At 3:47 p.m., the first present hit the wall hard enough to leave a dent. For half a second, my brain refused to translate what my eyes were seeing, as if reality itself had glitched. One moment my five-year-old son Tyler was grinning, clutching a dinosaur-wrapped box from his best friend Lucas.
The next, my sister Amy had snatched it from his hands and hurled it across my living room like she was pitching a fastball.
The impact came with a sharp crack. Something inside the package shattered.
The party music kept playing—Paw Patrol chirping cheerfully about teamwork—like it didn’t understand that the entire room had just changed. Tyler’s smile froze.
His face fell open in pure confusion, not even hurt yet, like his little mind was still searching for the rule that explained why his aunt would do that.
Then came the laugh. My uncle Jerry, sixty-three years old and three beers deep, clapped like Amy had just performed a magic trick. “That’s hilarious!” he wheezed.
Across from him, my mother lifted her boxed-wine Chardonnay like a toast and said casually, “It’s just stuff.”
I felt a cold certainty move through me then—quiet, surgical cold.
Not rage, not even heartbreak at first. Just the sudden, terrifying understanding that I’d been living inside a story where the villains were protected and the victims were expected to smile about it.
And somewhere behind all that noise, my father sat at the dining table, silent, watching like a man counting down to a decision he’d waited forty years to make. The second gift was worse.
Amy grabbed the big Jurassic World Lego set—one hundred twenty dollars, the one Tyler had watched YouTube videos about for months, narrating the build scenes like sports highlights—and raised it overhead like a trophy before slamming it down on the hardwood floor.
The sound wasn’t dramatic like in movies. It was worse—dull and final, the way a door sounds when it closes behind you for the last time. Pieces skittered across the floor.
Plastic snapped.
The box split down the seam. Tyler inhaled sharply, his body trying to pull the sound of crying back in.
“Amy, what the hell?” I managed, but my voice came out strangled, delayed. Amy didn’t even look at me.
She was already reaching for the next gift, fueled by attention the way some people are fueled by oxygen.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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