Perspectives

Chapter 22

Her throat felt raw. She had no idea how long it had been after he had left that her yells and screams had finally died down to nothing. She now sat slumped in the corner of the drawer, streams of tears now freely flowing down her cheeks. 

Piper had never before in her life felt so powerless. Not when her parents had split, not when that kid had shoved her to the ground in first grade, not even when she had first woken up in this place. She was so totally and completely helpless to save herself, to get herself back home. Right now her life, her future was being decided for her by an entirely alien group of people. People who didn't know her and who would make the decision that most benefited their own agendas. As if they would have her best interest at heart. 

There was a part of her that just wanted to curl into a ball and wait it out, to wait for them to come to a decision and for Kalen to come back and deliver her fate. But she had never been a defeatist. Even if she had no possible way to get to the council meeting, there was no way in hell she was just going to sit there and wait like a good little girl. She would not give Kalen the satisfaction. 

Piper scrubbed the remaining tear stains from her cheeks with the sleeve of her shirt and shoved herself up to her feet. Piper then began to slowly move her hands along the wooden walls of the dresser, running her fingertips up and down every inch in search of some kind of hole or weakness in the structure that she could exploit. "There has to be some way out." She muttered.

Suddenly her fingers came upon an uneven section of wood in the back wall of the drawer. Piper got down to her knees as she felt the entire area around the spot. It was small, but it could be the starting place she needed to make herself a bigger opening. That was, if the wood was weak enough for her to be able to pull apart with her hands. Piper figured the dresser must be fairly old, likely an antique heirloom of sorts passed down through Kalen's family or something. 

Piper slipped her fingers under the palm sized chunk of wood that had cracked off from the rest of the surrounding wood. With a loud grunt of effort Piper pulled back hard. She heard a loud snap as she stumbled backwards, taking a large chunk of wood with her. She threw the piece aside and returned to the hole to find that it was now about as tall as her torso.

For what must have been at least twenty minutes, Piper chipped away at the hole until it had become just big enough for her to squeeze herself through. Wiping a bead of sweat from her forehead, a grin broke across her face. She was getting out of there.

Cautiously Piper stuck her head out through the hole, bracing her hands on the edges of the opening to prevent herself from plummeting out to what could potentially be her death. She would have been staring into pitch blackness had it not been for the faint sliver of light coming from below. Though she was no expert on the inside structure of dressers, Piper guessed it had to be coming from the drawer below the one Kalen had placed her in. If there was light coming in, that must mean the drawer hadn't been closed tightly. With the drawer not fully pushed shut, there would not only be room in the back for her to slide into the drawer, but she might also be able to get out of the dresser entirely if it was open enough.

The small amount of light coming in wasn't much, but it was enough for her to be able to judge that the distance from her drawer down to the next one looked to be only about two feet. In theory, she should easily be able to lower herself down into the drawer, given she had the agility to maneuver herself through the tight space between the top edge of the lower drawer and the bottom of the upper one.  

Piper drew in a long breath. Was her act of pointless defiance really worth the risk? In her books, the answer was yes. Even if she couldn't do anything to change the decision Kalen had already made for her, she could at least do something other than passively sitting in her prison.