Breaking Glass

Chapter 2- Cuffed

I woke up in a hospital room, a nurse leaning over me. Beside her, stood a police officer, blonde, and built. He was young, like he’d just gotten out of Police College. He was the type my ex-best friend Melissa would have called “hot”. He glared at me as if he’d rather be anywhere but here. The nurse looked down at her clipboard before speaking to me.

“Kiera? Kiera? Can you hear me?”

“Hm…? Yeah,” I mumbled.

She then turned to the police officer. “She’s fine; she just inhaled a little bit of smoke,”

I remembered the officer pulling out a card, and introducing himself, but I didn’t care enough to remember what his name was.

“Can you tell me Kiera, what were you doing last night at 12:50 am?”

I looked away in silence.

He tried again. “Why did you have a lighter on you yesterday?”

Again, I said nothing.

A series of questions and interrogations followed, but I continued my silent responses.  What were they going to do? Put me in jail? It wasn’t much different from living in a foster home anyways.

I only snapped back my attention when the officer threw a newspaper on my bed. The headline read “Forest Fire in Park injures 2”. My eyes quickly scanned over the article, and I leaned back into my bed, stunned. “Two teenagers”… “Both around seventeen”… “Snuck out to meet up” … “second degree burns”.

Apparently there had been 2 other people in the forest with me last night. My head spun from disbelief. What if… what if the fire had actually killed them? What if I had been responsible for the deaths of two people? What if? I didn’t dare to think. Would I have been able to live with myself? I knew the answer. It was loud and clear. No, I wouldn’t have.

I was messed up, yes. But I was not a killer. It had been a freak accident. But I still hated myself. My eyes burned with tears, with hatred.

I looked up at the officer, eyes shiny and wild with anger. His frightened expression told me how crazy and deranged I must have looked.  He took half a step back, as if afraid that my insanity was contagious.

In between sobs, in the calmest voice I could manage, I choked out the words, “It… accident… lighter… cigarette… twig… catch on…. fire…”

The officer looked at me, doubt written all over his face.

“Yes, I’m sure it was, now could you explain to me in as much detail as you can, what happened last night?”

 I clamped my mouth shut, trying to muffle my sobs.

After a few moments, my sobs slowed and my breathing eased a little bit.

“I went outside to smoke because I couldn’t fall asleep. I guess I didn’t completely put out the cigarette.” I answered simply, staring him straight in the eye.

“Yes, I thought you might say that,” He jotted down a few notes in a notepad, clicking his tongue. “We’ve done a series of tests and you and I both know that you don’t smoke.” He leaned in and smirked. “Now, you can make this easy for both of us, and tell the truth, or we can do this the hard way. I’m going to ask you some simple questions and you can do yourself a favour and answer them honestly.”

I glared up at the ceiling, fists balling up at my sides. This guy was seriously starting to get on my nerves.

“Question number one, why did you really go outside at midnight?”

“I already said, I couldn’t fall asleep.”

He took an aggravated breath and scribbled a few things down.

“Okay, now why did you have a lighter with you?”

“Because I had a cigarette.”

“Can you explain why you had a cigarette if you don’t smoke?”

I paused and rolled my eyes before finally answering.

“I like the smell of it.”

The officer put down his notepad and stared at me. 

“I see we’re going to have to do this the hard way.”

*******************************************************************

A few hours later I found myself at the police station with a pair of cold metal cuffs digging into my wrists.

I sat in the interrogation room, the officer behind a desk reviewing a bulky file. I glanced around idly, and squirmed in my seat. After a couple minutes, he looked up.

“I see you have a history of psychological disorder in your family,”

My head jerked, staring daggers at him, a spark of fury igniting in my throat. I swallowed, compressing it.

“It says here that your father committed suicide about a year ago due to depression.”

He glanced at me for confirmation, or at least, some kind of response.

I gritted my teeth and stared into his smirking face, narrowing my eyes, patience wearing dangerously thin.

He leaned his weight forward on the desk and spoke to me slowly.

“You do know that mental illnesses can be hereditary.”

My father only went crazy after my mom died. But out loud, I said nothing.

Did I ever wonder if I was crazy? Yes. But to hear it from someone else was something completely different. I already couldn’t stand to sit here and listen to a police officer prod me endless questions, but when he started talking about my father and accusing me of being just like him, the thin string of patience I had been clinging on to snapped.

“Don’t you DARE call my family crazy!” I snarled at him. “My father was NOT mental, and I am NOT f***ing mental! Okay?”

I knew that using the tone of voice I was using now, it wasn’t exactly convincing that I wasn’t crazy, but I found my voice rising anyways. I was getting more agitated by the second. Another thing that struck me as strange at that moment was me defending my father after all the hate that had built up inside of me, for him abandoning me and leaving me alone in this world.

I thrashed my arms against the back of my chair and screamed at him every foul name I could think of. By the end of it, my face was a bright scarlet, my eyes were puffy and raw from overflow of tears, and my throat ached and strained from the misuse of my vocal-chords.

The police officer kept a straight face, stern and emotionless, a poker face. It would have been convincing if his fingers hadn’t been shaking slightly, itching to reach for his gun.

I prayed that he would. Just shoot me already. Get it over with. Of course, that never happened.

Instead, I ended up being diagnosed as “mentally and emotionally unstable”.

Instead of going to jail, because I was “crazy” and supposedly therefore not responsible for my actions, I was sentenced to live in a psychiatric hospital for however long it took for me to get better.  

Basically, I was being sent off to a loony bin. Starting next week. Fantastic. 

******************************************************

That's it for now :) Ill upload soon :) please please pleasee vote!