I put my hand up and waved, mentally bracing myself for the shit storm that usually went hand in hand when the entire Barreto family was together. Insults, wedgies and yelling were essential parts of a family that was half Brazilian and half Italian.

“You don’t remember you have a mom?” my mother yelled over at me as the whole family kept walking across the venue in my direction.

“Like I could forget!” I hollered back at her with a weak smile.

She visibly shook her head at the same time my dad flashed me a grin and a silent wave. While my parents were great and you could tell that they loved each other, a lot of times, I wondered how they made things work for them the last thirty-eight years. Mom and Dad were polar opposites who frequently disagreed on everything from what car they should take to church, to whether the lawn could go another week before it needed to get mowed or not.

Rafe’s two daughters screamed, “Aunt Gaby!” a second before they took off running. I made sure that Eli saw my smirk at our niece’s reactions since we were always arguing over whom they loved more.

Izabella and Heidi, four and six-years-old, shrieked until they were five feet away when they suddenly stopped… and gawked.

It wasn’t either one of them who verbally reacted to my makeover.

It was Gil. “What the—,” he glanced down at his daughter, “you-know-what happened to you, Demi?”

My siblings, Gordo and Mason really brought out the worst in me. I stuck my tongue out at him. “The important question here is: why do you even know who that is?”

He tilted his head over at the reserved nine-year-old by his side. “Disney Channel all day every day.”

It was the loud smack of a palm meeting flesh that had me glancing over at Eli, who was holding the back of his head with both hands, scowling at Rafaela. “What the hell was that for?”

The second oldest Barreto kid, when in reality she had always seemed to be the most mature, scowled at her little brother. “Why would you do that to her?”

“I didn’t do that!” Eli frowned, edging closer to our mom who was fussing at Rafe for hurting her baby boy.

“Did you fall again?” That was our dad that asked.

“Again?” Sacha whispered under his breath, and I couldn’t help but poke him in the side.

What really got me about the question was that they either expected Eli to be the culprit or my own clumsiness to be the cause of blame.

“We had our Soccer Death Match yesterday,” I explained, walking around the table so I could hug the entire clan, wincing every time one of them touched the side of my body that had taken the brunt of the impact when Sacha had tackled me playing.

The “ahhh” that came out of them was on the spot. They’d all heard about it, even the little girls, whom I went to hug first.

Izabella, Rafe’s youngest, pulled away from me after I kneeled down to hug her. Her little eyes, the same shade of green as my dad’s and mine, focused on the bruise on my face. She put up her little hand as if she wanted to touch it but was too scared to. “Did it hurt?” Iza whispered, her fingers curling in the air hesitantly.

“Yes.” Why pretend like it hadn’t? It had, and I’d be a damn liar if I tried to play it off. Either way, I had a feeling Iza knew me too well. She’d call me out on my lies and it wouldn’t be the first time.

She then looked into my eyes. “Did you cry?” Testing me. She was testing me and I was fully aware of it.

I heard Sacha make a noise behind me but kept my focus on my niece. “A little bit.”

Then she did it. The little girl I’d spent countless hours with, my mini-partner in crime, threw my ass under the bus. “Like when your boyfriend broke up with you? Or not like that?”