The Mafia Hit Man's Daughter by Linda Scarpa Page A

girlfriends. My friends growing up my whole life were always guys, even until this day. I hung out with a lot of kids—girls and boys—but the girls weren’t really my friends.
    Not long after we moved, I met these twin girls, Nicole and Teresa. They were friends with everybody, but they hated me.
    Nicole and Teresa were snotty little rich girls like me, but their father wasn’t a made guy. He was a regular working guy. They didn’t have the crowd around them that I had, but they hung out with the same type of people that I did. Teresa was going out with Carmine Sessa’s son. They liked the same scenery as I did at the time. They wanted to hang out with all the street guys.
    Carmine’s wife, Annie, was at the house one day and she talked to me about them.
    â€œYou should make friends with Nicole and Teresa.”
    I wasn’t having any part of it.
    â€œI’m not making friends with them. They’re so snotty.”
    â€œWell, I’m going to talk to them and see if they want to talk to you.”
    They didn’t. They said the same things about me that I said about them. They told Annie they didn’t want to be friends with me because I was such a snob.
    The funny thing was, I wasn’t a snob. I honestly never knew why nobody wanted to talk to me. I didn’t really understand it. Even though my father told me when I was younger that it was because of who he was, I didn’t think much about what he was saying.
    Maybe I had this persona of being a show-off, when I really didn’t realize that I was. I never thought I was a show-off. It was instilled in me by the age of six that having nice things was okay. But I never was the type to stick it in people’s faces, like some of the girls I knew.
    They had everything—I even felt like they had more than me—and they really showed it off. I was never like that. But everybody loved them, so I never understood why people liked them, but they didn’t like me.
    Recently I ran into a guy who’s a friend of mine—a single dad—at my kids’ school, who kind of put things into perspective for me. He told me that when he’s talking to other women in the schoolyard and I go near him, they walk away. I was shocked.
    â€œAre you serious?” I didn’t realize that. “Why?”
    â€œI don’t know. It doesn’t really matter.”
    â€œI really want an answer. Are you joking around with me?”
    â€œNo, I’m serious. Take notice the next time there’s a group of mothers I’m talking to. Whenever you come over to me, you’ll notice they walk away.”
    â€œWhy do you think that is?”
    â€œWell, Linda, when you walk into the schoolyard, you have a presence about you, an attitude.”
    â€œI have an attitude?”
    â€œI don’t even think you realize it.”
    â€œI don’t realize it, because I don’t have an attitude.”
    â€œLinda, I know you, but people who don’t know you, they would think that you do.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œI don’t know. It’s just the way you look.”
    The more I thought about it, I realized it was because I was always on the defensive, thinking that somebody had something to say to me about my father, or the life, or whatever. That’s basically why I became so disliked. I was always on the defensive, and I’ve always been on the defensive.
    But growing up not understanding why people didn’t want to talk made me very insecure. It made me not want to be sociable with anyone. People thought I didn’t want to be bothered. It wasn’t that I was snobby. Instead, I was just going into a shell. I didn’t know how to socialize because people weren’t talking to me. If I was just being me, and no one wanted to talk to me, then I figured I must be doing something wrong. I thought they just didn’t like me, but I didn’t know why.
    Despite the fact that