Sweet Romance13 min read
My Name Is Aviana — I Counted Every Step
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I grew up telling people to call my parents "uncle" and "aunt."
"Call us Uncle Brad and Aunt Eleanor," my mother had said once, voice small as a coin. She folded her hands like she was offering a debt. "They'll take you. You'll be safe."
I said what a child says: "Okay."
Then she put my hand in theirs and left. That night the elevator took her away and they closed their door like a pair of final sentences.
"Aviana," Aunt Eleanor said the first morning, bright and sharp, "you are not our child. You are my... distant cousin's daughter. Say it and mean it."
"Yes," I said. My voice felt like a leaf when she said it.
"From now on you call us Uncle Brad and Aunt Eleanor. Not parents. Understand?"
"Understand," I said.
Felix, the boy who slept in the next room and got chicken soup at dinner before me, rolled his eyes and said, "Uncle Brad, can you believe she talks like that?" He curled his legs up on the chair like a prince who had misplaced his crown.
"Shut up," Aunt Eleanor snapped at him. "And you, stop pretending you and she are the same person. She'll be grateful we give her a roof."
I watched them rearrange my life as if I were a piece of furniture.
"Sleep in the storeroom," Aunt Eleanor said, opening a door. "Make yourself useful. Clean. Wash. You are small help, that's all."
"Okay," I said. I put my suitcase in that dim room that smelled like detergent and mothballs and made a bed that sagged in the middle. I learned to be small.
"You should be grateful," Uncle Brad told me once, as if gratitude could erase a past. "We could have thrown you out."
I learned what being grateful could sound like even when your heart was raw.
They had a phrase for me when other people visited. "This is our relative's daughter," Aunt Eleanor would say, smiling like a person who had rehearsed a lie. "She used to live in the countryside."
"How nice," people would say. They didn't ask where my mother had gone. They didn't ask why the words my mother used—"uncle and aunt"—were nets stretched to catch me.
"I will not be small forever," I told myself in the nights when the storeroom was cool and I held a thin blanket to my chin. "If they don't love me, I will love myself properly."
School began again that year for the three of us who shared a house and a kitchen and a set of rules I didn't write.
I came late to the new high school with my backpack that sagged and my skin browned from work in the fields. "New girl," someone whispered.
The homeroom teacher, Mr. Everett Fournier, introduced me. "This is Aviana Durand," he said. "She used to rank high. Please help her adjust."
"Help?" a boy with a shock of blue-gray hair laughed from the back. "She's a planter, right? She hands out rice and mud."
"Don't be mean," Mr. Fournier said. But the laugh stuck like a burr.
The blue-gray boy's name was Marco Holmes. He had hair like evening sky and a smile like a puzzle: he could be sharp and he could be soft, sometimes both in the same breath.
"Sit there," Marco said with a lazy precision, gesturing to the empty seat beside his. "We'll put you in temporary buddy pair. For now."
I sat down, and he nudged the desk in an easy, sideways hello. "I'm Marco," he said.
"Aviana," I answered. The sound of my name in his mouth made my chest do something like dropping a small stone into a deep well.
"Nice to meet you," he said, turning his pen like he had all the time in the world. "Don't worry. I'll scare off the big frogs."
"Frogs?"
"Dumb guys who think the world owes them everything."
He smirked, and his smirk did two things: it kept things light and it hid something steady.
The corridor whispered my reputation faster than I could step. Katelynn Sanchez, a girl with keen eyes and a smile that knew how to cut, led a chorus.
"Village girl," she said like a verdict. "She probably thinks sunshine is a seasoning. She won't last."
"She scored first in the mock test," I heard Mr. Fournier say one morning as he pasted results on the board. "Our new student, Aviana Durand—grade 605."
The sound of numbers had a way of changing faces. Katelynn blinked, her practiced smile rippling into something like fear. The classroom hummed and then broke: "She got first?"
"Impossible," someone whispered.
"She must have luck," Katelynn said, loud enough I could hear it. "County exams are softer."
"Listen to Mr. Fournier," Marco said, eyes on me in a way that was more gentle than curious. "Keep your head. Nobody's allowed to call you small here."
"Why are you defending me?" I asked him later.
He shrugged. "Because you don't fake it." He looked at me with a candor that could be strange in a hoarder of masks. "Also because you're more interesting than the others."
I didn't laugh. I noticed how he watched me when I didn't know it, how sometimes his shoulders tightened when a spotlight of ridicule swung my way. Once he leaned close and whispered, "You look paler than you used to, have you been sleeping?"
"Not enough," I said. "Too much counting minutes."
"Don't do that," he whispered back. "Let me count with you. One more minute well spent is better than ten grudging ones."
Those small things became the first two steps of something I didn't name. He was not a savior. He never showed up like a movie knight. He simply existed near me, straightforward and present, like a sun that refused sudden storms.
At home, the store room remained my shelter. Aunt Eleanor would set a plate of plain greens for me and pile roasted shrimp onto Felix's plate.
"Felix needs to be strong for his future," she would say with a tone that made my veins tighten. "Girls get fat when they eat too much."
"It's not—" Felix would start, then gulp down the words like they were too heavy to swallow.
"You should be grateful," Uncle Brad would say. "We are doing you favors."
I kept my mouth mostly shut. My life was a pile of problems I wanted to fold into neat paper cranes. School was my folding table. I learned every trick of algebra, every rhythm of geometry. I stayed up late; I replaced sleep with practice; I turned my hunger into hunger for answers.
The months loped. Mock tests came and went. I kept climbing.
Felix's face grew sourer. "You think you're better than me now?" he snapped once, in a dark moment by the sink when the dishes cooled. "You think you earned that with mud and weeding?"
"I earned my seat," I said. "I answered the questions."
"You only answered by chance," he said. "Or by cheating."
"Then wow, my cheating must be tailor-made," I said. I don't remember being this sharp before; maybe hurt gives a person that blade.
"You will never take our things," he hissed then, right in my ear. "Not my room, not mom and dad. You're nothing."
"Watch me," I said, and the words were a bell.
I worked like a person who had been given a single match in a long night and decided she would not squander the fire. I swallowed humiliation, counted minutes, and answered more questions. I helped others without needing them to help me back. Sometimes Marco studied with me until midnight, and he would say, "One more practice. Then I will go and pretend I don't exist."
One night before a big exam, I found my phone in a puddle in the kitchen. It had been my father's present—simple and small—but it held pictures of his smile, of a younger me running through a rice field. My heart sank.
"Who did this?" I asked, voice small.
Felix shrugged like a person flinging a coin away. "Oops. Sorry. Hand slipped."
"You're lying," I said, because small things had become big and punctuated the list of reasons he could hurt me.
"Good. Now go and cry in your storeroom. That would be an appropriate hobby for you," Aunt Eleanor said from the door, a quilt of disdain around her.
I chased repair shops in the rain one night. No one could save my phone. Every shop said the parts were gone, antique. I sat on a curb while rain creased my face and thought of my father. I thought of the last video I had of him—his laugh a bright bird in my small chest.
Then someone said my name.
"Aviana?"
Marco stood over me like a bulb sending warmth. "You shouldn't be sitting here."
"I can't fix it," I said, tears starting. "It had our photos."
He put his jacket around my shoulders. He smelled like citrus. "Come on. I'll take you home. I can try to fix it."
"You don't have to—"
"I want to," he said. "And I said I would help."
He rode me home on his motorbike in the rain. He didn't say much. When we reached the house he leaned toward me and said, "I will fix it."
He grabbed the phone, tinkered, and, to my surprise, he turned it on.
"You did it," I breathed. He shrugged like it was ordinary.
"You're dramatic," he said. "But I like your drama."
The drama that binds two people often begins with small alliances—shared umbrellas, touched hands. Marco's help turned into a kind of habit. He sat with me in the school infirmary when I fainted once after an exam. He scolded me like a friend: "Eat properly. Stop proving things with near-collapse."
"Do you think I overdo it?" I asked, weak and honest.
"Yes," he said. "But that fire of yours? It's kind of magnificent."
At school, things shifted. Success made faces turn. Mr. Everett, the homeroom teacher, praised me openly. "Aviana," he said one day, tapping a stack of papers, "we want you in the top class. We will help you more there."
Katelynn tried to make a show. "You will never belong in the top group. That is reserved for those with lines of tutors."
"Then I will draw my own lines," I replied, because I had a chessboard in my head and I was learning moves.
Cristian Werner, the class teacher of the top class, put out his hand. "Aviana, come and sit with us. You belong."
Being moved up felt like a small ceremony. The top class was quieter, more exact. People there had been trained in comfort and authority.
Felix stayed. He barely looked at me. He kept his head down and muttered curses like a person reciting weather.
Sometimes people think the end of a fight is a single gesture. But punishments for those who hurt you, to feel true, must be seen.
The day I went back to pack my things before leaving for university visits—before accepting offers that would carry me out of this house and into a city named a thousand times like a promise—I planned something. Many small coins had become a snowball. I would not be prime minister or judge. I would be public and precise.
I went to the courtyard where neighbors liked to gather when news traveled or when a pot had boiled a little too high. They stood like a jury between the walls of our small block. The gossip engine loved a spectacle.
I had with me a letter and an envelope and a handful of receipts. The receipts had dates and names: months when my mother had been left without treatment; times I had paid for bus tickets from odd jobs; a record of every plate of food Uncle Brad and Aunt Eleanor had forced on me like a leash.
I walked to the center and waited. People murmured and then quieted; the courtyard loves surprise.
"Neighbors," I said, and my voice was steady. "My name is Aviana Durand. You have known me as a girl who was sent here to live with a 'distant relative.' Today I want to tell you what that meant."
Faces leaned in.
"My mother left me on their doorstep because she was sick and because she hoped they would take me. I was told to call them 'uncle' and 'aunt'—I did. They called me a servant. They split the meals unevenly. They broke my phone that had my father's photos. They told me not to say mother or father, only 'uncle' and 'aunt.'"
Someone in the crowd hissed. Aunt Eleanor's lipstick went a shade paler than usual.
"You?" Uncle Brad said, voice that tried to sound calm. "Aviana, what are you doing?"
"You told me once, right in this courtyard, that you could have thrown me out," I said. "But you kept me because it made you look kind. You kept a child as a token. I kept quiet. I learned your rules. I cleaned. I learned to stay small."
"You are being cruel now," Aunt Eleanor said, voice a high thread. "We gave you food. We gave you a roof."
"Food that you brought to only one person's bowl?" I asked. "A roof that had a storeroom with a bed that sagged? Neighbors, I have the bills. I have receipts showing when my mother couldn't afford dialysis because she believed she had money. I have evidence on dates when I had to walk under rain to try to fix a phone that had a last message from my father."
I held up the receipts. They looked like paper swords.
Uncle Brad stepped forward. "All right. This is slander. You are trying to blacken us in public."
"Then let's be public." I told the courtyard everything: the phone in the sink, the nights I went without proper dinner, the years I scrubbed floors while Felix had tutors. I read the dates when my mother had needed dialysis but could not go because she had no money—for the months Aunt Eleanor claimed she had checked the bank account and found everything in order.
"You said you were poor," Aunt Eleanor stammered. "That was not our responsibility."
"Neighbors," I said, softer and sharper at once, "I did not come here for revenge to hurt them. I came to tell you the truth. You deserve to know what you praised when you said 'what a kind family.' You praised their kindness when they hosted me, but you didn't see their cruelty folded into it."
There was a ring of murmurs. Faces shifted like fish in a net.
Felix's eyes turned on me, first with anger, then with the slow dawning that he had done something ugly now seen by others. "You—" He began.
"Enough," Uncle Brad said, voice catching on the word. "You are humiliating us."
"You humiliated me for years," I said. "Do you think words can only go one way? Today you will hear how it felt." I told the courtyard about the night I came back to a locked house, a suitcase abandoned outside, and an elevator that took my mother away. The people listening now had the image in their faces like a mirror.
"My mother called them and left me there because she was sick," I said. "She cried as she left. She left me in a shocking act of trust. And they had a choice: to teach me how to live, or to treat me as a thing. They chose the latter."
"Aviana—" Aunt Eleanor tried to interrupt.
"Please," a neighbor called. "We want to hear."
They wanted drama. They wanted the truth.
I named the times they had said I shouldn't visit my mother, the nights they told me to study and not to complain, the day Felix threw my phone into the sink.
For a long while no one spoke. Then someone leaned forward. "Is this true? Really true?"
"Yes," I said. "I have the receipts. I brought them." I handed the papers to a neighbor who had run a small shop for twenty years. He read and his face went white.
"What do you want?" Aunt Eleanor cried. "To take our reputation? To make us look bad?"
"Only to show what living with you looked like," I said. "If your kindness is a story you want to tell people, then they should know the whole story."
The neighborhood's judgment is a force. It moves like a tide that shifts sand.
"Is this why you never took her to the hospital?" someone asked. "Is this why she said her mother stopped dialysis?"
"I—" Aunt Eleanor faltered.
Uncle Brad's jaw tightened. "We did not stop anyone from going to the hospital."
"Then why did you never send money?" the shopkeeper demanded. "This letter says bills were unpaid for two months, but you told us everything was fine."
Felix, who had been watching like a person in a dream, suddenly looked small. Men and women in the courtyard used words I had wanted like keys: "neglect," "shame," "abandon." People who had greeted Aunt Eleanor with cakes now whispered behind their hands.
A few neighbors took out phones and filmed. Others stood sullen, arms crossed. Some looked at me with new sympathy. A few even clapped when I finished because public truth sometimes feels like a great weighing.
Aunt Eleanor's smile cracked. "You—" she began. Then she stopped. The neighbors were looking at her differently, as if the apron she always wore had been removed and everything underneath visible.
Uncle Brad's face went pale. "You're making false accusations. You will regret this," he said, trying to make anger a shield.
"Regret what?" I asked. "That people now know your kindness was conditional? That people now realize you used me to show off your virtue? I have no wish to destroy you. I only want to be honest."
Felix pressed his hand to his face and wept. It was small and ugly and entirely human. He had enjoyed privileges, and he had been cruel. The courtyard had recorded it; cruelty and privilege are rarely private.
Aunt Eleanor turned to him, suddenly protective. "Felix, don't you dare—"
"Mother!" he barked. "Stop acting like nothing happened."
The neighbors shifted. Some hissed when Felix shouted. Others looked away. A woman who had once exchanged recipes with Aunt Eleanor now stepped forward.
"I baked bread for your family last year," she said, voice shaking. "I brought it because I thought you were kind. I will never think that again if this is true."
By the end, Uncle Brad and Aunt Eleanor were not jailed or fined. I didn't want that. I wanted something else: for them to feel the smallness of the way they had treated me reflected back at them by the people who had once praised them.
They stood in my courtyard, colored with embarrassment. The gossip that had once applauded them now weighed them down. Faces that had once smiled at them now kept a distance. Children they had waved at now stared.
Felix collapsed on the stoop and clutched his head like someone realizing they'd been playing with a loaded toy. "I didn't know—" he sobbed. "I didn't know—"
"Did you ever ask?" I said softly.
He made a sound that was neither yes nor no.
Uncle Brad tried to hold his posture. He asked me to leave the receipts with him. He said the words of a man trying to stitch a shirt with gloves. "We will make it right," he said. "We are your family."
"You didn't make it right when it mattered," I said. "You waited until I was standing with my own name."
After a long pause, I handed them an envelope. Inside were five thousand and some change—the exact amount I had earned cleaning houses and saving. "This is the rent you'll keep," I said. "And this is the payment for the years you made me smaller."
I left the money on their table and walked away. Neighbors watched like a story had ended.
There was one private moment after. Aunt Eleanor ran out to the street and said—loud enough for a crowd—"We raised him well. He must apologize."
Felix came to me the next morning at the gate. His face was red and he looked like he had run a race to stand in shoes that didn't fit.
"Aviana," he muttered. "I'm sorry."
"Is that for the phone you broke or for everything?" I asked.
"For everything," he said, and there was a rawness I had never imagined possible in his voice. "I thought you were a joke. I thought—"
"Then do one thing," I said. "Stop acting like a victim. Live your work. Earn something with more than your name."
He nodded. He seemed to mean it.
The courtyard story made Aunt Eleanor and Uncle Brad change how others saw them, and that was a punishment of the daily kind. They endured looks, whispers, and the truth. For me, it was not vengeance. It was a public unmasking and a chance to close that door.
Life moved on. I went to university. During face-to-face enrollment Marco waited at the gate. He put his hand into mine and said, "So this is the next chapter."
"Yes," I said. "And I'm tired of being small."
He kissed me, quick and sweet. He had always been there, a steady person with pockets of mischief. "You did every hard thing," he said. "You earned it."
At graduation I got a call. "Aviana," Marco murmured as if he could not say the rest. "We both made it."
"I couldn't have done it without you," I admitted.
"No," he said, "you did it. I just kept you from going under a few times."
Years later, I sometimes think of that courtyard and how the neighbors rearranged themselves like furniture. People aren't always what they seem. Some help you clear your path, and some sit on it.
I look at a photo of my mother now, on a shelf with a small plant. Her hair was gray in the photo, and she smiled like she had a secret. I call her and tell her about the city, the way marble lobbies smell of lemon. She laughs and says, "I was proud of you."
"Thank you," I say. "You left me once because you were sick. I'm not angry anymore."
"You were brave," she says. "You were brave and you taught me to be honest."
"Mom," I say, "I still count minutes sometimes."
"One at a time," she says. "You have always been that way."
I keep one receipt in a drawer as a reminder. Money alone cannot repay the past. But I know how to count my steps, and I know the value of a public truth.
The end of some stories is not one sentence. Mine is a little list: a storeroom, a phone with cracked glass, a courtyard full of neighbors, and the man with blue-gray hair who fixed my phone and, later, my coffee.
"Promise me one thing," Marco said once, tapping my palm like he was securing a fragile cup. "When the world gets loud, we'll keep our own quiet."
"Deal," I said, and I meant it.
I still tell people my name and not their labels. I teach students now sometimes, in a small way, and when a child says, "Call me 'uncle' and 'aunt' instead of parent," I stop and ask why. We count and we measure. We learn to be brave.
The End
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