It had all happened so fast, like a whirlwind. She felt like Alice fallen through the looking glass, Dorothy swept away by the tornado. Grief was a foreign land, a place she'd never have to go. Her brief stints into it when she was young, the loss of her cat, the death of her imaginary friend when she was five. Nothing compared to the crashing weight of inexorable pain she felt now. She'd watched her. Watch the driver hit her watched her as they were pushed down the block as the momentum of their car stopped but the other kept going. No one knew she'd been with her. No one knew she'd watched her mother die, watched her eyes dim as life faded from them, held onto her hand while the paramedics came, screamed in desperation as her mother was loaded into another ambulance and it made its way away from her without lights or siren. No one knew how hard she'd fought the EMT that grabbed her and strapped her onto the board in the back of the other ambulance. No one knew, but her. And she was happy to keep it that way, happy to hide away the past that haunted her, happy to pretend it did not matter, happy to say that as the days went by she was fine, always fine. If you asked her how she was that is what she would say. The she was fine. She might even tell you that it was none of your business, but she never was. She could always feel the weight of the world that had fallen onto her shoulders at that moment, that moment when she was twelve. For her, the world had come to an end and she didn't know how to pick it back up again, she didn't know how to continue. Teresa Lisbon was alone in the world, forced to grow up far too soon.