Saffie ran to her front door, screaming, “Mum! Dad!” expecting the windows to be glowing bright orange and smoke to be seeping through every seam, but strangely enough the outside of the house looked completely normal. She opened the door, bracing herself for the fumes to suddenly hit her, but the only thing the air was filled with was the acidic scent of her mum’s latest basil and mandarin reed diffuser. Utterly confused, she slowly headed through the passageway to the kitchen and stopped as she came into view of the garden.
Out on the patio, Holly and Peter were standing around a huge, roaring bonfire, and through the closed glass doors Saffie could hear her dad’s muffled voice over the crackling of the flames.
“Holly, look at this one!” he shouted manically, waving a small box around. “There’s a devil on the front cover! Whoever made this should be ashamed of themselves!”
Saffie’s mouth dropped open as she realised that it was the physical edition of the video game she had created with Dax.
“NO!” she screamed, running to the patio door and sliding it open so hard it banged and slid halfway back again, but by the time she got outside, it was too late. As though in slow motion, Peter tossed it into the blaze.
As Saffie’s eyes focused on the other things that were already in the fire, she sank to her knees.
Every games console, every game, and every last bit of game related merchandise she’d ever owned was bubbling away.
“Well, well, well,” Holly said, her cheeks bright red and her whole body shaking with rage. “If it isn’t our dear daughter. I’m surprised you found the time to return home at all this evening!”
Saffie opened her mouth to respond, but couldn’t.
“Do you want to know who came into my office today?” Holly continued. “Elizabeth Hawthorne. Yes, that’s right, Sapphire. I had a very long conversation with Beatrix’s mother, who told me that Beatrix hasn’t seen you all week. So of course I phone around the neighbourhood, and what do I find out? That you almost knocked Mrs Cuthbert over when she was walking her poodles, that the Kingstons saw you doing some kind of tai chi in the middle of the road, and that you jumped into Charles Toffolo’s hedgerow chasing some imaginary creature. He’d been working on that bush for three months. It was actually starting to look like a squirrel!”
“I can explain!” Saffie pleaded, though she had no idea how she was going to.
“Explain?” her mum scoffed. “Perhaps you’d like to explain why your father opened his newspaper today to THIS.”
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Holly thrust a ripped clipping of a minor news story that read:
HOTEL GUESTS THREATENED BY TEENAGE HOOLIGAN
A troublemaking teenager dodged security at the Savoy Hotel earlier this week to terrorise unsuspecting guests in their rooms. Witnesses report that the girl had also been sighted aggravating tourists at Trafalgar Square shortly before, where one victim says his day was ruined after paying nearly £5 for a triple decker ice cream only to have the top scoop knocked off by the heartless yob.
In the midst of the article was a very zoomed-in CCTV still of Saffie with a manic grin on her face, looking like an escaped asylum inmate as she was being marched through the hotel hallway.
“There’s only one thing that can explain this,” Holly said, shaking the clipping. “Brain damage! Just like your uncle! Caused by all these years of playing video games!”
“No!” Saffie said. “It’s not that, it’s-”
“Saffie, you hit your father with your slipper because you thought there was a tropical insect on his head! If that isn’t a sign of brain damage, then I don’t know what is!”
That little bit of experience certainly hadn’t been worth this.
“It’s for your own good, darling,” Peter said, picking up what Saffie now realised was her pixel-art duvet cover. “We’re cleansing you of any further poison.”
“That’s my bedding!” Saffie wailed, pulling it from his arms.
“We’ve already replaced it!” Holly snapped, ripping it out of Saffie’s hands and hauling it onto the blaze. “We’ve removed everything and anything related to video games from your life before they can destroy it any more than they already have! I regret the day I ever allowed your uncle to buy you that first game! But it ends right now. Video games and all video game related rubbish is strictly BANNED from this household!”
Saffie tried reaching for one of her collectible figurines that had tumbled out of the fire and was sitting close to her feet, but her mum kicked it back into the thick of it before Saffie could pick it up.
“Do you want to end up in a coma like your uncle?!” her mum yelled, grabbing the collar of Saffie’s jacket and dragging her back to her feet. “DO YOU?!”
Saffie couldn’t take it any more. Something inside her had snapped.
“We’ll ALL end up in a coma soon from these fumes!” she screamed back, tearing herself away from her mum’s grip. She could only watch as the figurine’s golden sword, which had been held proud and high, melted like fondue cheese.
“When Dax comes out of his coma,” Saffie said, staring into the blaze through her watery vision, “he’s never going to speak to you again. He’ll never forgive you for doing this to me.”
There was a strange silence from her parents then, only broken by the occasional cough caused by the smoke.
“Saffie….” Holly said eventually. “I hate to break this to you, but your uncle is not coming out of his coma.”
Saffie turned sharply.
“What?”
“I got a call from the hospital earlier today. They’re giving me the option to sign his end-of-life release form. Once I sign it, they turn his life support off.”
“NO!” Saffie cried, a knot in her stomach threatening to make her keel over. “We are NEVER turning Dax’s life support off! I won’t let it happen!”
Holly didn’t respond, but said everything she needed to say through her eyes. As Dax’s sister and next of kin, she would have the final say.