More than one person blinked as they worked their way through her logic.

“Yeah, okay, I can see that,” Lexie conceded after a minute. She gave Sharon a rueful smile. “Just for the record, I think you’d be really good for him. I hardly ever make friends with his girlfriends. They’re all nice and whatever, but they’re really hard to get to know. Not unfriendly, exactly but... Not friendly either.”

“Well I’m friendly,” Sharon teased, winking.

“Are you going to warn him what he’s getting into with your family?” Kate wanted to know.

“What’s he getting into with her family?” Jessica asked, leaning forward to reach around Lexie and grab a handful of crackers. She wasn’t the only one who was curious, going by the expressions. Sharon sighed. She rarely talked about her family if she could help it. Why focus on things that brought her down when she’d much rather focus on the positive parts of life?

“They’re kind of big jerks,” Kate said, breaking the ice on the subject. “Her parents are huge snobs, super self-involved, and they care way more about their image than anything else.”

“As you can imagine, I’m definitely not their idea of a perfect daughter,” Sharon chimed in with a thin smile, now that Kate had gotten the hard part over with. “I’m basically the epitome of a poor little rich girl. Lots of nannies, lots of my parents trying to mold me into the shape they wanted, and lots of rebellion on my part.”

She hated the sympathy she saw on everyone’s faces. The ‘poor little rich girl’ moniker was not her favorite, but it was apt. Everyone else here had families who loved them the way they were. She’d heard Jessica’s family had had some trouble accepting the fact that she had two men in her life, but they had accepted it. Sharon was pretty sure she would have been disowned. Hilary’s family was pretty well off, but her parents were involved in her life in a way Sharon’s had never been. Sharon didn’t like being an object of pity. She didn’t like facing what she didn’t have.

She really did have a lot, and she was grateful for it.

So her parents kind of sucked. They weren’t the worst parents in the world; they were just normal, absentee, wealthy, image-obsessed parents with expectations for her that she never met. Now she went out of her way to show them there was no point in trying to manipulate her, but they weren’t bad enough that she felt justified in cutting them out of her life entirely. Sometimes she did think about it though.