VOID

Welcome to Queens.

    Do you ever just have a thought that is so buck ass wild that there is no possible way it could come true? Maybe it's you becoming famous, going on Oprah and getting to surprise the audience with cars. Maybe it's the thought that you are the best singer on the face of the planet despite the fact that you are tone deaf. Maybe it’s something as simple as the cute boy loving you back. Now imagine that every wild thought in your head became true tomorrow. Would you be ready to deal with the consequences that would follow from getting everything you want?  

  I should probably introduce myself before I continue to existentially ramble. My name is Scarlett and I moved to Queens about a month ago and it's a bigger shit hole than the movies and comics show you. All I wanted was to get away from my small town life in Lockport to have more experiences and to avoid living in the shadow of my perfect sister and my emotionally absent mother.

  Emily was the cheerleader type, she was fit and got straight A's. But the most important thing that Emily had was the love and admiration from our mother, an accomplishment of its own. Emily graduated and went to school to go be some doctor, like it wasn’t hard enough trying to get praise from mom. Everyday mom would ask me what I was going to do with my life and point out that I wasn’t doing much with it. Not like my mother had any room to talk. She had a new flavor every week and worked at the local grocery store bagging up your child's lunch-ables. As for my darling dad he left without so much as an "I love you" to any of us and mom just found another guy and replaced him without blinking. 

  Mom's newest man was Bruce. Bruce met mom at the local bar, where she would go after work every night, they came back home and hooked up and he's just never left. Bruce works as some scummy computer hacker by day and a “singer” by night or a “boxer” if he gets too drunk. I spent most of my time avoiding the constant war of screaming and angry sexual tension between the two of them by staying upstairs in the attic writing. I could put myself into the words I was writing, mostly about boys with owls and magical schools, or kids who got bit by spiders and all of the sudden have the love and admiration of an entire city where the noise drowned out the reality I was currently living. 
 
  About three months ago I came home from school to my mom drunk as I’d done numerous times before. She was yelling at me, saying that I wasn’t like my sister and that I wouldn’t go anywhere unless I got the same grades as Emily. She wouldn’t even take a deep enough breath to hear that one of my stories I had written in my college level English class had won an award. Mom always knew how to point out the negatives in life. Bruce then interjected himself in the problem as he always did. "Are you stupid or something? A ‘D’ in math, how hard are numbers, kid." I just ignored him as I always did but this time he grabbed me when I went to turn away.. 

  Mom did nothing to help, looking at it as a father disciplining his child. I spent the rest of the night trying to figure out how I was going to cover up the hand print that now painted my cheek before school the next day.  As I waited for a make-up video to boot up on my old Toshiba I came up with an idea. After graduation I would come home and go to my room and leave through the window when mom and Bruce left for the evening, I’d walk ‘til I could catch a cab and never let anyone hurt me again. Suddenly, like a lightbulb above my head a thought came to mind so I hit Ctrl+T and searched for a place to enroll myself into some self defense classes with some money I got from working at a local comic book store. I began my classes immediately and even though I wasn’t going to be in them for very long, graduation was coming quickly and I had to learn all I could.

  Graduation came and I don't even know why I thought it would even be that hard to execute my plan. They didn't come to the ceremony in the first place, and as I walked into the kitchen and put my diploma down I realized that they weren't even home. I would like to believe that they didn't realize my room had been packed up, aside from a few things that I would need before leaving. I left a note on my mattress explaining that they wouldn't be able to find me again and hit the road.