Page 12 of Locke 2

The bangs were incessant.

They would not stop.

And we were trapped.

Where was our mother? She’d screamed at him through the door that she’d called the police. He was supposed to stop trying to break the door down. At school they always said the police would come and rescue you from trouble, but how long did they take?

I didn’t want to poke around downstairs to check on her. Fear had me frozen in place of my sister’s bedroom, feet from her our teacup party.

But I have a cake…

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

“What do we do?” Aurora cried.

My heart thudded against my chest. I held in my shakes. “It’s okay. The police are coming.”

“Kali, what do we do?” she begged, gripping me tightly. “He’s coming! He’s coming, Kali.”

I didn’t know what to do.

I didn’t know…

“The police are coming…” I kept saying. “They’ll be here.”

But he would be here first.

And Aurora knew this.

She looked at me with so much fear. Tears slid down her face, landing on her blue dress. She waited for my lead. She wanted me to save her. I saved her every time she was in trouble. Dragons from her fairytale games or bullies from her school or the spiders that stalked her in our beaten down house. They all faced my wrath.

But there was a monster I didn’t know how to vanquish. A monster who had haunted me my entire life, threatening and unravelling everything, transforming into a living, breathing dragon determined to burn us to ashes.

That monster was my father, and he was beating down our door.

Six

Kali

Ifelt like a spy when I smuggled the colouring book into the classroom, keeping a lookout for Patsy. It would be easy to slip it into Lenny’s bag. I had to collect their planners before the end of the day and make sure they’d written down the notes their parents would need to check up on. Patsy was supposed to look them over and initial them and sticker them, but now that I was here, I was the one doing it on my lunch break.

When I got to Lenny’s book, I flipped to his page and saw his gigantic letters. “NO SHCHOOL FRIDIY” on it. I chuckled at the random doodles along the page. Stick figures that looked like army men and tanks and—-

My head tilted to the side as I narrowed my eyes at what looked like a drawing of a door. There was something off about it, though. Where the handle should be was a giant circle with a keyhole in it. Next to the door was a big square with a line going through the middle, and another running down the top. A window? But if it was a window, why was there a stick headsmiling in it? Was that a face he drew looking out of the window? Or was that a face lookingintothe window?

A chill ran through me.

I flipped through other pages, searching for more doodles, but the rest weren’t this detailed. I went back to the pictures again and traced my finger along the door, my frown deepening. What was on the door—

The bell rang, jolting me out of my thoughts. I quickly scribbled my initials on the page and slammed it shut. Then, as I slid the planner into his backpack, I included the dinosaur colouring book.

Take that, Patsy.

???

“You’ll get what you want. You’ll never see him again.”

I opened my eyes, the memory plaguing me. Being carried out in large arms. Slipping into a truck. Driven away.

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