DEAR DIARY,
When last we left our intrepid heroine she was on the verge of being outed as a horrible evil mutant by her Dad, who was convinced that the accident which had killed his wife (who was also, less importantly, the horrible evil mutant's Mom) was no accident at all. It was, thought Dad, obviously the fault of the horrible evil mutant, and he let this thought boil in his head for three months after the car crash.
All this time I was really scared, and really not sure what I could do to get out of this. I wasn't sleeping much, except at school because I knew that the cops at school wouldn't let Dad just walk into a classroom, and that made it feel safe. But at night, in my bed, I would just sort of doze off for a minute or two and then snap awake again.
So I snapped awake again a little before 3am, and this time it wasn't just because I was scared, it was because Dad's brain had finally finished boiling that thought and it was ready to serve. Now he was sure that I wasn't a normal girl, and he'd just loaded a shotgun to come down the hallway and take care of me before I took care of him.
I sat up straight in my bed, too terrified to even push the blankets off me, and Dad came down the hall. He'd made up his mind about everything, except for whether he was going to open my door normally, kick it open, or shoot it off the hinges with the shotgun. Everything after that was already planned out in lurid detail.
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"I sat up straight in my bed..." |
He opted for the kick, and I screamed and cried and pleaded with him until I realized that it only made him think how much he was enjoying this. He took aim at me and I managed to pull myself together just enough to push him. The buckshot took out most of the wall next to me and a little bit of my hip and stomach...and my push took him twelve feet back and through my dresser to leave a big dent in the wall behind it. He was still awake, though, and the gun was coming up again, so I pushed again, only this time I just threw him back down the hallway while I got up and tried to get my bedroom window open.
We had storm windows, and the outer one had a big piece of wood in the runner to keep me from opening it far enough, though. I don't know why I didn't remember that before, Dad put it in there when I was eleven because he didn't want me to be able to sneak out of my window. So I stood there, shivering and bleeding, fumbling with this stupid piece of wood that I'd forgotten about until it was too late, and by the time I got it lifted out and was reaching with my real hands to pull the window all the way open, Dad grabbed me by my hair and slammed me into the ground.
I pushed him into the ceiling, and he dropped the shotgun. It went off again when it hit the floor, but the only thing that got shot was a ceramic oil lamp that had fallen off my dresser when I shoved Dad through it earlier. Only the oil was all over the carpet, and it caught fire and the noise of the gun going off made me forget to keep pushing Dad into the ceiling, so he fell right on top of me.
He had both hands around my neck, and I couldn't breathe. I made the shotgun get up off the floor and slam into the back of Dad's head, which got me half a gasp's worth of air and let me focus enough to rack the pump on it. I couldn't see the stupid thing, though, so when I fumbled the trigger back, I guess it only stripped a bunch of skin off his lower back and nicked his spinal cord. But it was enough to get him to let go of me.
After that, I just shoved the whole stupid storm window out of the wall and pulled myself through it. I went around to the carport, wearing just a tank top and pajama bottoms and my own blood, crying and wishing someone would come and help me. And then I knew that the Vollners next door were calling the cops, and I suddenly realized that anyone who came wasn't going to be all that interested in helping me.
So I tore a window off the front of the house and threw Dad's car keys to myself, and I stole his car. I didn't even have time to push the seat forward, so I couldn't reach the stupid pedals and I had to keep pushing the gas down the other way, which was probably a good thing because it kept me thinking about something other than what had just happened and what I was going to do next.
I drove for about two hours, out onto the highway. I saw a sheriff driving past on the other side of the median and that's when I finally realized how much of an idiot I was, that the cops were going to come after me and they were going to be looking for Dad's car. So I took the next state road I came to, drove to one of those scenic overlook things, and parked. I grabbed a flashlight and a screwdriver from the trunk, then I picked up the whole car and dropped it into the canyon. Then I pulled a couple of trees over it.
And after that I was exhausted, and I crawled into the bushes to hide until the morning. I guess I fell asleep a little before dawn.