「故事·听力」My Brother Sucked Money From Us. I Made Him Pay For It!
My Brother Sucked Money From Us. I Made Him Pay For It!
Hi! My name is Penny, I am fifteen. My story will probably look unbelievable, even shocking, and I am sure that many of you who will hear it, will judge me for what I’ve done. I… a few months ago I reported my own brother to the police. Soon he will be facing a court hearing and, no, I don’t regret what I have done.
Like many other stories, mine began with a tragedy in my family. Two years ago my father died in an accident leaving his wife… my mother, alone with two children: me and my older brother, Sam.
Sam is three years older than me, and since that day he was the only man in our family. We were not rich, even before the accident, and now we got into some significant debt, so my mother had to find a decent job in order to raise her children and to keep her house.
My mother’s job took almost all of her time. And even though I understand that she was doing everything for Sam and I, I think it was her mistake that she simply did not pay any attention to us. Maybe it's partly her fault - what happened with Sam?
Sam and I were never close. After our father’s death he became even more distant from us, his only family. He barely talked to my mother and me, but at the same time made a whole bunch of suspicious looking friends. It seemed that Sam did not care about my mother or me. Instead of giving us his support during this hard time, my brother seemed to feel this sort of freedom that bordered on doing whatever he wanted.
Even when he had not yet reached maturity, he frequently slept someplace else, sometimes he went missing for several days, but the worst part of it was that he had started to demand that my mother and I give him money! You know, when I lost my father and realized how hard it would be for our mom, I was hoping that Sam would get a job and start to help the family…
And I think it was only fair because I was going to start working as soon as I grew up, as soon as my age permitted me to work.
Sam, instead of helping, sucked the dollars from my mother for “pocket money” never asking if she had enough for the family expenses. In addition, the mystery of where he was spending the money, remained. And there were rumors in the neighborhood that Sam was hanging out with a bad company.
Time passed. But nothing really changed in our family. My mother still did not care about Sam’s behavior because she was preoccupied with other problems. The social worker from Sam’s school called from time to time, in order to tell us that Sam was absent from class again. And after Sam had, by some miracle, finished high school, he was even harder to track down.
I got a job as a waitress, following my own plan of action, and lost any connection to my brother – now we barely saw each other and didn't talk, even at home. I worked hard and it was uneasy for me. And I didn't earn that much... Do you think that I'm talking too much about money? It's intentional actually, because now the money starts to play a significant part in my story.
After a while, I started noticing that Sam had expensive things. For example, once when we were at home, I saw an iPhone in his hands. It didn't look brand new, but still - it was one of the latest models. How could Sam have bought it? I would have had to save for a long time, but I am still not sure I could have even afforded it.
Outdoors, Sam usually wore a brand-new leather biker jacket, which I figured was worth more than several hundred dollars! I could not understand where Sam got all of these expensive things from, since we still did not have money. I seriously doubted that he had gotten a job. Time after time, I tried to ask him directly where he got all these things from, but he only snapped and answered me rudely.
To tell you the truth, I could not get it out of my mind. I guess, I even envied my brother – my mother and I worked a lot, but we still could not afford practically a-ny-thing, so where did Sam get the money from? In order to find out, I decided to eavesdrop on his phone calls.
The wall between our rooms was thin enough… but I got an idea for how to make the acoustics even better. When nobody was at home, I drilled a small hole in the wall. It was hard to detect if you weren't looking for something like that. And I also tried not to make any noise in my room, so that Sam wouldn’t notice anything suspicious. Oh, if only I had known what kind of truth was going to be revealed!
My brother was reckless enough to discuss his business on the phone with his company of… criminal partners. They were… thieves.
I was getting the whole picture, as a puzzle, from his phone calls. At first Sam and his friends tried to steal wallets, like as pick-pockets...
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