I'm Tanya Bronstein. I'm sixteen years old, my favorite color is yellow—it rhymes with hello, which I don't get very often—I ate pickles for breakfast, and that rock outside the window is getting bigger.

Huh.

I stopped for a few moments to ponder why—perhaps it was in a hurry to get to its dentist appointment—until the reason hit me. Quite literally, in fact. It hit the window, grazed against my arm, and left me bleeding. Though my arm wasn't broken, it sure felt like it.

On the bright side, at least it wasn't my face!

But that's not important. The most important part was that it hit the window.

It didn't take long for me to realize how terrible the situation was until I looked down at the bits of glass and shrapnel on the floor and concluded whoop-de-fucking-doo, this would be loads of fun to clean up.

By the way, it really wasn't.

"What's going on?" my brother shouted, rushing into the room.

His eyes darted towards the mess of a window, the mess on the floor, and the mess that was me. Bro must've noticed that I was an even bigger mess than I usually was, shushing me before I could answer. I didn't need to answer. The answer was right in front of him. To his side, actually, if you want to be a pedant.

"It's those Davis kids, isn't it?" he muttered to herself, hastily wiping the blood on my arm with a paper towel. "Never trusted the lot of them."

I mumbled an incoherent insult under my breath—they were my best friends, dammit, no matter how unscrupulous they seemed to be—and let Bro wrap my arm with bandages. He mumbled some equally incoherent insult back, and for the moment, everything was okay.

Until I had to clean the mess up, that is.

Sorry, kid, he told me with an apologetic look on his face. Them's the breaks.

"Them's the breaks your ass," I replied. The witty comeback wasn't very witty, but he got the point. He laughed as he headed back to the living room.

Shooting him a glare, I furiously mopped the floor for the next thirty minutes.

Twelve times twelve is a hundred-forty-four. A hundred-forty-four minus two is a hundred-forty-two. The square root of a hundred-forty-two is between eleven and twelve. In case you couldn't tell, I love numbers. More specifically, arithmetic. Numbers don't make mistakes. Numbers don't lie to you, numbers don't hurt you, and numbers don't steal your lunch money. Numbers are just that—numbers! The statement is either right or wrong and there is no in-between.

Though I am tired, I am calm. And that is all that matters.

Without saying a word, I head to the bathroom in the hall, staring at my reflection in the mirror. The person in the mirror stares back. She is clearly in awe of my glorious visage.

"Hey," I say to her coolly, drumming my fingers on the bathroom counter. She does the same.

I wiggle my fingers and say "abra-cadabra." My reflection silently wiggles her fingers back. She's not much of a talker.

I do a silly dance. She dances with me.

Sigh. This is stupid. There are better things to do. Like homework, or movies, or working on that book I've been writing—something, at the very least.

My hand brushed against the doorknob.

"Wait!" Someone cried. "Don't go!"