Jaime Kenneth had been an odd child, to start with.

When he was brought home for the first time, the relatives flood over. They cooed and poked at the skinny, wiry kid whose pointy edges hid well under his elegant smile in a way that reminded them sharply of his adopted father. And when the people asked Jaime what’s his birthplace or what’s his hometown, the answer flow out of him was automatic, almost like a reflex. “Sarasota,” he had said. There was a gasp volleyed across the adults, only now did the men and women regarded him with intrigue and interest. Whispered words behind folded napkins edged around the peripheral of his hearing.

“A child coming from the scum, yet so quick to assimilated in this elite system.” A woman with a sharp feign-British accent, who later he known as Aunt Myra, spoke to his father at the recliner, sipping her wine, although she never let her drilling leer wander off from Jaime. “You certainly had a good eye for your heir, big brother.” At this, Myra’s eyes flickered down to her side, where her baby daughter, Lilith, was crawling about. A subdued look of repugnance passed her face, and quickly obscured when she turned back. But it was there, Jaime would recognize it, for he had seen the same faint frown on his birth mother.“Tell me, where did he come from, Goldie?”

“Why does it matter?” His father replied. “He’s here, now. He’s with us, we’re his parents. This is his hometown, this is where he was borned, this is where he would grow up and graduate and come back to. Now, let me enjoy a goddamn football game, Myra. Go bug Jane.”

And it was true, Jaime had thought. It doesn’t matter what the paper says. He didn’t exist until the eleventh of May in 2014, until he was running up the ivy-choked porch and tumbled through the door to the inside of his real childhood and became a Kenneth. Days in Welch and Beckley never exist, and never once in his life he regret the decision to censor memories from himself. For what was there for him to remember? Welch was the place where he was nothing but the town whore’s son, where he fought kids twice his size every day, where he let old men molested him for a crumpled bill and a rare hot dish of stale fries. While Beckley’s only distinct imprint was an over-populated foster home with dripping pipes and feces-reeked food. The memories were of his past life, a life that he did not borned in nor experienced nor connected to.

Sarasota was, and still is, his one and only home. This is where there’s a mansion he would say that was his first love for its spare rooms and vacant hallways, for its wide, glossy black driveway, for its never-empty fridge and sun-light exterior. Sarasota, where there’s a tamed garden and the familiar outline of his mother’s back bobbing behind a rose bush, where there are tepid Spanish and Vietnamese and blues country music mingled in the viscous noon sunlight, where there are boys and girls with brown-crisp skin running barefoot up and down the roads in the never-ending game of tag, smearing their bloody footprints over green, warm lawns.

But Sarasota was far from heaven. Unlike Welch or Beckley, Sarasota doesn’t bare their blunt, vulgar flanks naked for the world to ridicule, instead, its ugliness came from pinches under the table and secretive smiles traded over a bottle of champagne, from masked fatal words that serrated right through your disadvantages, from glares and handshakes over a sealed suitcase, from white, white teeth cutting on diamond rings and ruby necklaces. It’s a place where you’ve to calculate the first hundred steps even before you put down your foot, lest glass shards mangle your skin. One would find it an oppressive environment, however Jaime was drawn to it like a moth to a flame. He was fascinated by the raw, throbbing wickedness that each of them wrapped and hid in their head, fascinated by the endless facade and personalities he had discovered. And he was addicted to the superior thrill thrumming in his veins as he witnessed nemesis fallen into the great conclusion he had constructed.

It was like Dark Magic, or, as Aunt Myra once put it, heroin. Once you’ve inhale it, you would never get out. It would be in your system, soaked in your words, deep-rooted in your character.

Others may try to fight the symptoms, but Jaime embraced it wholeheartedly. He became Sarasota.

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He was caught sneaking into the father’s study room. Jaime vaguely remembered the knee-jolt, jumping sensation in his stomach when a pair of giant hands ripped the paper clippings from him. His father had stood towering over the crouched Jaime, red shadow filtering from the coloured glass pane dipped and carved into his skin, adding a sheer menace onto the man’s crude features.

“Out,” His father ground out from clenched teeth. The child Jaime heard him, loud and clear, yet he could not bring himself to clamber up. Neither could he tore his eyes from the bold, black headline crunched in his the man’s fists. It was the first time, the very first time, he could catalogued his father’s angry expression.

Senator Goldman Kenneth Arrested for Fraudulent: One Million Pound Had Vanished. Thirty-Years In Prison Awaited.

“Out,” His father bellowed, and this time, he bolted out of the room, letting the faded photograph of his father who marched into the squad car with a blank, unreadable face, his trench coat billowed behind him. The image blazed in his mind, making him tossed restlessly for nights, trying to conceive how a harmless-looking man like Mr. Kenneth could possibly be a grand thief like that. How could a treacherous man possibly conceal his true cunning nature for so long? How could he make anyone—how could he make Jaime—look at him and see only a man whose touch was too kind, whose posture was too rigid out of silly formality and awkwardness with his words?

Later—possibly when his father had cooled down, or perhaps when child Jaime had decided to confront his foster parents’ past, or maybe when they reconciled or something—later, at some point, his father had told him: Son, we’re not what we’re.

Jaime couldn’t remember what were they talking about that leads to that. He couldn’t even recall when exactly or what was his father’s expression did his father say that, nor could he remember their surrounding or the atmosphere that swallowed them. His memory kept shifting into a new scenario every time he revisited it, as if his mind was deliberately censored out that single event. But for what purpose, he couldn’t fathom. Nonetheless, the situation may vary, his father might or might not put his heavy hand on Jaime’s shoulder, one detail would never change: his father would eventually say, “We’re not what we’re.” And the dreams, if he should refer to them so, would end right there, right after Jaime said, “Indeed.”

Recently, Jaime often found himself falling asleep silently mouthing the syllables in the damp darkness. The words that keep ringing crystal clear over and over again in his head like a silver bell, guiding him to the path of light at the end. He would feel the layered meanings hovering just out of his reach, beckoning him to unpeel and explore the sacred Pandora’s box. We’re not what we’re. It had become something Jaime mulled over a lot more listlessly at every free second as he matured into adulthood.

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Jaime woke up early, his father’s words echoed in his head, fading slowly into nothingness. He lied in his bed, hands braced on his stomach, inhaled and exhaled evenly.

The fierce rain had mellowed and petered out at dawn. Cool air rushed through the cracks of the window, caressed his senses and made him drunk in the fresh, cleansed scent of dew, greenery and ethereal sunlight.

He wretched the storm-shutter open and slided the glass pane over to lean out, arms folded, chin nestled in the inner of his elbow, watching the round imperfect orange orb shimmered above the horizon and then quickly got obscured by a blanket of cloud, reduced to nothing but a halo of light. clearing the fog. Vague golden rays penetrated the bruised sky, and the purple slowly disintegrated into unyielding white.

It was beautiful, but it reminded him of his father’s funeral. So, he shut the window.