SAVE POINT 1
Rosabella
He didn't even know how much he stifled me.
...These were my thoughts? I huffed, laughing a little to myself as I swung around the streetlamp, which buzzed and flickered overhead in the night sky as my fingers wrapped gleefully around the freezing, smooth base. My hair billowed out, strands getting caught in the collar of my coat and sticking to my exposed neck. The cloud of my breath warmed my cheeks and the tip of my nose, but I didn't mind the cold.
Not if it let me breathe for just a minute.
Dad thought I loved the Chinese food place at the corner.
What I really loved was the freedom—the two-minute walk where I felt like no one was watching me.
Not even him.
...Shouldn't I be worrying about talking to some crush or something? Or about homework or painting my toes a certain color?... Like any other teenage girl?
"General Tso's and orange chicken? Pre-pay?" the Chinese man asked me, holding up the take-out bag he knew full well was mine like he’d cooked it himself.
I grabbed it from him with the small bow that I knew he liked.
"Thanks, Ming!" I called over my shoulder.
...As I danced out in the drizzling rain for just a few more minutes, spreading my arms and tilting my face back to catch all the little drops of life misting down on me. The moon swam, high overhead.
But my watch vibrated.
The timer.
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If I was over two minutes late, Dad would go into nuclear meltdown mode, and the food would get cold before he finished his lecture about safety, self-preservation and stranger-danger.
...I'd been getting kind of worried about him. His caution had increased to paranoia lately.
"They're getting closer; I can feel it, Rosie," he'd said just that morning, pulling back the curtains he'd always kept firmly secured over every window to stare blankly out at the street.
The blankness in his face scared me most. It was like he was losing touch with reality. He'd been jumpier in the last few months: seeing shadows, talking to people who weren't there while making something on the stove and trying to cover it up whenever I walked into the room...
It was probably not normal to feel like this as a teen—to feel like you had to take care of your parent.
I saw my classmates all the time, circling the street with their bikes well past 9pm.
Talking raucously.
Their jokes and laughter wafted up to my bedroom window like a lie I tried every day not to believe.
But it was hard to not want what they had:
Freedom.
No fear.
No restraints or restrictions—
It was like dangling candy in front of a starving three-year-old; there was only so much one could take.
My thick-soled boots thudded up the concrete steps of the apartment. I jammed my thumb into the buzzer button till the static clicked—sometimes, it got stuck. And I swung past the blinking elevator button to take the stairs two at a time, feeling the churn of my muscles as I hauled up each step...heard the swish of the plastic bag in my hand…
And the grime on the wall passed.
And the smell of some type of burnt beans and rice dish wafted into my nose.
I reached the top of the stairwell—
Threw my weight to wrench open the door—
And saw our door.
Our apartment door.
Also, wrenched open.
Hanging by the hinge.
I dropped the bag of Chinese food. I barely heard it hit the carpet with a dull thump.
And I raced forward, my mouth twisting in utter desperation. My heart pounded in my ears—
My mind tripped over itself more than my feet were—
The world past the doorpost blurred as my fingers clutched at it, heaved me forward as quickly as possible.
"Dad???!" I screamed.