• Background: A teenage girl lives with her alcoholic and abusive father, as well as her older sister and mother, who are afraid to do anything about it. It's been this way her whole life.

    "You couldn't survive one day on your own." He challenged, his temper rising.
    I smirked. "Oh?"
    He shook his head. "Without me, you couldn't do anything."
    I narrowed my eyes. "You'd be surprised how I'd get along 'without you' around."
    And then the tyrant took a step forward and opened the front door in a way that one can only achieve when constantly drunk. "I'd love to test that theory."
    Finally. Eight steps. Eight steps were separating me and the outside world. The door between them was gone. Seven. Six. Five. Four.
    But it wouldn't last. It couldn't. He spoke again.
    "You know, if you leave, you wont live to see 16. I'll make sure of it. I will kill you." He said it no differently than he would talk about the news or the weather. As simple as that. A death threat clear out in the open. Four pairs of ears could hear it. Two were scared and silent as the grave. One- mine- didn't care. The last belonged to the speaker.
    Three.
    "You know I don't lie." The liar sneered.
    I whirled around, face to face with the man who had single handedly ruined my entire being.
    "You don't? Well then. Prove me wrong. In fact, I dare you. Keep your word. And I'll keep mine." I spun back around.
    Two.
    But before I could even think of the last step, an earsplitting shot rang through the silence behind me. I heard two women scream and something glass fall to the ground and shatter. Something else hit the floor.
    A body.
    My body.
    Me.
    And I felt something else. Pain. Fiery, burning, intense, white-hot pain. Like I never could have imagined. Streaming through every inch of my body, invading my senses and taking control. I kept on fighting the feeling, and I thought it would never end. There started a dark edge that darted into my vision at an alarming rate. It continued until it finally took over... And then, black.

    And just like that, he had won. And just like that, I was suddenly looking at myself from outside of myself. Like a photograph gone wrong. The white tile was stained red, blood pooling around a pale, lanky teenage girl sprawled out on the tile, facing sideways. She had short blond hair and a ring of tribal pattern tattoos on the back of her palms and around her fingers. Her eyes, once gray and full of a complete unique and undescribable feature, were now clouded over and beginning to lose all color. There was blood flowing out from underneath her black shirt, barely stopping at all for the meaningless resistance. There was no movement from the girl. It took me that long to realize that we were not alone in that room. There were several others. One was saying that this girl had been shot directly in the spinal cord, insuring death upon contact. But he was wrong, he told the other man that there was no pain. He knew nothing of the pain this girl had felt. At what cost? Nothing had been saved, nothing rescued and nothing gained. The girl lying on the floor had been murdered in vain, and now none of it mattered. When I looked around, I could see that there wasn't a single person I knew in this room. So I was right, no one cared of my fate.