He told me that a billionaire CEO like Xavier was completely out of my league before he walked away to greet a group of men in expensive suits. I watched him walk through the crowd and had no idea that the man he just forbade me from speaking to was actually my biggest client.
I knew that the revolutionary speech Xavier had given at the London summit last week had been written on my laptop at three in the morning. To my brother, I was just a strange sister who wrote small things in coffee shops and had never achieved anything significant.
I took a deep breath and walked toward the back of the room where I found the disastrous setup of Table Nineteen. There were plastic cups and crayons scattered everywhere along with plates of cold chicken nuggets and a baby crying in a stroller.
I sat down in the middle of the chaos until a young boy with a messy bowtie looked up at me and said he liked my dress. “Thank you very much,” I replied with a small smile.
“I like monsters and fast cars,” he told me while holding up a blue crayon. “I like those things too,” I said as the woman watching the children gave me a sympathetic look from across the table.
“Did they exile you to the corner as well?” she whispered with a tired laugh. I told her that I apparently did not fit the desired profile for the main tables and she replied that at least nobody at this table was pretending to be someone else.
I sat there for the next hour handing out juice boxes and drawing a massive dragon for the boy whose name was Parker. From my seat in the shadows, I could see my brother acting like he was the king of the world while my parents beamed with pride at his success.
