“You want me to sit with toddlers?” I asked. His patience finally snapped and he told me that I simply did not fit in with the people who came here to network and close major deals.
“You are not on their level, so just sit in the back, eat your meal, and please try not to embarrass me,” he muttered. My throat tightened with anger as I reminded him that I worked just as hard as anyone else in the room.
He let out a short and mocking laugh before telling me that my little freelance blog did not count as a real career. “I do not have time for this, so stay at Table Nineteen and do not even think about approaching Xavier Thorne when he arrives,” he commanded.
He told me that a billionaire CEO like Xavier was completely out of my league before he walked away to greet a group of men in expensive suits. I watched him walk through the crowd and had no idea that the man he just forbade me from speaking to was actually my biggest client.
I knew that the revolutionary speech Xavier had given at the London summit last week had been written on my laptop at three in the morning. To my brother, I was just a strange sister who wrote small things in coffee shops and had never achieved anything significant.
I took a deep breath and walked toward the back of the room where I found the disastrous setup of Table Nineteen. There were plastic cups and crayons scattered everywhere along with plates of cold chicken nuggets and a baby crying in a stroller.
I sat down in the middle of the chaos until a young boy with a messy bowtie looked up at me and said he liked my dress. “Thank you very much,” I replied with a small smile.
“I like monsters and fast cars,” he told me while holding up a blue crayon. “I like those things too,” I said as the woman watching the children gave me a sympathetic look from across the table.
“Did they exile you to the corner as well?” she whispered with a tired laugh. I told her that I apparently did not fit the desired profile for the main tables and she replied that at least nobody at this table was pretending to be someone else.
I sat there for the next hour handing out juice boxes and drawing a massive dragon for the boy whose name was Parker. From my seat in the shadows, I could see my brother acting like he was the king of the world while my parents beamed with pride at his success.
They had spent years looking down on me and asking if I was still writing things on the internet while they praised Jeffrey for knowing how to climb the social ladder. They never understood that while Jeffrey talked constantly, I was the one who listened and turned those observations into powerful words.
By the time I was twenty-six, I had signed secret contracts with some of the most influential people in the country who were happy to pay for my voice. I earned more money than my family could ever imagine, but I kept my success quiet and they never bothered to ask the right questions.
