Envelope Challenge

Chapter 2 - Spitfire

She found herself back at her house in the exact same scenario she fled from previously. Her mother stood at the front of the room and Polly sat on the ground because her mother had taken the chair out of the room. Normally, she was allowed to sit on the chair during her lectures, but she obviously overstepped some unspoken boundary.

"You dared to leave the house without my permission? Especially right after I finish telling you to listen to me?" mother screamed at her. "Not only do you leave without my permission, you blatantly ignore me and run out even when I tell you to stop."

"I'm sorry, mother," she stated in slight repentance.

"Obviously you're not!" she yelled into her face. "If you were truly sorry then you would have listened to me last time!" She gave a disgruntled groan and ran a hand through her tightly braided hair pulled into a bun. "That's it. You're grounded, starting this minute, young lady."

"I'm a senior! You can't just ground me!" Polly exclaimed and contemplated standing up, but decided against it.

"As long as you live under my roof you will abide by my rules!"

This time Polly did stand up. She stood toe to toe with her mother for the first time she could remember and screamed into her face. "Then I'm moving out!"

"You can't move out! You're my daughter!" Even though the reasoning was flawed, they were both too lost in the heat of the moment to realize the irrationality of that line of thought.

"I'm eighteen years old! I'm a legal adult and I can move out if I want to!"

"Well, you're not taking anything I bought for you with you. And I bought everything you own!"

"No! I got my job and have been getting a steady paycheck! So, I do have things I bought from my own effort!"

Her mother was getting beyond angry. She already ran her hand through her hair enough that it tore free from the bun and her face was flushing red. If she got any angrier, that vein in her right temple would begin to bulge and then start to throb the angrier she got. It was something Polly had begun to notice in the recent months when she become more vocal to her mother's random demands.

"Oh? And where would you go? Huh? Do you have any plan for your future at all?" They were both screaming at each other at this point and spit flew from her mother's mouth, causing Polly to hold in a shiver of disgust when it landed on her.

"The City! I'm going to Washington Square Park!" As if that ended the argument, Polly whirled around from her mother's enraged figure and stomped across the hall to her room.

She angrily threw clothes into the suitcase she kept hidden under her bed. Once she graduated, she planned to leave her mother and already had plenty of supplies saved up for that event. It was just taking place earlier than she had originally planned. She threw in those jeans she loved and the hoodie that her father had given to her. Because her mother didn't buy it for her, she considered it fair game to bring along; it was the only memento she had of him after her mother everything that left a trace of him out of the house. After throwing in miscellaneous object with the rest of her clothes, she decided she was ready to go and was on her way to the front door.

The locked door in front of her stopped her. The doorknob rattled uselessly as she twisted, locked from the outside. Dropping the suitcase, she pulled on the handle harder. She left out a frustrated scream, hitting her fists on the unyielding wooden door.

"Let me out!" she screamed loud enough for her mother to hear. She didn't need to scream quite so loud; her mother was waiting right outside the door.

"Not until you start acting like an adult!"

"An adult would be free to leave her own room," she retorted. "You don't want me to be an adult!"