maxine pryce. resub.

When I was seven, someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. Again at seventeen. Both times I shrugged and said, "I dunno". And I never really got the chance to figure it out, because a year later I was a Victor's Sister. I hadn't planned on it, not even when they took Mickey away. But the position sort of fell into my lap at the most convenient time of my life, spending most of the years pining after my brother's attention and yearning for the tribute who he brought home that would never love me back.

I hate that arena. It just takes and takes and takes from me, and I only realise once it's gone that it took my deepest desires. All I wanted was for Mickey and I to grow up and grow old, maybe we'd both marry nice girls and we'd build cabins in the woods next to each-other and I'd look after his rascal kids. Everyone used to ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up but I didn't know, because what I had then was pretty damn great. In hindsight I should've said "Exactly who I am now" - I just wanted it to be us. Mickey & Max. Max & Mickey.

Just us.

And then he went into an arena and came out again, and Marley showed up when the world stole him from me and gave him back and took him away from me again. I didn't like the kid at first, goofy and idiotic and the apple of Mickey's eye. I've always been selfish, particularly greedy with my brother. But I found a fondness in my heart for Marley and he began to fill the void Mickey left, and I learned to share our brother and find space in my life for a new one.

Two years later he brought back a girl and a boy and I never much cared for Angel, and he never much cared for me, and we were complacent with our mutual tolerance of one-another. But more people took up Mickey's time, and soon it became a family of three, then four, then six. I could forgive him, because he brought home a girl that made my chest ache and I loved her from the moment I met her.

But she got on a train for a red-headed girl from Five and never gave me a second glance, and I became that angry, bitter person once more - the girl Mickey tried so hard to get out of me. The Salazars were the least of my problems, a rumour, a tabloid.

Then Jacinta got pregnant and I couldn't handle it any more.

I told Marley first. He had googly eyes for the one his age, must be something in our gene pool, so he wasn't half-listening when I told him I was moving out. It felt like a betrayal to tell someone other than Mickey my secrets, but he wasn't Mickey any more. He hadn't been since they plucked Mackenzie Pryce out of the glass bowl. It was unfair for me to ask him to be who he was before all of that, and it was unfair for me to demand so much of him when he owed the others his life, but I told you - I've always been selfish. Bitter. Especially when it comes to Mickey.

So I betrayed him, in my own little way. When they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up they weren't expecting me to say vengeful, heartbroken, full of spite. But I'm twenty-seven and have nothing to show for who I am except a frown, a surname, and a complex of being abandoned by those I expect the impossible from. Loving Marley is easy, so I confide in him, and leaving Mickey is awful but he left a long time ago and came back someone I don't know anymore.

Mackenzie Pryce is a victor, a father, a stranger.

And me, I'm just Max.

It's why I left the Victor's Village, got a job at a bar and sleep on someone's couch. Because I'm twenty seven and I don't know what I want to be or who I want to be other than more than Mackenzie Pryce's sister. I don't want to be vengeful, or spiteful, or bitter or jealous. But I am, and as long as I keep myself tied to Mickey and that damn house with those damn Salazar's next door it's all I'll ever be.

For now, I'm just Max. Exactly who I was then. Just worse, somehow.