The ferry trip across Nantucket Sound was quite uneventful as the two friends sat on deck chatting. They drove to Plymouth with the top down on Angela’s yellow VW Bug, enjoying the sun and fresh air. They had just entered the city when they saw a sign in front of a new housing complex.

“Look,” Angela screeched as she pulled over to the curb unexpectedly, cutting off a car in the lane next to them.

Daniella tried to ignore the angry man who honked at them, calling them stupid idiots as he passed, but ignoring people wasn’t as easy for her as it was for her friend. She always felt guilty for causing another person grief.

“This place is perfect,” Angela told her as she opened her door and climbed out.

“Perfect for what?” Daniella asked, following behind her friend as she made her way up the walkway to a condominium on the corner. She stepped up onto the small porch and walked in through the open door behind Angela.

“For you. You can move here, away from your parents, have your own independence, and still be close enough to visit every weekend. It’s perfect, and brand new.”

“I don’t think we’re supposed to just walk in,” Daniella argued as she followed her friend into the end unit.

Daniella stopped in the doorway. She had to admit, it was possibly the most beautiful place she’d seen in a long time.

They walked into a large living room with a stone fireplace, light gray carpeting, and a set of French doors that led to a balcony looking out to the finished pool and clubhouse. Turning back to the interior of the house, Daniella continued her inspection. The walls were painted a light gray with a darker gray accent wall around the fireplace. The large windows were covered by wooden shutters and sheer curtains.

The kitchen was open to a dining room on the opposite end of the living room. It was beautiful with gray granite countertops and white marble floors. The cupboards were a pale gray with silver knobs, and there were more cupboards than even her mother’s kitchen.

It was everything an inspiring chef could ask for. The appliances were stainless steel, with a dishwasher, microwave, and sink. The refrigerator was a set of four drawers in the counter against the wall, allowing for more counter space to set up small appliances. The stove was set in a small island in the center of the room, and there was a bar-style counter dividing the dining room from the kitchen.

At the far end of the dining room was a door that led to the laundry room, complete with a stackable washer and dryer, and a small closed-off area where the furnace and water heater stood.

Next to the laundry room was a small half bath and a door leading out to an attached single car garage. A hall closet stood next to a set of stairs that led to a second floor.

Upstairs were two large guest bedrooms with an adjoining bathroom shared between them. This part of the house was directly above the kitchen and laundry room and looked out to a park being built next door.

The full bath had a nice soaker tub with sauna jets, a toilet inside a small closet-style room, and a double sink. The back wall behind the sinks was a wall-sized mirror, with another full-length mirror on the back of the door. A closet stood at the top of the stairs, this one for linens and supplies.

Another set of stairs, this one only four high, led to the master bedroom which was above the living room and dining room. A double door divided it from the stairs, and inside was a bedroom fit for a Queen. It had vaulted ceilings, with a small crystal chandelier hanging in the center of the room. A set of French doors opened onto a balcony, directly above the one in the living room, just not quite as large.

From the patio, Daniella could see the tiled pool and hot tub, the clubhouse, and the roof of another set of condos. There wasn’t anyone close enough to argue about noise or the smell of supper burning, except for the empty condo next door.

Daniella walked through another set of double doors, like those leading into the room, and found herself staring into a walk-in closet, complete with shelves and a cube-style chest of drawers standing in the center of the room. There was a built-in bench, so you could sit and put on your shoes, and the wall with the door was covered in floor to ceiling mirrors.

Across the room was a third set of double doors, this one leading into a bathroom nearly as large as the bedroom. It had a large separate shower of gray tiles, with several spray nozzles and a steamer spray that turned the shower into a sauna. A long narrow bench was built into the wall, and much to Daniella’s surprise, there was even a box with controls for a stereo and intercom system and a recessed telephone.

The tub was large enough for two and was sitting on its own raised platform, with a step that led up to it. Like the one down on the second floor, it too had jets. A tiled ledge surrounded the edge, large enough to sit on, and had a frosted window that took up nearly the entire wall. The toilet was in a small closet next to the shower, along with a narrow linen closet. A gray granite counter with two porcelain sinks, took up the entire length of the wall next to the door. The cupboards beneath the sinks were a light gray, like those in the kitchen and downstairs bathroom. Between the two sinks stood a low vanity, complete with a light bar, promising to allow the owner ample illumination to apply the perfect layer of makeup.

Daniella felt a stab of depression as she walked back down the stairs. This was exactly what she was looking for, but she knew there was no way she would ever be able to afford it. Even with the money she had saved up, and the trust fund her grandparents left her, it would be too expensive.

Angela stood in the middle of the living room, a short oriental man with her. She turned as Daniella joined her, a wide smile pulling on her red painted lips.

“So, what did you think? Don’t you just love it?” she asked Daniella.

“It’s everything I’ve ever wanted, but there’s no way I can afford it.”

“How do you know, when you haven’t heard the price?” Angela teased her, handing her the paper she had been looking over.

Daniella took the flyer from her friend and read through it twice. There was no possible way this place was selling for only two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It was huge, far more than the luxury condo she rented in California, and that one was worth two million dollars.

“This is the first of five stages,” the oriental man said in a voice void of accent.

“Once the other sections are built, they will sell for twice that amount, so now is the perfect time to buy,” Angela told her excitedly. “All you need is some furniture and your own car of course. This way, you’ll be close to your parents, and still far enough away to have your independence. Max is just up the street, and you’re only minutes away from nightclubs, shopping, a movie theater, even two schools.”

“I’ll have to think about it,” Daniella said, feeling the sting of self-doubt wash over her.

This place had everything she’d ever wanted. As Angela said, she’d still be close to her family, but far enough away that they wouldn’t be stopping by unannounced. She knew she had enough in the bank to afford it, even without breaking into her trust fund. With this place, she’d be able to take her time finding a job and not rush into the first thing to come along.

“Stop doubting yourself,” Angela told her, seeing the conflict on her friend’s beautiful features. “Do you like it or not?”

“Yes, of course, I like it. I love it. It’s just that…”

“Your parents will get over the fact you’re moving out and starting your life without them. Now, are you going to buy it or not? If you don’t buy it, I will.”

“Alright,” Daniella found herself saying, then suddenly it was there. The excitement she always felt whenever she made a decision on her own. “I’ll take it.”

“That’s my girl!” Angela exclaimed as she hugged Daniella tightly. “We can start shopping for furniture tomorrow, and you’ll be able to move in…how soon can she move in?”

“Once financing has been arranged, and the papers are signed, she’ll get the keys,” the oriental man said with a wide smile.

“Then sign the papers,” Angela argued. “Do you have them on you? She can sign them now.”

“I have a set in my car, but don’t you need to discuss this with the bank first?”

“Bank, smank,” Angela insisted with a flip of her wrist. “I’m an underwriter for the First National Bank of Massachusetts. I can guarantee her a loan.”

“Alright, then I’ll get the papers. I’ll be right back.”

The girls watched as the man left the condo before Angela grabbed her friend’s arms and began bouncing around the living room like little kids.

“I can’t wait to move in,” Daniella told her excitedly. “And I won’t need a loan. I have never spent a single penny of my allowances or holiday money, and I was reimbursed seven years of my tuition because of my scholarship. Dad told me to keep the money and not tell Mom, so I can write out a check today.”

“That’s great, but you should still get a loan. It will help your credit.”

“I’ve got excellent credit already,” Daniella insisted, mentally imagining the style of furniture she’d buy.

“You know, if you want a roommate,” Angela began in a very serious voice that brought Daniella’s eyes to stare at her.

“What about Richie?”

“We’ve been having a lot of problems lately,” she said, walking to the fireplace. “He wants to settle down and get married, but I’m not ready. I want to live before I die. Having kids would be great, and I want a dozen of them, but I want to have fun first. I want to see the world and meet new people. He doesn’t understand that. He says we can go on vacations, but it’s not the weekend or summer trips that I want.”

“I feel the same way,” Daniella told her quietly. “My mom is always trying to fix me up with some son or relative of a neighbor, or an upstanding family of the community. Just this morning, we got into another argument about it. She just can’t understand. She married my dad right out of high school and started having babies immediately. But that’s not what I want.”

“You never told me what she said when you told her you were spending the night at my place?”

“She wasn’t home, so I left a message on the machine. I know she’ll be pissed off, and I’ll hear all about it tomorrow, but at least it saved me another argument.”

“Well, I for one, am thrilled that you’re moving forward.”

“So am I,” Daniella said as she looked out the balcony doors.

For the first time in her life, she was happy she’d made up her mind without having to listen to a month’s worth of lectures. For the first time in a long time, she felt like the adult she knew she could be.

After she signed the papers on her new condominium and promised to bring by a certified check in the morning, Daniella spent the afternoon shopping with Angela. They must have visited a dozen stores. She’d spent far more money than she intended to, but Angela reminded her, they were celebrating her new-found freedom.

She found a beautiful pair of cream-colored Prada heels and a matching purse in an exclusive shop in the mall and found herself swiping her credit card before she had a chance to change her mind. She purchased a very flattering pantsuit from another store, two short dresses in a third, and some skinny jeans in a fourth. When they finally arrived back at Max’s house, she had spent nearly four thousand dollars. But somehow, she didn’t feel guilty about it.

Angela’s grandmother was a fantastic cook, and when Angela called to tell the old woman they wanted to spend the night, Max jumped at the chance of making them dinner. Since her family had grown and most had moved away, she didn’t get the opportunity to cook for anyone besides herself. Having company around, made her happy.

Maxine Mitchell was an amazing woman. She was the kind of grandmother Daniella had always wanted. Her own grandparents had started their family at a much later age. They were old when she was born and died a few years later. She never got the chance to know them and had always felt she’d missed a lot. Fortunately, Max accepted her into her fold like one of the family and never made her feel out of place like the Jeffersons did with Angela.

The three spent nearly two hours at the dining table, laughing and talking about their day, their shopping spree, and the new condo. Max told Daniella that she was welcome to go through the attic and the unused rooms upstairs and choose whatever furniture she wanted. Daniella’s excitement continued to grow as they talked about her first home. It was like she was floating on a cloud, and she was eager to explore what this new world had to offer her.

By the time the clock struck eight, they felt like they would explode from Max’s superior supper. They had lobster thermidor, baked potatoes, clam chowder, and cornbread muffins. Max made a triple layer chocolate raspberry cake for dessert, but after everything else, they couldn’t find room for a single bite.

Angela insisted they visit Bourne Again Nightclub, and after cleaning up the table and washing the dishes, they hurried upstairs to dress. Much to their surprise, Max wanted to go along. Daniella was always stunned at the old woman’s youthful enthusiasm. She insisted that she wasn’t going to sit around the old Victorian mansion and wait to die. She said she was going to give death a good run for his money, and he’d have to catch up to her if he wanted her.

Daniella stood in front of the full-length mirror admiring her reflection. Her new blue and white striped mini dress hugged her slender waist and hips perfectly. Her long auburn hair hung down to her waist in ringlets, and her Prada heels added three full inches to her five feet four-inch stature. She was now as tall as her best friend.

As she stared at herself, she once again began to think about how different she was from the rest of her family. Where she was dark-haired with emerald green eyes, her family was blonde with blue eyes. Her father was going bald in his older years, and her mother visited the beauty parlor twice a month, but that didn’t stop them from being lighter than their middle child. Even the neighbors commented on the differences.

At one point, she thought she had been adopted, and the secret of her birth was a mystery no one spoke of or dared mention. She always felt out of place in her own family. Where they liked to picnic at the beach, she liked to sleep under the stars in the mountains. Where they would prefer to go for a bike ride along the city streets, she’d rather go hiking or spelunking.

When she was nine years old, Alice found her daughter in the bathroom, an empty bottle of bathroom cleaner beside her, and her hair dripping wet with the smelly, pine-scented liquid. Daniella was determined to be blonde like her family.

Her mother got her cleaned up and took her to a chest of drawers in the family room, where she pulled out an old photo album. She turned the tattered pages to a black and white picture of a young woman, in her teen years. She sat in a family photo with four boys and three girls. All with hair lighter than the young teenager. Her long dark locks hung over her shoulder, making her seem oddly out of place, and Daniella felt she could relate with her.

Her name was Millicent Jefferson, her great aunt three times removed, but everyone called her Millie. In those days, a woman was expected to be feminine and petite, but Millie had ideas of her own. When she was ten, she cut off her hair and dressed like a boy, so she could sneak onto a ship, taking the position of the captain’s cabin boy. When they returned to shore four months later, she was immediately returned to her family, dirty, with a large scar across her neck and upper chest.

The ship she was on had been attacked by pirates, and she had barely escaped with her life, but not before everyone learned her secret. The captain wasn’t angry at all, but rather amused. He told her when she grew strong enough to hold a sword to look him up. He could always use another strong arm, especially one that belonged to such a strong-willed, determined sailor.

Instead, Millie donned a pair of men’s breeches and took off on horseback to join the bandwagon heading west. She was only sixteen, the same year the picture was taken. The family heard from her a few times each year, just to let them know she was alive and well.

She had traveled to Wyoming and purchased two hundred acres of land with money she had been given on her journey, though nobody knew or would speak how she had come about it. Alice said there were speculations, about what really happened, yet nothing was ever made clear, and in those days, people didn’t speak of such things.

Millie set out to clear her land and had built a small shack for herself when a group of renegade Indians attacked her property. They stole her away and burned her house. The town’s people were certain she had been killed. The local priest even wrote her parents to tell them she was dead, but to everyone’s surprise, she was returned safe and sound three weeks later. The Indians who had stolen her became her bodyguard, and remained with her for nearly ten years. They helped her clear the land and rebuild her home into a large farmhouse, complete with indoor plumbing.

Millie returned to Edgartown twenty-five years after she had left. With her were her husband, a Cherokee Indian, and their three children. She was the talk of the town for many years to come after that, but she didn’t stay around to hear it. She had sold her property in Wyoming for a hefty profit and boarded a ship to the Bahamas. The last anyone heard from her, her family had purchased a small island and set out to make it their home.

When Daniella was fourteen, she had just been dumped by her first boyfriend – for Stacy Hamblin, no less. She was heartbroken and knew her mother would never be able to understand why any boy would choose a girl like Stacy over a Jefferson.

She ran up to the attic and hid, so she could cry in private. There, she found a small wooden trunk with the initials MW carved in the lid. She opened it to find several pieces of beautiful handmade jewelry, made from silver and turquoise, a patchwork quilt, and a beaded Indian dress of rawhide. There was a pair of knee-high moccasins, a beaded headpiece, and six journals, all with the name of Millie Jefferson etched on the inside.

Daniella spent the better part of a full week reading them in secret. She knew her mother would insist she was too young to read about the wildlife her ancestor had led, so she would hideout to read them after school, or lay beneath her bed in the dark, reading by flashlight.

The fact was, there were several parts that had embarrassed her. Her aunt had led a life far more wild than even Alice knew. She had known many outlaws and had in fact, become lovers with most of them. She met up with three desperate, ruthless train robbers on her way out west. They stole her innocence and taught her to shoot a pistol, and in return for the use of her body, they gave her the money she used to buy her property.

She wrote about the time the renegade Indians had kidnapped her, and how she had used her body to save her life. She earned the loyalty of all three with her courage and determination, and in exchange for their pleasure, they vowed to protect her.

The town’s sheriff was a young man who was dead set on becoming the best lawman in all of Wyoming. He had come to her property to check on her, just a few months prior to the Indian attack. At that time, she was living in a tent and cooking over a campfire. He raped her and made her perform several sexual acts that left Daniella blushing.

Millie knew nobody would believe her, so she kept silent, using the man’s dishonorable acts to blackmail him. In exchange for her body, he would pay her in silver, and help her on her property. The man was smart and much stronger than she was, yet he had enjoyed her talents much more than anyone would know. It kept him coming back, night after night. He helped her build her first house and clear a good portion of her land, so she could begin farming.

On occasion, he would bring a friend or two along to enjoy her company, and together they would spend many long hours exploring the darker side of humanity.

She wrote about a time when she had even become lovers with a woman, the wife of a neighboring rancher who had been killed in a stampede. That lasted for more than two years until the woman’s children grew old enough that she feared they would begin asking questions or start talking to friends.

Millie became pregnant five times over the course of her years with multiple lovers, before she settled down with Johnny White Cloud, and started a family of their own. Thanks to her knowledge of nature and the many herbs that grew around her property, she successfully rid herself of the unwanted accidents without causing permanent harm to herself.

Johnny White Cloud was the only man, of all of them, that she truly loved. He came to the town as a liaison between the Whiteman and the Cherokee. Being born of a white mother and a Cherokee father, he knew both worlds intimately. Millie had always been a supporter of the Indians and was very vocal about her feelings, so it was only natural that they were bound to meet.

She and Johnny met at a county meeting in late July. That night, he came to her property to discuss her ideas on blending the two cultures and living together peacefully. They spent the night in passionate lovemaking, and he never again left her.

After the birth of their first child, Johnny convinced her they should be married, but neither wanted a white man’s marriage. The dress and boots Daniella found in Millie’s treasure box, along with the beaded headpiece, was her wedding outfit. They rode to Cherokee country and stayed for six weeks. During that time, they were married, and she once again became pregnant.

The beautiful pieces of jewelry Daniella found in her chest, had been wedding gifts from Johnny’s parents. She wrote that she had never felt more welcomed or more at peace with herself than she had during her time with her husband’s tribe.

Millie was furious that the US government herded the Indians like cattle and sent them to live on reservations. She hated that the Indians were never accepted into the world of the Whiteman, and having been only a woman, even though she was far more than the average woman, nobody was willing to listen to her. She sold her property and came back to Massachusetts for a few short weeks, before leaving to start a new life with her family. Her last entry was made the day she sailed.

"I have lived my life to my own designs and I have never looked back or regretted a single day. I have loved more fiercely, and more passionately than any woman has ever dared. If I had to do it all over, I wouldn’t change a thing. Life has been good to me because I never ran or hid from it. And so, I go now, facing life at sea so I can start again with the man I love and our children.

To those who would condemn me for the choices I made, I have one thing to say to every one of them.

Go fuck yourselves."