Run Away (An Academy Ghost Bird Fan-Fiction)

Prologue

My heart thundered under my breast. I was sure my parents could hear me, asleep in their beds inside the two-story, gray-siding clad house on Sunnyvale Court.
Rain puddled at my feet, soaking the dirt of 1000 walks into my off-brand tennis shoes. I usually enjoy the rain. I like the feel of walking barefoot through puddles in the grass and the smell of rain mixed with pine trees. Tonight, the rain was cool and the air crisp against my skin for early August in South Carolina. I would be out all night, though, so this was completely bad timing.
With my toes pointed out to the street, I stood at the edge of the long driveway. A cool wind split through my dark poncho. I wanted to shiver, but I steeled myself and ignore the cold.
This is it, I told myself. If you're going to leave, you need to do it now.
A new house sat half finished around the bend of Sunnyvale. I explored it yesterday while on a walk and discover the back door was unlocked.
My hand gripped the straps of my overloaded backpack. One night, I told myself. One night where I'm not sleeping under the same roof as my parents. I'm not going to die, like my mother seems to think I would. Normal people, everyone else in the world, weren't all murdered and raped the moment they went outside.
Thoughts of my bedroom in the house behind me flooded my mind: the soft green comforter, the mauve carpet, the warmth of the cotton sheets, a quiet symphony playing from the stereo. I shook my head at the thought, lifting a hand to my brow to flick away the collection of water there. No. I had already made the decision. Besides, it was too late to turn back. Sneaking out of the house was hard enough to do at night. I wouldn't want to be caught trying to sneak back in.
I forced my leg up and out to step foot on the dark pavement of the road. My parents' house was the newest on the half-circle street, tucked away behind a forest near a new highway. There were only twenty homes in the neighborhood. In front of my parents' house was an empty lot with room for one more house, but the land was still undeveloped. The rest of the street had several middle income homes and made for a very quiet neighborhood. Unfortunately, the street light was never installed in front of my parents' home. Even though I knew the blacktop was flat, it made me nervous that I might trip on a stick-- or an ex-murderer.
I stomped my other foot onto the road, turned left and started walking. The wind swept up around my face, and I tucked my head down to brace myself against it. I fell into the deeper shadows of the road, shielded from the glow of neighbors' outdoor lights. I shivered as a breeze picked up around me.
Even as my heart continued to pound, I moved forward. Every second I envisioned my sister or my parents waking to find me gone and glancing out the window to spot me. Only I knew better. They probably wouldn't notice until well into the afternoon that I was nowhere around. The reluctance I felt was only the whispers of my mother echoing in my head.

My sneakers barely made a sound other than the occasional plop in a shallow puddle along the road. Passing the empty lot, I walked past the one story, brick, ranch-style house I've noticed from my bedroom window. They have a Golden Retriever that I've seen tethered to their front yard. I'm hoping the dog isn't there now as I walk past, I don't want him to bark and get my parents' attention. My mother always notices dogs barking and complains about the noise. Its one of the reasons we never got a pet growing up. Luckily, the dog seems to be inside and out of the rain keeping my nighttime stroll a secret to the neighborhood. I walked past the houses one by one, each one dark except for a porch light or an occasional bedroom. No one looks out to see the shadow of a girl, soaking and shivering from the rain, walking silently past their warm, dry homes.
I reach the new house and pause to look around one last time to make sure I hadn't been spotted by anyone. All is quiet, nothing but the patter of raindrops on my hood and shoulders. I step onto the dirt of the freshly tiled, soon-to-be, driveway and walk around to the back of the house. I make sure to avoid the side of the house closest to the neighbor just in case they have a motion sensor security light. Reaching the back porch, I gently wipe my shoes on the cement trying to rid them of dirt and mud but it seems like a pointless task with the mud caked on. I don't want anyone to know I was here so I find the driest section of the porch closest to the door and slip my shoes and socks off and carry them so I don't track mud into the house. I check the back door, it is still unlocked. I ease it open and step inside, careful to not bump any walls with my body or backpack. The air inside is warm and still. See, everything is fine. I walk further into the house and decide to go upstairs and get comfortable in a bedroom for the night. I pick a small room upstairs that has a large bedroom facing into the woods since I don't want anyone to look from the street and see me walking past the windows. Finding a bathroom, I peel off my drenched rain poncho, that deflected absolutely no rain, and place it into the tub. Since my clothes are soaked too, I peel those off as well, placing them along side the poncho, and grab a change of clothes I was saving for tomorrow from my backpack. All I have is a pair of shorts or a skirt, neither will keep me as warm as pants would have but since my pants are soaked its better than sitting in wet clothes and getting hypothermia.
After changing into dryer clothes, I sit in the middle of the room and pull my journal out of my backpack. I've kept a journal for a long time, documenting my dreams or my thoughts. When my sister, Marie, and my mother kept snooping and I kept getting punished for what I wrote I had to start writing in code. I use the Korean alphabet but with English words so they couldn't read it even if they tried using an internet translator. I flip through the pages, skipping all the ones where Marie has scribbled in permanent marker that I'm a geek or stupid. Finding a clean page, I start writing in code about tonight.

"I did it!" I write. "I'm going to be sleeping out from under their roof. Mom will never know but I will always know that I was right. The world doesn't need to be as scary as she makes it out to be. There isn't a murderer around every corner and a kidnapper in every shadow." Only the sounds of my pen scraping the pages echo through the house. "I will admit that I was scared, but only of her discovering I was gone. I don't want to know what her punishment will be if she finds out what I've done." Too many times I have sat on that hard wooden stool until my backside was numb, too many times I've kneeled on the hard tile, forgotten for hours at a time. Those were all for minor things like writing in my journal about wanting to talk to someone at school, or walking onto the back porch without permission. I can't imagine what punish for this would be. She always screams at me about something she saw on the news about girls getting taking from their front yards and how much trouble I would cause the family if I was kidnapped. She's never physically hit me but her punishments tend to last hours and my body aches for hours after each one.

I continue to scribble my thoughts in code, describing the house I found to stay in, writing about the rain and about last night's dream where I ran from a pack of wolves until I was standing at the edge of a canyon with the pack growling at my back. Completely absorbed in my writing that I almost miss the creak of the floorboards. Someone is here!

I turn, ready to jump up and run...

...Too late