The Family Royce
This isn’t the beginning of the story. This is simply where it gets interesting, where my sister and I come in.
Ventura wasn’t unknown to us. It was centuries of our family history. We knew it was there. We knew who owned it. We knew it was worth a lot. We knew that it could never be sold… and we knew that every generation it was passed down when the old owner died. Never, even in our wildest dreams, did we ever think it would be passed down to us.
“Your grandmother loved you two,” our father had stated like that was all there was to it. Richard Royce was a tall and bulky man, with a shaved head and a long greying moustache and goatee that fell to the centre of his chest. His eyes were almost black, but they glittered with kindness. Never was there a raised voice or hurtful tone. We were lucky to have him for a Dad and we made a point of showing him we knew it.
Of course, we knew Grandma loved us; we were her grandkids, but she had a lot of grandkids and a lot of kids for that matter. Why us? What made us so special? We were certainly grateful, but it didn’t seem to make sense and first and foremost, I was always the inquisitive type.
“It was her that gave you your nicknames, remember?” Dad had gone on, while we sat staring at the letter from Grandma’s lawyer that was to alter our lives forever.
In my entire living memory we’d only ever been Rogue and Ranger; never Rivven and Raven. Not even our school used our birth names and no, I hadn’t remembered. But when I thought about it, that was right. She had given us our nicknames, but that just led to me questioning even more things that weren’t adding up.
I’d been named after my many times great grandmother Raven, who was alive when Ventura was being designed and built. Ventura was my grandmother’s pride and joy, a testament to her family legacy and her entire heritage. If anything, she’d want me to feel that same pride due to my namesake… but she wanted to call me something else. Why? Why Rogue and Ranger? And why leave Ventura to us when she still had living children?
Yes, we were the first set of twins born to the family since Raphael and Romana. It was Raphael who was married to Raven when construction on Ventura first began, and it was the twins’ father Romira who had originally orchestrated the build, but centuries had passed since then.
After they died in a tragic fire, Romana was given ownership of Ventura and when she died, it was handed down to Rachel, Raphael and Raven’s daughter who Romana had cared for after they died. It had been passed down ever since… and now it was ours, but why?
It had never before been passed down by more than a single generation and Grandma Reina was an absolute stickler for tradition. None of it made sense, but I was considered paranoid by my family to question it so thoroughly.
“Why does it bother you so much not to know?” my mother Lyla had asked us. Mum was a tiny woman. Rogue and I were both taller than her by the time we were twelve. She had hair that sat just below her shoulders and was never the same colour two months in a row, and cool green eyes that reminded you of still, quiet water. She wore angled glasses with a black frame most of the time and was usually wearing an apron covered in either flour or paint, depending on her hobby preference that week.
At that moment, it was like she’d never met me. When your family has something that is so large and is worth so much, and it ends up being left in a will to two kids, teenagers or not, you’re going to wonder why, especially when questioning everything- from why is the sky blue to why do square roots exist- had been my default setting my entire life. What I didn’t understand was why my parents didn’t wonder why.
“I guess they just understood Grandma Reina better than we did,” my sister had whispered to me on the way back to our room. Even though we weren’t children and there were plenty of rooms for us to have one each, we still shared the one. When our parents asked us whether we wanted our own rooms, all they got in reply was a dumb look. It had never occurred to us that we could be separated, let alone want to be.
My sister plopped down onto her bed, but I walked over to the dresser. There, stuck into the side of the mirror was a series of photos. Us growing up; our parents bringing us home as babies; Grandma Reina with her husband, Grandpa Lee, who had taken the Royce name for Grandma, as she was the last of her line, and only a man of such dignity and respect would have been a match for her; all of us on the family grounds last Christmas; and finally, one with great however many times grandma Rachel, all of five years old, standing beside Romana after the death of her parents had left her orphaned.
I locked eyes with myself in the mirror. Raven Royce. Ranger. I was shorter, slighter, and paler than my sister. Rogue was almost so tall she had to bob down to see her whole face. My large eyes were a bright blue, sitting on either side of a pointy nose on a round oval face. Dirty blonde hair fell over my broad shoulders and down almost to my hips in a sleek straight sheet. Moles and freckles were splattered across my body from my large forehead down, and as I gazed into my eyes, wishing my lashes were thicker, I had to raise myself onto my tiptoes to get close enough.
I eventually gave up trying to find the answer in the mirror and turned to face my sister. Rogue was a solid half a foot taller than me, and her olive skin always tanned where mine burned, which led to far more freckles. Her face was longer, her hair was a dark brown and her eyes were an icy blue that felt like they pierced your soul.
Dad, ever the Dungeons and Dragons nerd, always said we matched our nicknames perfectly: me; smaller, swifter, and built for ranged weapons and Rogue; tougher, a deadly hand, and a near silent mover. She could get to the kitchen at two in the morning and heat leftovers without our parents ever hearing a peep. Regardless, I found just as many answers looking at her as I did staring at myself… none.
I sat down next to her and from her place, sprawled across the centre of the bed on her stomach, she groaned: “Move, there’s no room.”
“You have a queen size bed,” I snorted derisively.
“Exactly. It’s at capacity,” her muffled voice drifted out from underneath the pillow.
“Ha HA,” I responded sarcastically. “Your wit knows no bounds.”
“Witty enough to inherit the family estate, apparently,” she shot back, still into her pillow.
Yes… but WHY?
§
The day the letter came, four days before, Rogue and I were at school. “She’s done it again!” our friend Gia hissed to me as she planted herself on the bus seat beside me. Gia was brown all over. She had tanned skin the colour of an iced coffee and small, bright brown eyes with lashes that seemed to go on forever. Her almost black hair fell just past the shoulders in kinks and waves. She was the tallest girl in our year and there were times when certain people gave her a hard time. Mainly, a girl named Reina, who enjoyed a lot of names that really hurt Gia.
Reina was the type who considered herself perfect; perfect skin, perfect hair, perfect height, perfect life. So, if your family had less money, you were trash; if your family had more money, then you were pretentious and entitled. If you straightened your hair, you were a try hard, but if you left it natural, you weren’t ‘taking care of yourself’. There was no way to win against her and so there were many who took the: ‘if you can beat them; join them’ stance. As such, she had amassed a crowd of followers who all acted like her.
Gia didn’t know her relatives. She struggled with dyslexia and fought for every academic achievement she had. That was how we met. When she moved to town with her foster family she was placed into the same school support program I was in for my ADHD. She never wore makeup, and her height could have put the Harlem Globetrotters to shame. This all made her a wonderfully placed target for Reina and her groupies. Her family, her height, her dyslexia, her skin tone; because “that colour shirt really doesn’t suit you, sweetie”; all of it made Gia the perfect prey.
The worst part of it was the fact that Reina just so happened to be our cousin, named after our grandmother. Because of this, we weren’t able to set her straight or we’d cop it once we got home, because of course “Reina is a beautiful, smart girl! She’s kind to everyone!” her mother, our Aunty Regina, would say. If she caught wind of us speaking out against her daughter, she’d take her outrage out on her husband, Uncle Reiner, who would, in turn, take it to Dad, his brother.
Even though Dad was well aware that Reina had some deceptive, shady tendencies, he was most definitely a ‘stay in your own lane’ type of man and if there was one thing he expected in his life above all else, it was peace. That was part of the reason he didn’t really care that he’d been overlooked with the inheritance of Ventura. If it wasn’t his, the drama surrounding it wasn’t either.
Rogue and I didn’t care whether or not Reina was beautiful, smart, or our cousin; we hated her with every fibre of our being. It made things worse that not only was she our age; she was at our school and in our classes too. Rogue responded in a far more mature and adult manner. She kept the peace, spoke calmly and respectfully, no matter how Reina was behaving and refused to be drawn in, much like our father, to the drama that followed Reina around. I, however, had a completely different tack. I was the impulsive one who responded on instinct and acted before thinking. I was the protector who would gladly throw away my reputation to go to bat for someone who was being unfairly targeted. I was the one Rogue had spent most of her life keeping in check to stop me from going too far and getting into trouble.
“Don’t worry. Aunty Regina and Uncle Reiner are sending her to a private school so come the end of the year, you’ll probably never see her again,” Rogue pointed out.
“And when you have events she’s invited to?” Gia pressed, raising an eyebrow.
“Gotta have them to worry about her being invited to them,” I retorted. My father was not the most social of people, especially with the extended family. Mum, Rogue and I were all he wanted. We hadn’t even been to a family function since the funeral we had for Aunty Rhiannon, Dad’s sister. She disappeared years ago and still, no one knows what happened to her.
“She’s such a pain,” Rogue cut in factually. “She’s giving the family a bad name.”
“Freedom… not bad,” Gia smiled, ignoring her, nodding and displaying a row of straight, white teeth as she pictured it. “Wait what about you?” she asked, the smile dropping off her face.
“Ha!” Rogue snorted with laughter. “Mum and Dad said they were thinking about sending us too… before Ranger lost it.” She raised an eyebrow in a ‘go on’, motion.
“I wouldn’t call getting on my hands and knees and screaming losing it,” I sighed, breathing out slowly. “There was begging among the screams, you just couldn’t hear them.”
“We weren’t about to let them stick us with Reina until we finished school. We almost died when we were told she was going to start with us,” Rogue said. “And there was no reason to change this late. We started here; we’ll finish here.”
Ten minutes later, we were off the bus and at our front door. The second we’d gone through it Mum was upon us, bawling her eyes out. “Mum! What’s wrong?” Rogue called over her tears. She took a shuddered breath, before leading us into the lounge room, where our father was seated in his favourite armchair. When we walked into the room, he looked up and we saw that his face, too, was tear stained. He beckoned us over. We sat down on the arms of his chair and he put an arm around each of us.
“What is it, Dad?” I asked flatly. And so we found out that Grandma Reina had died, and Ventura… was ours.
