Today being a party day means tomorrow’s schedule is already penciled in, and it will be an eventful ‘do nothing but rot in front of a giant television while feeding each other pain pills and swearing to never drink again day. And let’s not forget the late-night dinner that is guaranteed to follow, which will more than likely end with someone screaming at their boyfriend for flirting with the waitress of the hour. Poor waitresses.

And my parents said life would be less predictable here.

I wonder if they can feel how hard my eye roll is from across the globe?

No matter how much they like to pretend they’re not teetering at the tip of the dreaded hill every bad birthday card teases past the age of twenty-nine, they have no idea what being on the edge of eighteen looks like.

They’re clueless, and to be honest, they like it that way. As if the dominating defense duo of Filano Law would bother themselves with meaningless matters such as wannabe boyfriends and zany-addicted daughters. Not that this is me acknowledging either of those issues, but are they calling me every night to make sure their ticket is well-punched and properly publicized? That’s a hard no.

I’m not sure what’s worse, that they don’t check in or the fact they are aware they don’t have to.

Thou shall not disappoint thy parents; words equivalent to downright dullness if you ask my peers, but I don’t share their sentiment and they don’t follow it.

Am I good at pissing my parents off? Yes, but where they do as they wish and bet on forgiveness later, I tread carefully at the start. Like an acrobat on a tightrope, I balance like a pro, never allowing myself to fall over the dreaded ‘did you hear about the Filano’s daughter’ line.

My sister, on the other hand, leaps without looking, unconcerned with the mess she makes on her way down.

If it were up to my parents, they’d have married her off to the former district attorney back in Naples when they learned he was asking questions they couldn’t afford him to find the answers to, the whole ‘keep your enemies close’ and all that.

Ambitious, young women marry seasoned, older men, my mother’s words echo in my ears.

I think she adopted such an idea after stepping into what, in many ways, was a man’s world. Not that it stopped her.

She’s the reigning queen and king of her profession.

My sister, of course, couldn’t stomach my mother’s desires and took things into her own hands by sleeping with the DA’s son instead. And then she told him about it. It was a shitshow, cost them a fortune to rectify, but at the end of the day, it was done.