After an hour of driving past large swaths of farmland, we arrive at the town dump. It's huge, and as I feared, it smells horrible. Like vomit and used diapers. Seagulls swarm over the garbage. I hold my nose to exhibit my distaste. "I wish we could have gone to the beach. This place stinks."

My mom laughs. "Don't make me wish we hadn't brought you Eve.

My mother's always poured all of her energy into Ryan. He's her favorite. I can't blame her. He's funny, outgoing, and wildly ambitious. I'm quietly overlooked. Like an afterthought. I often feel Ryan and my mother can suck all the air out of the room. I'm the youngest, the sensitive family barometer. With my father's dark eyes, and my grandmother's short, rounded nose, I have a hard time liking myself. In the rear view mirror, I see features of the two people I despise the most in this world blended into my pale amber, heart shaped face. My mother says I look exotic, but she never tells me that I'm pretty. I'm ashamed of my looks, associating them with my father and grandmother's brutality. I speak softly to avoid attention. My shyness makes my family think that I'm weak, but I'm not. I feel everything. I intuit people's true motives, sensing their emotions around me like a living heartbeat. Privately, I feel my mother's poured so much of her love and energy into her first born she had little time left for me. She's always building my brother up, while my father tears him down.

Something moves in the piled garbage making the landfill shift. I watch apprehensively as a large rat scurries across the debris. A few garbage bags slide down an embankment, landing in front of the car's wheels, but my mom's unperturbed. She drives past the heaping mounds of garbage until we're at the closed section of the dump. I see what look like viking burial mounds. Hills made up of decomposed dirt with nodes of garbage sticking out of the landfill. My mother waves her hand as if she's a realtor showing us prime real estate. "Fifty years ago, the farmers dumped their trash into this section of the dump. Can you believe the treasure waiting to be found here? We can find some antique bottles." She looks at Ryan and smiles. "They'll sell for good money.

He's incredulous. "Really? Thats why we're here?"

I'm immediately won over by their enthusiasm. "Awesome, it's like a scavenger hunt. Where do we dig?"

Mom hands us the shovels. "Along the tree line. Where the property boundary would have been." We find a crude wall made of what look like rocks pulled from the fields. "Right here, this is good." She puts her foot on the shovel, and pushes down, the tip biting into the dirt.

Two hours later, we've excavated a large hole. All three of us are standing in the pit up to our waists, with trowels in our hands. My brother hits something that makes a clinking sound, then carefully digs around the dirt. He unearths an aqua colored pale object. Pulling it out of the ground, he brushes away the dirt with his gloves. "Look at this! I think it's an old coke bottle."

"Can I see?" Excitedly, he hands the bottle to me. Despite being encrusted with dirt, the pale blue glass is unusually pretty. Looking closely, I see little air bubbles trapped in the frosted body. "It's so heavy."

"That's a good find, Ryan. Right off the bat too." My mother says, "Put it in the box and keep digging!"

We find our first stash of pre-1920s junk piles in the woods down an embankment. Places where old houses or businesses once stood. Our mother finds the next piece of antique glassware. A small cobalt blue pharmacy bottle. She holds it up to the to read the embossed inscription. "Bromo Seltzer, Emerson Drug Co. This is Alka-Seltzer."

"I love the blue color." I'm enamored by the bottle's intense, deep hue. Ever since I can remember, I've loved painting and drawing. They're the only things I feel like I'm good at.

Even my father once complimented one of my drawings, "You're a good artist, Evie", but that feels like a lifetime ago. The next day, he'd found a used copy of Charles Schultz Peanut cartoons and handed it to me. He'd circled an art contest. Excited, I'd entered by mail for the same art school Schultz had attended. The one where you draw a horse, or a donkey, then send it in to be evaluated.

"Isn't this much more fun than going to the beach?" My brother, usually as fastidious as a cat is getting filthy as he excavates more bottles.

I have to laugh. "No, it doesn't compare to the beach." Privately, I'm enjoying our adventure. For the last few hours I've forgotten all about my fears, and our father's temper. I wish it was always just the three of us. I lean on my shovel imagining a little house with a white picket fence, flowers in the windowsill. Maybe, I'll find a stash of gold coins, hidden here during the civil war. They'll bankroll my dream. I want to be a painter and attend the Montreal school of art. Last year, we drove past the Olympic stadium while Nadia Comaneci scored the first perfect ten in Gymnastic history. Everyone was talking about the Olympics because terrorists had killed some of the athletes, but all I remembered that day were the colorful murals painted on the brick walls of downtown Montreal. The street art blew my mind. On every main road, there were pots of flowers adorning the lampposts. They were marked with elegant, blue and white Fleur de Lis symbols. The air was a crisp, clean, cerulean blue. Montreal highways are so pristine compared to the turnpikes we take when we visit my grandparents in downtown Philadelphia. On the outskirts of Philly, there's a lot of abandoned buildings and graffiti. The sky over the factories are a sulfuric cauldron. My mother says it looks like entering hell.

Just before twilight, we start packing up our antique glassware finds. We've excavated about fifty mud covered bottles. When I bend over to pick up my trowel, the lip of a bottle sticking out of the dirt catches my eye.