take her home in a town car. I was left sitting in the lounge, trying to eat my cold toast.

"You OK, Lily?" Wallace sat down across from me just as my Mum came into the room. She pulled me into a side hug as she sat beside me.

"You OK, honey?" She brushed my swollen cheek and blew on it, treating me like I was still a child with an owie boo boo. I snuggled into her, my toast snack forgotten on the coffee table. She held me for a while as I looked out the lounge room doors into the back yard, watching the lights twinkling of the city beyond the estate.

"She was supposed to be at her grandparents place. I gave them a call and they had been told she was studying at a friend's house. We will have to tighten restrictions on her." He sighed and moved forward in his seat, elbows on his knees, his head dropped in defeat.

If this went on, Eyva would destroy her relationship with her father, and, although deep down I believe she deserved it, I also felt that if Eyva decompensated emotionally, she would probably take it out on my mother or Jack. I looked at mum and realised I didn't want that to happen. If Eyva blew up emotionally and mentally lost the plot, my mother and Wallace's relationship could get damaged in the process. I took a deep breath and moved out from my mother's arms.

"I think I should move out." I declared. I was planning to do this at some point anyway, but now seemed like the best time to bring it up. "I'm about to start uni and I don't need to be here in the same house as Eyva. She needs this home more than I do, at this point."

"No, Lily. No." My mum tried to pull me back into her arms, but I held up a hand.

"No, hear me out." She nodded with a frown, and I turned to look at Wallace.

"She's not coping with things changing so much. Eyva is trying to hold everything together all by herself while at the same time trying to get things back to where they were before mum and I moved in. She is threatened by my existence, worried that I will take away you and your love from her, that I'll take away her wealth, her status, everything she holds dear. If I leave, move away from her comfort zone and what she deems as her territory, then she would gain her equilibrium back."

"You're also a part of this family, Lily." Wallace frowned, not liking my idea so I approached it from a business point of view.

"Think of Eyva as a computer programme where her internal coding that sets the parameters for how she functions with other programmes and external coding is unaltered. Change the variable of the external programmes or interface coding but leave the parameters unchanged, and the programme is going to fall apart and fail in its primary function.

"She can't cope with the changes happening around her, can't get by as she has always done so she is trying to compensate and force everything back to the way it was before. I am the only changed variable in her life, the new element that has been introduced that she can't figure out how manage. Her internal parameters haven't changed to the new external coding, if you will." I watch Wallace closely.

"If you want Eyva to learn to manage the external variables in her life, you need to help her change her internal coding. That can't happen while you have those external variables threatening her existence within this family. She coped with Jac-Jac when he was born as he was too young to be any real threat to her. She coped with Brooke in her life because mum wasn't a rival, but your new lover." I look at mum and Wallace each. I shrug my shoulders.

"I'm the cause of the change and the problem can only be solved if I move out."