If You Fall

Six

I almost peed my pants. I did drop the mozzarella cheese I was holding, but it was in a wrapper. I knew who it was from the knock but I checked the camera screen anyway and then went back into the living room and knelt by the couch. 

"Reed," I said, in an urgent whisper. His eyes opened again, alert regardless. "Your sister's here."

His eyes widened as he sat up. "Really," he said, shaking his head to clear it of sleep. "That's not good." He looked up at me with hazel eyes containing about a thousand different colors.

"Yeah, no kidding." My anxiety was stealing my breath in small increments. I was terrified of his sister, and rightly so. Not that he even knew it.

The previous year he had been gone for three months, and halfway through she'd shown up at my house. I knew who she was because I'd met her twice before, with him, briefly. She was ten months his senior. They did not get along.

I'd always known she was mentally ill, whether genetically or because of the abuse she'd suffered or a combination. Reed had told me more stories than I'd wanted to really know about, those nights he was "in his cups" as he put it.

So when she'd shown up that day and pounded on the door, hollering that she knew I was inside, I opened the door out of fear of what she would do if I didn't. It was a very stupid move.

"Where's my brother?" she asked, pushing past me into the little house. Her hair was cut unevenly at the shoulders, and dirty. She had four inches and a hundred pounds on me.

"I don't know," I answered honestly, my heart pounding, and she punched me in the face under my right eye. I was no stranger to getting hit but the shock after five years without it happening was great.

She followed it up with a fist to my stomach, and when I doubled over, she pushed me to the floor and kicked me in the ribs. "Where," she said dispassionately, taking a handful of my hair, her face inches from mine. "Where, meltface?"

She looked like Reed, although they had different fathers. Her eyes were dark brown, and lacked the smallest bit of feeling other than contempt and malicious glee. She was having fun. I, on the other hand, was trying not to puke. "I swear, I don't know. I never know," I managed to get out.

"Wrong answer," she said conversationally, the corner of her mouth lifting a little as she continued to hold my hair so she could punch me again with her free hand.

This one was in the jaw and sent starbursts of light through me head. "He can't tell me," I said, crying now and hating it, but I was afraid she was going to really hurt me. She had that look. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand because I felt the blood trickling from my lip. The bright red smear scared me further.

She regarded me. "I need money, so tell me where it is."

She drew her fist back again menacingly but I put both of my hands up to block it, relieved more than anything because there was something I could give her. "In the closet," I said, my side on fire now. There was two thousand in cash in a shoebox in there. "On the shelf." There was two hundred thousand in the floor safe but thank God she didn't know about that.

She let go of my hair and pushed me back so my head hit the floor, which luckily was carpeted. Not that it helped cushion the blow much. "It'd better be enough," she warned. She disappeared into the bedroom and I lay there and tried to exist through the pain in my side and face.

"This'll do," she said, returning. "For now." She kicked me again, in the lower back, and I missed her leaving in the agony.

When Reed returned three weeks later, I was just able to stand straight again. I didn't tell him what she'd done, only that she came by and was a complete bitch and I gave her money to get rid of her.