Love,Pierce

Chapter 1: The bet

                                🔸🔸

Dedicated to  preshivipes
   
                          Ocean

"Some of you might know why we called this family meeting..." there was a pause before mom continued "... and one of them is your brother Terrell trying out for football this sophomore year," mom said with a look of disappointment on her face. Some 'uhs' and 'whys' were heard from me and my other siblings, even from my dad.

Mom cleared her throat, getting back our attention "Now don't be like that; in this family, we support each and everyone's decisions, whether they're dumb or not" she said with a fake smile.

Dad cuts in "And also; before we forget the most important thing, the quints will finally be going to high school with Devon and Terrell"

"WHAT!!" said I and my siblings in unison

"I said it before, am not gonna say it again...Now that's over, let's go have dinner," he said as he quickly left us with our thoughts.

Now I know what your thinking; why isn't five cute looking teenage girls in high school, or in any school for that matter. Well if you haven't guessed it yet then I'll tell you. I and my sisters are home-schooled 'cause of our condition.

And when I say 'condition'; I don't mean we're sick or suffering from a deadly illness, no I mean phobias and anxiety.

Big, ugly phobias that have refrained us from having a normal teenage life, and it all started from when we were three. Being the only girl set of quints to be born, everybody wanted a piece of us. And to be fair, we liked it at some point.

We didn't even notice that our lives were just revolving around the camera. It was always—light.Camera.action. Those three words made us start regretting why we chose This life.

I mean we didn't, but you know

Everything just became suffocating. You know. Something that we thought was fun wasn't anymore.

The day I and my sisters were on the stage looking at the camera, panicking. We were panicking for a lot of things, to be honest. That day we had to memorise our lines; do our hair and makeup, and still act natural. That's a lot of pressure given to a three-year-old if you ask me.

As the show started, all eyes were on us. Everybody wanted to know 'what we were going to say', 'what we were going to do', and  'if we were going to mess up' this time: and that made us even more terrified. So we panicked. We couldn't breath; everyone was felt suffocating, our chest felt tight. We just wanted it to stop. Soon after it was night. a night for us.

I woke up to white lights; thought I was I heaven, but sadly no. I was in the hospital, not knowing what happened.

Soon after that, things started getting worse for me and my sisters. At age six; our panic attacks occasionally started getting worse, same goes for our anxiety. I can remember when we were at the park having fun and a girl just touched me and as usual, I panicked, but I didn't know why. The strangest thing happened that day, as I was affected by the whole touching scenario, my sisters were as well.

At age ten; doctor Owen finally diagnosed us with four rare phobias:

Agoraphobia- fear of public spaces or crowds
Glossophobia- fear of speaking in public
Kiononiphobia- fear of room full of people
Germanophobia- fear of germs

Doctor Owen said my anxiety led to every single one of our phobias. He didn't know how or why the panic attacks wouldn't stop, but what he did know was—if I kept on having them, it could lead to us having a weak heart and nobody wants that.