week 4: Lisa

"A lesson Learned"

Thirteen-year-old Paige walked down the deserted road carrying a suitcase with a broken zipper and a messed up wheel that prevented it from rolling. She wasn’t sure where she was going but she knew she had to get away. Her stepdad Larry was clinically insane but the state thought she was better with him then a foster home. Last night he proved them wrong when he went ballistic over a dead goldfish.
Screaming that he was useless if he couldn’t even keep a goldfish alive. She explained that it wasn’t his fault and that goldfish have very short life spans but that just angered him more. He began breaking things and blaming the store for selling him a fish with cancer.
She was scared and slipped into her room as soon as she could. It was a sparse room with nothing but a bed and a desk. Her clothes lay neatly folded in Rubbermaid containers. The walls held no pictures; instead, they were neatly stored in a three ring binder. She checked her hello kitty wallet and found it contained two one-dollar bills, a movie ticket receipt, and an expired library card. It wasn’t much but she knew it would have to do. She lay in bed and waited for morning.
At daylight she grabbed a flashlight and some chex mix then left the house and just started walking, knowing anything had to be better than this. She hit town two hours later and remembered the abandoned movie theater. Kids at school talked about being able to get inside through a board covering a broken window, that they pulled off and replaced showing no signs of entry. With no other ideas, she headed there.
Getting inside wasn’t as easy as they described due to size of the board, but after a long struggle she managed to get it off, but knew she would never get it back on behind her so she left it open. The morning light coming through the window, shined on a thin woman with rotten teeth. She moaned and turned to face the corner but not before Paige saw the scars on her arms, and wondered if she had been in a car accident. She moved down the hall and found a scrawny old man sleeping with his head propped up on a statue of the Virgin Mary. Using her flashlight, she was able to see his long scraggly beard, which looked like it, held years worth of dirt. He wore a filthy wedding gown and red scuffed up high heels. Before she looked away, she noticed one of the heels had broken off and wondered how he walked.
She side stepped the old man and continued down the hall. On the left she came upon a viewing room with the Dumb and Dumber sign still sitting in the slot on the side. She scanned the light inside and saw the shadows of a dozen people littering the room.

Her heart began to race and she quickly realized she once again had to get out. She scrambled back to the window and climbed out leaving the board on the ground as she walked away. She headed back home with a lesson learned. It was better to live with the crazy you know then the crazy you did not.