My Brother My Mate

The most important thing is popularity

Anthony's POV

The nerd.

Now I was the stepbrother of the nerd!

I tossed my suitcase onto the bed in my new room, which wasn't half bad, and answered Mike's call, who had been calling me for a while.

The first thing I heard was his laughter and that it was on speaker, because the other guys were laughing too.

"Did a couple really adopt both of you?" Mike asked even though he already knew the answer. He just wanted me to repeat that yes, the nerd was now my stepsister so they could laugh at my situation again.

"Stop laughing, assholes. If you saw my room, you'd stop," they were starting to annoy me.

"Man, let us have some fun, we know you've always been our leader, that you're undoubtedly an Alpha, and that the Goddess has smiled upon you since birth, despite the death of your parents." Mike's words were true, and my bad mood eased a bit. "Now you're going to live the life of a true Alpha. Surely the couple that adopted you wants you as their heir, but brother, not everything could go perfectly for you, right? You had to have the nerd as your stepsister."

More laughter, but this time it didn't bother me. The guys were right. Even though the nerd's room was now next to mine, from that moment on, I would have the life of an Alpha. The life I deserved.

"Tomorrow is your birthday, man. Can we come? How far have you gone?" Mike asked.

I pursed my lips.

It would have been really nice if the guys could attend my party and see the place where I was going to live now.

"We drove about three hundred miles, sorry. I'm pretty far away, in another pack's territory. Green Valley, I think it's called."

I heard the protests from the guys over the speaker.

"That sucks, man!"

"I know, but it's not that bad," I threw myself onto the double bed that was now just for me. "Tomorrow, I'll start meeting the girls at my new high school."

"May their parents protect them," Mike laughed. "If their families knew you had arrived, they would surely be asking your new father to keep you, to ban you from entering the high school."

"I promise you a video call when my new parents' party is about to start, and you'll also get to see the new girls."

That excited the guys who, like me, were tired of meeting the same girls from the orphanage. The promise of new and young flesh was what excited me the most.

"It will surely be a great party, worthy of an Alpha. You should send a car to pick us up," Mike suggested, echoing the request of some of the guys.

"Nothing would please me more, but I still don't have enough trust with my new parents..." Then I remembered that I would have a shared party with the nerd and told the guys, so they wouldn't be surprised if they saw some pink balloons or a Barbie cake at the party.

"Are you kidding me? No, it can't be that you both have your birthdays on the same day!" Mike teased. I had given them a new reason to tease me.

"It seems so," I complained. "According to the documents they have about us, we were also born on the same day, so we'll transform on the same date, isn't that terrible?"

"But for that to happen, there's still a year left, right? You're the same age as us, man, sixteen."

"Starting tomorrow, seventeen, yes. At least there's one more year before we transform, and by then the nerd might not even be here anymore, who knows."

"Well, man, although a shared party sucks, I wish you the best and we look forward to that video call, so you can show us the girls from Green Valley pack." Mike said goodbye.

I thanked the guys for their call and reaffirmed my promise to call them the next day, when I was halfway through the party.

As I got up from the bed, I heard Luna Emma's voice on the other side of the door. She was calling me for dinner. I replied that I would be down soon and sighed. Now I would have to endure the nerd's ugly face at the same table. I would make sure to establish our distance, and hierarchy, very clearly, lest she, being my stepsister, now think we were equals.

No.

That would never happen.

I went down to the dining room determined to make that very clear.

Mariam's POV

My room was beautiful. The only thing that spoiled it was the fact that it was next to my new stepbrother's room and that the two rooms were connected by a common door, which I crossed through one of the several dressers full of new clothes.

Luna Emma, or mom, as I wanted to start calling her, called me to dinner just as I locked the door to my stalker's room.

"I'm coming out now. Thanks."

I would have liked to have time to take a shower before having to go downstairs, so changing clothes must have sufficed. When I got to the dining room, I was even more dazzled than with the look of my room.

Truly, a pack house was a spectacular place. I had never had the chance to enter one, and this one fulfilled everything I had imagined it to be. Only Anthony's presence spoiled it, as he was already sitting at one of the twenty seats at the long table.

I sat as far away from him as possible, but close enough to my new parents not to be rude to them. The food platters soon arrived in the hands of several servants.

It was incredible.

I was beginning to live like a millionaire.

"We will have a great party," Luna Emma said after the prayer and as the servants began to fill our plates with delicacies I had never dreamed of trying. "I hope tomorrow you can make new friends at school and invite them over to our house in the afternoon."

I noticed Anthony looking at me with a sinister smile on his face.

"I can assure you that my entire class will come, Luna, but I'm afraid that from my sister's side, nothing will come except the dead frog from the science lab."

He was a jerk, but what was more painful was that he might not be wrong.

"I don't think so," Alpha Damian said as his eyes met mine. "Mariam is a very beautiful young woman. I'm sure she'll make a great impression at school and will be very popular in the first few hours when everyone starts to get to know her."

Anthony laughed, and I began to hate that conversation.

"I'm afraid, Alpha, that you're putting your hopes in a lost case. She has never been popular, and she never will be, not even as your daughter."

"Actually, I don't care about being popular," I said as I cut into my meat. "I'm content with being smarter than you."

I noticed that despite the slight smile Luna Emma gave me, my new parents weren't entirely pleased with my comment.

"Popularity is very important for the Alpha family," my new dad pointed out. "I assure you, Mariam, that tomorrow, when everyone at school knows you're our daughter, what you've said will change. You'll be very popular right away, so I hope you can invite as many kids to your party as possible because tomorrow's event will be a gauge for you, young people, in the eyes of the most prominent members of the Green Valley pack. Do you understand?"

Though I nodded to my father, I felt an immense knot in my stomach. I wasn't at all sure that being the Alpha's daughter would be enough for me to achieve what I had never done in my life: to have at least one genuine friend.

Anthony was smiling and kept directing his hateful and mocking looks at me.

I feared he was about to do something disastrous.

"Did you hear that, nerd? Popularity is everything. Here, intelligence is secondary, or tertiary. If you want to lead a pack, you must, above all, be popular."

I ignored Anthony's words because I knew he only wanted to provoke me, but Luna Emma did react, as perhaps Anthony hoped would happen.

"Nerd? Why do you call your sister that? I don't want you using those nicknames between you now that you're siblings."

Anthony smiled with the same satisfaction as a fisherman who has cast the line and caught a big fish on the first try.

"Oh, I'm sorry, but that's what we called her at the center. She was the nerd, and it seems she wants to keep being the same here." I lowered my gaze, flushed and embarrassed. I knew Anthony wouldn't stop, but it was already too late to silence him. "I never saw her with a friend, in fact, I think she never talked to anyone. She must have talked to herself because she also sat alone in the dining room, spent time in the library during breaks, and no one wished her good night when we went to sleep, right, nerd?"

I felt a great congestion rising through my neck and spreading across my face, reaching my eyes, where it tried to escape in the form of thick tears.

"For Goddess's sake, Anthony, how can you say that about your sister!" exclaimed Luna Emma, my mom, in an attempt to defend me. "What you're saying is impossible. No one can be alone. I'm sure Mariam had at least one friend, right, sweetheart? Maybe you weren't the most popular at the adoption center, but you had a friend, Anthony just never saw her."

The saddest and cruelest part of it all was that Anthony was right.

I didn't have, in my sixteen, almost seventeen years at the adoption center, a single friend. No one.

That's how unpopular I was.

"I..." I couldn't articulate any more words. The congestion in my face erupted, and, with all the shame in the world, I found myself forced to get up and run out as tears streamed down my cheeks.

"I hope you're satisfied, Anthony!" I managed to hear Luna Emma say, but my stalker cared little for our new mother's rebuke.

Alpha Damian said nothing. Surely he was already regretting adopting me.

I ran to my room, sure that perhaps I only had the night hours left there. The next day I would be forced to get in the car and return to the adoption center. I wasn't worthy of an Alpha family. They had made a mistake with me.

I closed the door and threw myself onto the bed, desperate.

How could Anthony be so cruel.

He hadn't even given me a chance to stay for a day. Surely he had done it because he wanted the birthday party for himself alone, as if it were my fault that our birthdays coincided.

I would never have a birthday party for myself.

As the tears became less frequent, I heard Luna Emma knock on the door of my room.

"Mariam, dear, can I come in?"

Luna Emma's voice was sweet and caring, just as I supposed a mother's should be, and although I didn't want to talk to anyone at that moment, to avoid the risk of further humiliation, it was her home, and I was just a guest for the night. I opened the door after wiping my face.

"Don't pay attention to Anthony's words, to your brother's." Luna Emma said after sitting next to me, on the edge of the bed. "I didn't know what kind of boy he was, I'm sorry. I thought you two got along considering that... well, actually, it doesn't matter, all you need to consider now, Mariam, is that this is your new family, and you are welcome here, no matter who you were or what happened at the Grey Hills orphanage, do you understand?"

"You're not going to kick me out?" I dared to ask, hoping to know how many more hours I could stay under the roof of that wonderful house.

"Kick you out? What are you talking about? Of course we're not going to kick you out, why would you think that?"

Luna Emma seemed to be a very understanding woman whom I could trust.

"I thought, as Alpha Damian said, popularity is everything for you, and since I'm not..."

Luna Emma rolled her eyes and smiled.

"Oh, dear, of course not. Well, maybe you misunderstood my husband's words. What he meant is that you'll be very popular here, that there's no way you won't be, being our daughter, and if you're not by tomorrow at school, don't worry either because after the party, when everyone knows who you are, you'll see how the next day all the most popular girls will want to be with you and be your friends, I can assure you."

I was surprised that Luna Emma had so much confidence in me.

"I don't know, I don't feel very sure that will happen..."

"Nonsense, dear. It will. Believe me. Even I, though you might not believe it, wasn't that popular in school, did you know?"

I looked up and locked eyes with Luna Emma. She did seem to have been very popular during her youth, and even now, being the Luna, she must have been the most popular woman in the entire pack. Her beauty, poise, and self-assurance screamed how popular she was.

"She wasn't?"

"Just a little, nothing more. Normal stuff. But now my past doesn't matter, only your present does, daughter. What matters now is your present and your future."

Luna Emma's words filled me with confidence, and the fact that she had already called me 'daughter' was even more gratifying.

"Thank you... mom." I said before we hugged.

"Rest, little one. You'll see how tomorrow you'll be the most popular girl in high school. Don't worry."

Luna Emma kissed my forehead before leaving the room, and before falling asleep, I wanted her words to be true.

Would I, just by being the daughter of the Alphas, be the most popular girl in high school?

That remained to be seen.