美国青少年故事（8）

Hey guys, I’m Daniella. I’m 18 now. This story began with me stealing 30 bucks from my grandparents, and in a few years it resulted in a complete break within my family, and my parents invading my house and forcing me to give up my plans for going to college. I guess that’s what is called the domino effect.


Our family has always had problems with money. We weren’t exactly poor, but for some reason, sometimes by the end of the month we had to skimp on everything, including food. Sometimes me and my brother Evan would stay with our grandparents to save up a little bit of money for our parents since it was closer to our school. Our grandparents also had problems with money, but it was just easier that way.


I was 14 and Evan was 12 when we found something weird in our grandparents' house. They were out somewhere, and we were searching for some paper for our schoolwork, so we looked in one of their cupboards. We found this very fat envelope. At first we wanted to just put it back, but Evan noticed that it was full of money. We couldn’t resist and looked inside. We couldn’t believe our eyes. This envelope was full of money, I think there were thousands. Me and Evan just looked at each other and quickly put it back.


A few weeks had passed and we were at our grandparents again. We really wanted to see a new movie that was at the cinema, but we had no money, so... we remembered the envelope. We decided to take a little bit, just enough to see the movie. And then we took a bit more, cause maybe then we could go out to eat somewhere and buy snacks. We promised to each other that we would never take more of it.


But of course, we did. Every time we wanted something, we would take just a little bit, because they wouldn’t even notice this small amount of money disappearing. But when it was Evan’s 13th birthday, our parents told us that we couldn’t celebrate this year, because we had almost no money. Evan was really sad about it, and I got mad at my grandparents - why were they hiding all this money? Didn’t they want us to be happy? So I took a huge sum of money out of the envelope and later, me, Evan, and his friends had a big celebration.


We returned home later than usual and our parents were very curious as to why. Evan was so excited, so he told them about the party. They were confused, and Evan tried to come up with some excuse, but we were forced to tell the truth. Our parents were sooo mad, but not at us. Our grandparents never supported them in any way and left them to manage their lives themselves. You see, my parents met when they were young, everything happened very fast, and they weren’t ready to start a family. Of course my grandparents weren’t happy about this either, and they had a strained relationship, but nobody knew that our grandparents actually had some money!


Next time all of us met, there was a HUGE FIGHT between my parents and my grandparents. My mother remembered all the times when they needed money and my grandparents never helped, even when we really needed it. And how they tried to raise us but were forced into poverty and my grandparents lied and said that they had no money. At one point Mom started to look through their cupboards, trying to find the money she felt she was entitled to. It was then that our grandmother calmly took the envelope, threw it at my Mom’s face, and said “Take it and leave.”


We drove home in silence. Nobody knew what to say, because it felt like all the dirty secrets of our family had been revealed in one night, and there was no chance for any of us to ever go back. Of course Evan and I still loved our parents, so when they said that our grandparents weren’t part of the family anymore, we listened. 
From this point onward, every mention of our grandparents caused a fight in our house. I felt like I hated them, but Evan hated them even more, because he was younger and was listening more closely to what our parents were saying. And our life didn’t really get better with this money - soon it was all gone, because we needed to buy some stuff for the house, including a lot of things we needed to repair. Our house had been in really bad shape for years. 
Three years passed, and all this time we were thinking that our grandparents were evil, cold people. We had zero contact with them, until grandpa called and invited us... to our grandmother’s funeral.


It was sad. My grandfather looked so small and thin, not like he was a few years ago. Nobody really talked during the funeral and the worst part was that Evan refused to go to the funeral, because he hated our grandparents...