a Piece of Art

20.0 T H E E N D

   So this is it, I guess. The moment I have been waiting for the past month, since I decided this is something I truly wanted to do.

   Twelve sharp was the time the guards changed, both am and pm. I knew that. My grandmother knew that, and once again we used it for our advantage.

   I got in my family's land easily, almost without even trying. I walked the distance between the guards, the garden, till the door. I ran the bell and surprisingly, my mother opened the door, like she knew I was there.

   We stayed silent for a second.

   "Hello mother."

   I saw her hand rise, her eyes showed how much she wanted to slap me. She waited a second, drop her hand and closed the door.

   Through the door, she yelled, almost hysterically. "Edward!!!"

***

   I wouldn't say things were easy after that. But it got calmer. My father ended up listening to her from his office and coming to the door. He opened it and was mostly surprised by what he found.

   He seemed worried the most about the fact that I had 'broke in' more than anything, though I tried not to mind.

   We stayed in silence, sitting in the living room for over fifteen minutes. Purely filled with awkward silence. I was starting to regret my decision, damn Parker and his thoughts of redemption.

   That's when I decided to talk. I remembered why I was even there to begin with.

   "Hello." I said. Well, I tried.

   "You have already said that." My mother answered, bitter.

   My father waited for a second. Before breaking down. "Where the hell have you been, Elizabeth?"

   Strangely, the way he pronounced my name, the foreign use of a curse word, comforted me. I took a deep breath. I can do this. There is no need to be nervous.

   "I'm currently studying at college." I said calmly. The gasp my mother let out, didn't surprise me. "Things are going pretty well. To be honest." I smiled to myself. They might not be proud of me, but I do was proud of what I had accomplished.

   "Did you have to run away to do that? You could have just told me. You know Daddy would have paid for it." My father said. He simply didn't understand.

   "Yes, I sadly had to. I did tell you what I wanted. You just didn't listen. I told you and mother there were many things I wanted to do." The conversation hurt me, but I knew these were things we needed to say.

   "That's not true." He refused.

   "I even got several of my pictures in a popular gallery, I'm getting many request from popular magazines." I told them, trying to show them this had been for the best. I was truly better.

   "I told you you should have never bought her that horrible camera." My mother said, just looking at him. The nerve she had.

   "Then you would have took from me the only thing that ever brought me happiness." I directly told her.

   "Oh dear god, don't be dramatic, Elizabeth. You had your taste of the real world, I assume you run out of money so that's why you try to come here to justify your actions. It's okay, I'm not mad anymore, you can come back home if you drop out from that horrible place."