She stomped up the stairs, each bang of her feet on the wooden stairs echoing in her ears. Perhaps her mother was shouting at her not to make so much noise, but she wasn’t listening. She trudged into her room, shuffling herself across the floor, lazily. She slammed the door, and stood for a moment, at the top of the stairs leading to her room, surveying her room, her fortress, her escape from the world.













Dirty clothes, magazines, schoolbooks, crumpled papers, candy wrappers, and just about everything else you could imagine littered the floor. Out of a gap between a pile of clothes and her backpack, you could see an inch of hardwood floor peeking out.






She went down the three stairs leading to her room, and once she reached her bed, threw herself on it, face down, burying herself into her pillows. She finally lifted her head up, and flipped over, so that she was face-up on the bed, arms crossed behind her head. She stared up at the ceiling, looking at the plastic, light up star stickers she had put on her ceiling when she was younger, with the help of her dad. Tears welled up in her eyes.









She shook her head and sat up, wiping away her tears, not letting herself cry. Instead, she got up, and stepped over the mess that covered her entire floor. At her desk, in a far corner of the room, she grabbed an unused pad of paper and searched for a pen. Finally, she found one that worked. She plopped down on her swivel chair, leaning over the desk, pen in hand.





Then, she began to write.