50Prologue
Being one of the most prestigious families in the San Francisco Bay Area had its perks, but for Estelle Duquaine it had been a nightmare for the last three years. Her high school career had been hellacious. While her twin grew out of the slightly chubby kid body style and went right into modeling, following in their mothers footsteps, Estelle got just a little taller but was still a little flabby in comparison. This caused a great deal of friction between the sisters both in school and out. When thinking about it Estelle's friends would also be Jozlyn's friends since they are twins and all. But with Jozlyn's outgoing personality she quickly became the queen of the school even in first grade and the trend only continued into their high school career. Leaving Estelle with few friends, and as if that wasn't enough Jozlyn continuously pitted their class against her.
Despite her relationship with her twin Estelle has a fabulous relationship with their older brother Randi. He was always there to be her friend when their sister and her friends started taunting Estelle about one thing or another. Usually about her weight, she was not over weight she just wasn't as sickeningly thin as her sister and her friends. Randi took care of his sister, he taught her to drive at an early age and he taught her to fight and such since he was always at the gym. Estelle dropped a lot of her baby weight that way but was still nowhere close to how thin Jozlyn is. She got into working on cars from their fathers interests. He had opened a small auto parts store, that had grown to be the best in the bay area, when he was eighteen. By fourteen Estelle was spending nearly all of her spare time there and if she wasn't there you could find her in the garage working on car parts that had been turned into the store because they no longer functioned correctly. She refurbished them all. But like being a little thicker than her sister and her friends, being a gear head also caused her a lot of heart ache in school, especially in high school where it was just not very feminine to work on cars and have grease under your finger nails. Estelle longed for graduation, knowing full well that she could escaped the clutches of private school, and her sister.
Their parents were not above spoiling their children and as a result of their individual interests it was not surprising that the children got just about anything they could ever really want. Their father Toni being a car enthusiast it came as no surprise that all three children received a car for their sixteenth birthday. Toni Duquaine was not a hard man he doted upon his daughters, especially Estelle, but he didn't want her to end up as spoiled as Jozlyn. There was no other word for what Daphne, their mother, did to the twin. Because she had her mother's supermodel build and character she followed in her mother's footsteps. As for Estelle she worked for everything and Toni believed that was the way the world worked and she might as well get used to it. Estelle never complained she loved her father and knew by this time that there was generally a rhyme and rhythm to his madness.
She watched as her brother received a car for his 16th birthday. One that Estelle and her father had rebuilt for him. It was a 57 Chevy, and it was in newly minted condition. You see she and Randi shared their father's fondness for cars, and while Randi didn't care much for the mechanics of them Estelle did. By her 16th birthday she could fix nearly anything wrong with a car, though that got her endless torment by her sister. She watched as her mother unveiled the Mercedes-Benz ML550 custom SUV for Jozlyn. You see not only was the family wealthy altogether, but Daphne and Toni were both independently wealthy as well. Estelle well she was a little let down by her car, it wasn't what she wanted but she knew that there wouldn't be a 2009 Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano sitting in the driveway for her. The car was just too expensive, but the 1998 Lexus 250 RWD manual transmission was kind of a letdown. She hugged and kissed and thanked her father like it didn't bother her that her sisters brand new car was going to create a scene at school, and then the comparison was going to be hell. After all Estelle was the car guru and yet she ended up with the worse of the two cars.
Right around the time the girls were turning sixteen Randi was graduating from high school, and as a reward he was getting a new car. Racing was a big thing among the friends he had recently acquired. Though it was in a very different league than what you would think. The kind of racing that may come to mind for you are Honda Civic's the car he got to race was a Bugatti Veyron 16.4. This car could go from 0 to 100 in 2.5 seconds flat. Needless to say the class of racing he was into was very different than that of the punk kids you see. Though the amount of money involved was very much the same.
But now the twins were hitting their senior year, both would be turning eighteen and graduating soon. They would both be getting a new car, or at least Joz was she was already picking it out for delivery on graduation day. Estelle hadn't even thought about it. Getting away from her twin was bound to be gift enough.
1
The first day back to school was always hell, seeing all the people that you have been in school with since kindergarten and hearing the same old stupid one liners. Hearing the same jeers toward her and listening to all the girls and guys fawn over Jozlyn. It was enough to make a girl sick.
Last year was far worse, Randi wasn't there last year to act as a buffer. Most of his friends were friends of Estelle's they were all like big brothers to her. But they have all graduated now and most of them spread out around the U.S. and some even studying abroad. So she was on her own this again this year. It suited her well enough she was mostly a loaner and she worked hard on her school work most of the day at school so it kept her out of trouble.
After school she took off to the store to work for a couple hours. It was always a relief to pull into the parking lot of the store. It was a sort of safe haven for her. The people who worked there were not just her coworkers but also her friends. They respected her and her abilities to work on cars and run such a well known store so well. She took care of everything. She doubted that any one of the dealers she worked with knew what her father's signature looked like. They had all been dealing with her for nearly two full years now. The people who were working in the store now were all people she had hired as when her father turned over management to her most of the previous workers had left and a couple had retired.
She sat down at her desk in her small office in the area behind the checkout counters, where the car parts were kept. The store carried anything you could possibly want for your car and if it wasn't in the store it could be ordered. That's what made them so different from other stores. Most of the other stores did not carry items for high end cars, because they couldn't have the parts shipped to the store. Part of that could be contributed to Toni and Estelle. Toni had started making connections early with dealers of just about every kind of car known to man. Nothing was beyond the reach of Toni Duquaine, well until now because without dropping his daughters name not even he could get anywhere.
She paid bills, coded work orders, took a virtual inventory. She only did physical inventory once a month and if things started going missing she did random physical inventories every night to determine why there were things missing. Deposits were made, emails sent and received. Just the normal day at the office. She finished the last of the coding and shut up the office for the night saying goodnight to the guys who would be closing the store around nine.
She arrived home in time for dinner. She had learned the hard way that you do not miss dinner with the family. According to both of her parents it was unacceptable to not make it to the family dinner. It was the one time of the day that everyone was altogether where they could talk about how their days went. It seemed strange to have one less at the dinner table though, with Randi gone and all. He wasn't that far from home, but far enough that it was an inconvenience for him to come home every night. However the agreement had been that he come home once a week and at two weeks into the semester he had yet to show up.
Daphne, their mother, had always seemed to want nothing to do with anyone but Joz, but everyone could see it plain on her face that she was disappointed having not seen her oldest baby come home to report how college was going. Despite them all being there at the table it was still sectioned off. Daphne and Jozlyn sat at one end talking and Toni and Estelle at the other talking. After dinner, both girls were dismissed to go work on homework. Estelle would actually do her homework, Joz on the other hand would chat with her friends online and pay someone to do it for her in the morning if she hadn't already caught someone after school.
Estelle always found it cute that her parents would make dinner together and clean up the kitchen together. They seemed so different from each other but they worked together so well. And sometimes at night if she had escaped down the back stairwell of the house to the library she could peek out into the living room and see them cuddled on the couch watching a movie late at night.
It was nearly midnight when she was finally finished with her school work. There was a little bit more than usual that night, but going into a Friday filled with quizzes and exams she was sure not to have any homework for the weekend. She checked her phone one more time to see if she had a message or missed call from Randi neither of which she had, then climbed into bed.