The Last Refuge Of Silver Dollars

         The Last Refuge Of Silver Dollars
         
        So it was me.
         My brother comes home and opens the desk drawer in his room, hitting upon the plastic jar and the last of the sacred hundred dollars we had saved as kids.  Looking for the two twenties, grey relics of the old days, the kind they don’t print anymore.  The jar is empty and hollow, and there’s not even a nickel. 
         Of course he asks me where the money has gone, since he hasn’t touched it for years.  I deny everything, casual and measured, lying through my teeth, it wasn’t me.  I tell him to check the change box we’d kept, an illusionist’s elusive coin bank that made the money appear to vanish after it was slipped through the slot.  It isn’t until my father blames some of my friends, stragglers from the night before who had slept over, that I confess.  I spent it all, I say, the last refuge of silver dollars, it’s done. 
         My father is in fury, because who does this, what kind of daughter, what kind of daughter.  My brother won’t look at me, because I’ve violated memories and private rooms, something that was once guarded and secret treasure.  She won’t change, my father says, and what will happen when you are stealing from your employers?  It isn’t worth explaining that I wouldn’t do that, that those aren’t the kinds of people I would betray. 
         It isn’t worth explaining that when we were young, we had saved up five hundred dollars to buy a video camera and become vividly famous, get ourselves out of here.  It isn’t worth explaining that that had never happened, or that those precious twenties had been abandoned and decomposing in there anyway.  That he hadn’t wanted it, so I’d spent it.  That I didn’t care about their value, and that I’d drained the last deficient drop of dreams on a cheap dress. So I was guilty before the court of law, but ladies and gentlemen, look at the underhanded and your accused behind bars and see if they are not true.