I’ve never seen something so tempting than the little red light surrounding the button that screams “DO NOT TOUCH”. It was daring me to touch it. Finally, the pressure broke me. My fingers crept closer… closer… closer…
Before I could press the button, a ginormous black net dropped down from who knows where crumpling me to the floor. I hit my head pretty hard, and my vision was becoming blurry filled with random black spots. There was no way for me to stand up or move this massive, rugged, harsh net off of me. Just then I heard this awful, horrid, spine-chilling laugh from somewhere in this dark building.

“Oh, how gullible you are, Tessy. I would have thought you were smarter than that”.

Tessy? No one has called me that since my dad left 12 years ago. I never really knew why, just that he had to leave or something bad could happen. I never thought anything of it until now.

The net lifted off of me, but before I could escape there were hands on my shoulders. They were squeezing to make sure I didn’t try anything. But if we’re being honest, I didn’t have the energy anyway. Whoever was doing this to me had obviously done it before and was very good at it. I never realized it but we had started walking. No one talked. The only sounds were the loud thumps from the feet of the man holding my shoulders, cracking much louder than mine or my kidnapper’s against the rigid floor beneath us. We stopped suddenly, stayed there for a while until we sped up the pace to wherever we were going. I had no idea where we were going, but I was bound to find out sometime.

We entered a room, and my senses quickly picked up something they did not like. Something was off.
The temperature of this room was drastically colder than the one we were just in. The floor was now some sort of carpet, and there were lights. I looked around to see who my kidnapper was, but he wasn’t there anymore.
Weird.

I started looking around instead. There were dark grey walls, same color carpet, one bed in the corner that looked about the size of a king, a bedside table, lamp, and a dresser. It all looked nice, like your own bedroom at home without your personal things. But there had to be a catch.

Tessy… a voice echoed.

“What? Who’s there?” I shouted with the utmost amount of fear in my voice.

No answer.

It was quiet enough to hear crickets. I tried the door that we came in through, locked. I should have known. This room felt as if it was closing in on me faster and faster the longer I was in here. My isolation must be their desire. I had to get out of here. There had to be some way out that they hadn’t thought of. I just needed to survey the area in order to find out where. There was 1 window, 1 door, and a vent up on the ceiling. I could not use the door, it was locked and there were no windows on it. The window would be the second best and easiest way out, but if my kidnappers thought this process through then they would have used plexiglass, so it will not break, or break very easily. The vent at the top of the wall would be the third option of getting out of this room. I could climb up into the vent and try to crawl through them to an open spot, drop down and run.
They did not feed me, give me water, no new clothes, shower, etc. I have not been in here very long, but I could tell that they are starving me. I walked over to try the door one more time, maybe if I twist it hard enough it will bust open and I’ll be out of here!

It doesn’t budge. Ugh, onto the next plan, the window. If the window isn’t plexiglass I could find something hard to throw at it so it will break, but if it is, then I better duck fast. My dad taught me something about glass before he left us, even though I wasn’t too old, I somehow remember it. If you tap the glass with your nail and it makes a clicking noise, it’s real. But if there’s no noise, it’s fake- or plexiglass. Unfortunately, my nails are about as short as they can get so I don’t think tapping the glass will work. I guess I’m throwing something at it and hoping for the best.

The bedside table was not much help. I don’t know why they even put it in there if there was gonna be nothing in it. Maybe the dresser would save me and have something I could use… like a shoe that was left, or a decoration that no one wanted so they threw it in here. There was nothing in the dresser, unless I was supposed to use a hair clip to pick the lock that the door doesn’t have, or a tennis ball. I mean that could work, but I don’t think it is strong enough to break the glass. I guess I’ll never know until I try. Before I threw the ball at the window, I had to make a barricade so if my plan backfired, I wouldn’t get a tennis ball to the face resulting in a black eye. I moved the dresser- or attempted- in between the window and I, squatted behind it and threw the ball as hard as I could. Unsurprisingly, it bounced right back and hit the dresser. Good thing I moved it! Now, onto my next idea, my last idea. If this didn’t work, I would be in here until they decided to let me out.

If they let me out.

I pushed the dresser over to the wall by the vent using all of the strength I had left in me, followed by the bedside table for a kind of step up onto the dresser. I climbed onto the table, which was not very sturdy, then onto the dresser. I was suddenly very close to the ceiling, and a lot closer to the vent. To my luck, the cover did not have screws or nails or anything in it holding it to wall for me to struggle to pull out.
I wedged my fingers between the wall and the metal of the cover and pulled, hard. I didn’t need to pull that hard though, because the vent popped right out and sent me tumbling off the dresser onto the floor. I sat the cover on the floor, as far away from the dresser as I could, so if I fell again it wouldn’t be too bad. I got back up on the dresser again and pulled myself up into the vent. There was lint and dust scattered along the inside of the vent, that eventually made its way into my airway down to my lungs causing me to cough harder than I ever have before. Luckily, my sweatshirt slid easily against the vent so I didn’t get stuck, or caught on anything. Getting out was a different story. I had no idea where and how I was supposed to get out of here. There were no openings in the vent so far, so I just kept going.

Then it cracked.

The vent started making this loud, obnoxious cracking noise to warn me that it was about to break. Unfortunately, I can’t talk to vents telepathically, so I didn’t know that at the time until I was on the ground. The vent broke open and revealed the scene around me. There were very high ceilings, steel walls, and concrete floor. No people, no noise, no nothing.

So, I got up as fast as I could and ran. Didn’t even think about what was going on anywhere else or what could happen. I just ran into nothingness until there was light meaning a door. I kept running until I was there at the door to open it. I thought I could just run through it just like the movies and have someone standing there waiting for me, but good thing I stopped because you had to pull this door to open it. When I opened it, the bright light of the sun blasted me in the face and caught me so off guard that I had to use the side of the building for stability. I knew I had to get out of there before someone noticed that I was gone, so I used my first instinct and ran until I couldn’t anymore.

Then, there was a gas station. I ran as fast and hard as my lungs would let me go, just to get there and have it be closed. The only way in was for me to break in, and that would trigger the alarm system- if they had one- and the police would come. That was my only chance of getting out of here, so why not? There were rocks all around me, so I grabbed one and threw it as hard as I could into the glass door and watched it shatter around me. It was almost like slow motion. The glass fell piece by piece in front of me while I just stood there. But I had no time to stop and watch. I had to get inside to find a phone. Sticking my arm carefully through the glass onto the door handle, I managed to unlock it and open the door. As soon as I was inside, I looked for a phone. There had to be one somewhere. Not on the front counter, or in the backroom, maybe the drawers beneath the counter. I checked them one by one, left to right until I found it. The first thing I did was, called 911 to tell them that it was just me who broke into the gas station and they didn’t have to go full on police on me. They got me and took me into custody, where they then contacted my family. While all this happened, I thought about my life…

Was I on good terms with my family? The people who mean the most to me? If I wasn’t, what would have happened if I didn’t make it out of there? The last memory I could hold onto of them was a bad one. If I wanted to remember them I wanted it to be on good terms. Don’t take your life for granted. You never know when the last time you see someone will be.