My Brother My Mate

Crushed berries

It was lunchtime on a hot summer day when I had to walk, with my tray of food, right past Anthony, the bully at the Grey Hills charity center. Holding my tray, I began to calculate the exact moment when Anthony's unruly hair would turn enough for me to pass without him noticing my presence. I sighed and, with tight lips, detected the precise moment when Anthony turned to listen to Robert, his abuse accomplice. I pressed my feet and began walking towards the safety of the last table in the dining room, having to ignore the call my glasses made as they slid off the bridge of my nose due to my haste.

Without turning my gaze for a single moment, I passed almost brushing Anthony's elbow, my constant tormentor, and just as I was about to make it, my glasses couldn't withstand the forced march and fell to the ground, rolling right towards Anthony's foot. If they got stepped on, I wouldn’t have a replacement until the next semester when the health fair returned, and I could order new ones. I had no other choice but to bend down and pray that Anthony, despite being leaning to his side, wouldn't notice my presence.

With a tremendous show of balance, I managed to bend down while holding the heavy lunch tray with one hand, stretching the other to reach my precious glasses, without which I couldn't see more than blurry spots on the pages of the books I so enjoyed reading. Anthony remained distracted, unaware of my presence. At the decisive moment when I stood up after retrieving my glasses, I felt the most dreadful horror for any girl.

My period had just started, and I hadn't put on a pad that day. With the moisture between my legs, I tried my luck once more, but I had already used up all I had left. I had just stained my pants right next to Anthony, who then noticed my presence.

“I didn't know nerds got their periods too,” exclaimed Anthony, whose loud and very masculine voice always managed to capture everyone's attention in the dining room. “Or did you crush some berries down there?”

The loud laughter that erupted around me made me wish I had the power to become invisible, or merge with the earth and become one with it to never surface again.

Blushing as intensely as the stain on my pants, I opted to reach the safety of the back table I had attempted to get to, but Anthony's strong hand wasn't going to let me, not when I had just given him an excellent reason for a grand spectacle in front of a crowded dining room audience.

“I didn’t say you could leave, nerd,” said Anthony as he grabbed my thin arm, and then I couldn't prevent the tray, with all my lunch, from falling to the floor. “Look at the mess you've made, klutz. You just splashed my new sneakers.”

I didn’t even check if it was true that my bully's sneakers had been splashed. I only wanted it to end as quickly as possible. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on any thought that could take me to a place where nothing that was happening really occurred.

“Hey, nerd, what are you going to do to clean my shoes? Though maybe you should clean yourself first. Look, you're a mess, disgusting. Cover that up.”

Despite having my eyes closed, tears managed to find their way through my tightly shut eyelids. I was enduring the worst humiliation Anthony had ever subjected me to, the brat who had been bullying me for nine years without letting more than two days pass without doing it.

How much I hated him!

How many times had I prayed to the Goddess to take him away, whether it be feet first in a box or because some very unlucky family adopted him; it didn’t matter how, I just wanted Anthony to leave and disappear from my life forever.

Nine years!

It had been nine years of bullying.

I don't know what led Anthony to choose me as his favorite victim, but he seemed to have an obsessive fixation on me. I encountered him in the hallways, in the gardens surrounding the orphanage, he was even daring enough to enter the girls' dormitories just to give me a hard time and remind me of my position because, even though none of the orphans had received their wolf yet, which would only happen when we came of age, the natural hierarchy of a pack was already beginning to show.

“You're an omega, nerd,” Anthony repeatedly insisted every time he finished one of his pranks. “No matter how much you study, you'll always be below me.”

The cruelest part of his words was that they weren’t devoid of truth.

I knew that in the strict hierarchy of werewolves, it wouldn't matter how much I studied, how hard I worked to get the best grades, or if I secured a scholarship at the best university in the country. Sooner or later, I would have a boss like Anthony, an Alpha who, just by being born as such, would be the leader, and I, who was shaping up to be an omega, would always be his subordinate.

When Anthony grabbed my hair to try to drag it towards his shoes and use it as a mop, the Goddess decided to answer her devotee’s prayers.

At least, in part.

“Anthony, stop that, please!” shouted the center's director from the dining room entrance.

Paralyzed by the woman's commanding voice but without letting go of his victim’s reddish hair, Anthony turned his gaze to the one calling him.

“Come to my office immediately. There’s a couple.”

That combination of words: ‘My office + there’s a couple’, was well known to all the orphans in the center. It was a ray of hope for any of us to be able to say goodbye, in the coming days, to that place.

“Where's Mariam?” asked the director immediately, hands on her hips.

Anthony released my hair, and I could turn my head to adjust my glasses, which hung from the bridge of my nose.

“You too, girl. Both of you. To my office. Now!”

Anthony got up immediately, without even looking at me. He almost hit my face with his knee as he stood.

“Hey, you're going to need this,” said a charitable soul, a young girl who had never spoken a single word to me until that moment, in the twelve years I had been at the center, as she handed me a jacket.

With my face still wet, my hair disheveled, and a stain that grew every second on my rear, I took the jacket and wrapped it around my waist.

“Thanks,” I said with a slight nod to the girl before leaving the dining room.

Once outside, I considered stopping by the washroom first and trying to do something about the mess between my legs, but it had never been advisable to keep a couple waiting in the director's office. After tightening the knot of the jacket covering the disaster, I hurried down the hallway leading to the place I had entered only twice in my life: the first time at five years old, the second a year later. Since then, ten years had passed without being called there again.

“Anthony is a distinguished athlete from our center…” the director was saying as I entered, and seeing the three chairs in front of the desk occupied, I decided to remain standing to the side of the door. “His sporting skills have earned him several medals, especially in wrestling and athletics.”

“Though I also play soccer, and some basketball,” added the not-so-modest Anthony.

From my position, behind the couple seated in front of the director, I considered the possibility of being mistaken. Had I also been called? Or did I imagine it as a result of what had happened in the dining room? Why was I in the same meeting as Anthony?

Convinced I was out of place, I prepared to leave when the director called me by my name.

“And this is Mariam, our academic pride. Please, girl, introduce yourself.”

Surprised, I turned my gaze and met the eyes of the couple who were watching me attentively.

“Nice to meet you, Mariam. I’m Alpha Damian, and this is my wife.”

“Luna Emma, dear. What a pleasure,” said the woman elegantly.

“Mariam. Pleased to meet you.”

I shook the couple's extended hands while the thought that I must be dreaming crossed my mind.

It was an Alpha couple!

Had they come to adopt me?

Me?

At sixteen?

And an omega?

No, that wasn’t possible. This had to be a mistake. They must be there for some other matter, not an adoption. No one adopts a teenage orphan. The director herself pointed out the thought passing through my head.

“I must admit this is very unusual,” she said with a nervous smile directed at the Alpha and Luna. “This is the first time something like this has happened in this center in its nearly two centuries of history.”

And Anthony?

What was he doing there, and why had he been talking about his sports achievements?

Would they put us to compete, him and me, to be the one to benefit from the adoption by the Alpha couple?

If we competed in a science, math, Spanish, chemistry, or any academic subject test, I would win, without a doubt, but if they were physical tests, I wouldn't stand a chance, though such a competition was cruel. But they were Alphas, and I had heard they could be like that: cruel and competitive.

“We saw the references before coming,” said Alpha Damian. “You can imagine it's a long journey from the Green Valley pack to here. We wouldn't have come if we weren't sure.”

“My husband is right. We've already decided. It's a made decision,” clarified Luna Emma.

The director's eyes widened like saucers, and I didn't know what they were talking about.

Had they already seen the references?

Did they come from the Green Valley pack?

Had they already made a decision?

“Very well, in that case, I'll do the paperwork,” responded the director with a big smile. “Congratulations, Anthony, Mariam. You've both been adopted by Alpha Damian and Luna Emma. Now you’re like siblings!”