Am I Pretty Yet?

Chapter Four

This chapter has been edited 07/28/16.

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"Mia, please, stop!" Chase yelled, fumbling to unbuckle his seatbelt. I waited with bated breath but Mia kept running, her footsteps stomping against the concrete pavement as she passed by house after house. Even though Starcrossed had ended for nearly two years now, I had the complete deluxe edition of all four seasons on DVD. It had been a birthday gift from Mom last year.

Stuffing a handful of cheddar cheese chips into my mouth, I grabbed the remote to turn up the volume. One thing I despised about the beginning of spring was the sudden and drastic downfall of rain. The clouds in the sky turned gray, the mornings were chillier, and the air became cooler, smelling of mud. Mom had already gone to the effort of taking out two of our umbrellas from the hallway closet and placing them by the front door for easy access as I headed to school and she headed to work.

The droplets were turning fatter and fatter, pelting loudly against my window pane. When Chase finally reached Mia and whirled her around by desperately making a grab for her arm, Mia's mouth was moving, saying something I couldn't quite catch. I groaned in frustration, turning up the volume even more. Then I heard a bang. My shoulders jumped in surprise, and I immediately lowered the volume until the TV screen indicated it was on mute.

My heart pounded. It was a Sunday night. Mom was out with her older sister, my Aunt Delilah, across town having dinner at Queenie, the Italian restaurant with overpriced french baguettes. The owner had a cheesy French accent, and Harrison and I highly suspected that it was all an act for business reasons.

Another bang sounded, and this time I grabbed my stuffed octopus out of instinct. Looking down at my cell phone, I punched in Mom's number and held the speaker up to my ear. When I realized it wasn't even ringing, I looked down, my heart sinking. No signal.

I heard another bang, and then the entire house was cloaked in darkness. I swallowed hard despite my throat being dry, sitting frozen on my bedspread, unable to make myself move or even breathe. The rain was still coming down on the roof at a steady rate.

drip drip drip drip.

I fumbled with my phone, trying Mom's number again but still there were no bars on my screen. A knocking noise erupted, this time coming from downstairs. Someone was at the door.

I was going to die.

It was a burglar. Or a rapist. Or a burglar slash rapist. Like the not so smart girl in horror movies, I found myself quietly moving downstairs, my footsteps softly padding along the carpeted steps. I had to at least attempt to protect our home. We had been living here for as long as I could remember. I learned how to do a backwards flip on a trampoline in the backyard, and Harrison chipped a tooth once in the front yard when we'd been playing tug-of-war back in the Eighth Grade with an old jump rope we'd found in the attic. If a burglar slash rapist was really going to barge through the front door, they were going to have to get through me first.

A knock sounded again at the door. I took an umbrella from the stand, holding it in a way that I'd seen a protagonist hold it in some action film that Harrison had been obsessed with during our first year of high school. This time the knock sounded more like a desperate pounding, so I unlocked the door and bravely swung it open, hitting the intruder on the head immediately with the end of the umbrella.

"Jesus!" the intruder yelled, tumbling to the ground and clutching their head. The intruder sounded a lot like...

"Harrison?" I called out, running out in the rain and kneeling in front of him. He was holding his head in both hands, taking deep breaths. "What the hell are you doing here? It's pouring."