Day one
“Hey, Elaina, I just got this letter from your school. Can you come down here, please?” my dad calls from the kitchen.
“Alright be right down!” I yell back.
I run down our wooden staircase glancing at the pictures on the walls and wondering what could be wrong. I enter the kitchen and immediately notice the serious and concerned look on his face; the same look he gave me when he gave me the news that my mother had died.
“Elaina,” he says in a worried tone, “come sit down please.”
“Sure, what’s wrong?”
“If you were in danger or if someone was messing with you in school you’d tell me right?”
“Of course! Why wouldn’t I?” I say thinking, where is this all coming from?
“It’s just that I received this letter from your school saying that you are currently in a dangerous situation with a school bully.” he speaks softly obviously trying not to push me for answers.
“With what bully?”
“It doesn’t give a name; it only says that the principle wants to speak to you and me today after school.”
“That’s odd I haven’t had a problem with anyone recently.”
“Well we will figure it out later. You better hurry out that door before you miss your bus.”
“Okay. Bye, I love you!” I say running out the door.
“Love you too!”
Later while I’m doing my homework my phone starts ringing. I look at the caller ID and notice that the number is blocked. I answer reluctantly and freeze in fear.
A man with a harsh and threatening voice is on the other line, “If you don’t tell us what we want to know, you and your father die or you tell us and you can pretend this day never happened. Take your pick.”
Clearly panicked now, I say, “What do you want” trying to sound as calm as possible.
The man replies with a smile in his voice, “Where is it?”
Shaking in fear that one false move, or word, would get my dad killed, I stutter the words, “Wh, where is what?”
“Don’t act stupid! I have two people ready to shoot your dad on my command now tell me where it is!” he nearly screams, but something changed in his voice, he sounds nervous.
“Fine have it your way” he says.
Right then my dad bursts through the door runs over to me and pushes me to the ground milliseconds before a hundred rounds, it seemed, of gun shots fires through the window I was standing in front of a second before.
I cover my ears, scream, cry, and everything in between as I watch my house get ripped to shreds. Almost all the pictures hanging on the walls get hit. The vase on the table shatters into a billion pieces, and the walls, that we only had painted a month before, now have holes on every square inch of seeable space.
Softly but stern, my father tells me, “Go upstairs,” (because the stairs were right next to us) “and grab my pistol and shells that are in the nightstand”. I stare at him for a moment, and then seeing the worry in his eyes, rush upstairs. I sprint up the stairs tripping a few times grab his pistol and run back down. My dad grabs the gun and starts shooting. The men in the car speed away after the man sitting in the passenger seat gets shot. I start to write down their licenses plate number, but my dad stops me.
