"You doing okay?"
"Y-yeah. I'm…I'm fine. Why-" she swallowed hard against the choking numbness in her throat that was threatening to strangle her. "Why do you ask?"
Artie scowled up at her from his seat. "You can cut the stuttering crap out. Everyone knows you were faking it."
Tina lowered her head and twisted her hands into her long, dark hair. Her fingers deftly knotted the strands and untied them—knot, undo, knot, undo—the repetition was soothing. "Sorry. I-I'm not trying to. It's just coming out that way. Nervous h-habit, I…I guess."
Artie rolled his eyes and turned back to the front. "Whatever," he whispered under his breath. She caught the words and stilled, her heart beating furiously in her chest. Focus. She needed to focus. She just needed to forget that in precisely twenty-two minutes and thirty-nine seconds glee would be over and she'd have no choice but to go home. Her hands returned to their frantic task. Knot, undo, knot, undo. She couldn't look at Mr. Schue, or Artie, or Mike, or any of the other glee kids. Knot, undo. They wouldn't understand. And she was fine. Knot, undo. This sort of thing happens everyday to all kinds of people. No big deal.
Her eyes went back to watch her hands at work. Knot, undo, knot, undo. The motion was hypnotic. It was easier, she realized, to do this with her natural hair rather than those brightly-colored extensions she had locked away in her desk. Plastic was so much prettier in color and texture, but so much harder to handle. No extensions today, just like the day before. None tomorrow too if she could help it. It was better this way. At least now she wouldn't have to worry about them going missing or one of the other students pulling them out as she walked by. And her father was happy about the change—it meant that the whole dressing goth thing might really have been just a phase. Maybe his daughter wasn't as weird as he'd thought. Yeah, it was better this way.
"Tina?"
"Yes!" Her head snapped up in attention. The other kids were snickering around her and she felt her cheeks go hot. "S-sorry. Um, what were you asking, Mr. Schue?" She thought carefully about the formation of each word, how it should sound, how she couldn't afford to revert back to old ways. Not over something like this.
"We're brainstorming ideas for choreography for the last piece. I was wondering if you had any input."
She dipped her head and shook it in the negative. "No. I like what we have," she whispered.
Schuster was hesitant, but let it alone. "Okay," he said. He leaned forward and laid a hand on Tina's shoulder. She tensed a bit but didn't budge. "Can I talk to you after rehearsal?" he murmured quietly to her so the other kids couldn't hear.
She really didn't want to talk to him, but it was one more thing to keep her from going home, so she nodded and watched him step back to the front of the room, a pleased smile on his face. "Anyone else have any ideas? No? Okay then, guys. From the top."
"Is everything okay, Tina? You seemed pretty out of it at rehearsal." He had waited for the last of the other glee kids to filter out of the room before speaking with her. It was nice of him to wait until they were alone to speak, but it left her feeling rather vulnerable. She didn't want to do this. She didn't want to be here.
"Every…everything's fine. I'm just kind of stressed right now."
She was shutting him down. Will sighed, but didn't push the issue. "All right, but I'm here if you need to talk to someone. And there's always Ms. Pillsbury." He patted her shoulder and stood. There wasn't much of anything else he could do. "You did pretty good today, Tina. See you in class tomorrow."
She nodded quickly, still keeping her head low, and rushed to grab her bag from the floor. Nobody needed to know about this. This sort of thing happened all the time, right? Yeah, it was nothing. She'd be fine. It was nothing.
But nothing followed her every move when she toed off her shoes and stepped over the threshold into her house. The living room was too dark, the light that should have come from the window was blocked by that terrible black tape that kept the heat from leaking out the hole in the glass. It couldn't cover the spider web cracks inching to the top of the window and down toward the windowsill. Her parents hadn't bothered to put the tape up that far. She hurriedly flicked the switch to her right. The room filled with yellow light. It made her feel a little better.
She avoided the room as best she could, tiptoeing carefully across the carpet toward her room. She wondered how long it would take for her to be able to sit in there again for more than five minutes without wanting to scream and flee. The memory of a million shards of glass glittering like stars on the floor was still fresh in her mind, and she couldn't help but wince as she walked across the carpet fibers without the safety of her shoes. Oh god, how she wanted the wonderful armor of her shoes. What if there was some glass that had been missed? She would vacuum tonight again just to be sure. It always helped to be sure.
She carefully opened the door to her room and looked in before walking inside and setting her bag down on the floor. She was being silly. There wasn't anyone here. The thief had come in, taken what he wanted, and left. And they hadn't taken much. Just some jewelry, a little money from that ceramic jar on her desk and the digital camera. So what if it still had photos of them in it? So what if the thief or whomever he sold the camera to could watch their smiling faces stare back at him? He probably just wanted money for things like that. There was nothing to suggest the break-in as personal. Nothing at all. The thought didn't make her feel any safer.
She walked into her parents' room, praying her mother didn't come home early and find her there. She ran her fingers over her mother's nightstand, skipping the little box where her jewelry was once kept. There wouldn't be anything in there—not her mother's tiny diamond cross that daddy had given her on their twentieth anniversary, not the gold chain that she'd loved to admire as a little girl, nothing. It was all gone.
She stepped out of the room and headed toward the hallway closet. This was her little secret, hers and hers alone. Her parents couldn't know about this. She pulled out a soft blue blanket and wrapped it around her shoulders. A new blanket every night just to be sure that no one had put their hands on it. This one was her favorite. It had been the first one she'd washed, the first one she'd used after it all happened. It made her feel more supported than the others but only slightly so.
She was fine. She wouldn't need the shields soon enough. She'd get over this. This was only temporary.
Tina quietly padded back to her room, leaving the door propped open. She'd know right away if anyone was coming or going. She didn't want to be caught unawares.
She sat down at the foot of her bed and curled her feet under herself. The blanket wrapped around her body like a fuzzy blue cocoon. Her parents couldn't know. They couldn't know that she hadn't felt safe since she'd come home with her parents after her aunt's birthday dinner and found the hole in the window, the glass on the carpet. They couldn't know that she had trouble sitting at her desk or picking out her clothes after finding her drawers open and rifled through. They couldn't know that in the week since this all had happened Tina hadn't slept on her bed once, instead curled up on the floor wrapped in a blanket from the hallway closet because her pillow had an indent where a head not her own had been.
It wasn't such a big deal. People's homes get broken-into everyday, but it was hard for her to accept that her house was not her home anymore. Someone, some stranger, had violated it, and she wasn't sure if she'd ever feel completely safe again.
Author's notes: The prompter for this wanted a story that dealt realistically with a robbery. He/she was tired of robbery stories where the perpetrator(s) talked too much or were overly sadistic (it's actually pretty hard to find a story with a robbery in it that doesn't also include rape). I've dealt with a robbery before (though it was while working, so I wasn't exactly a bystander) and even nonviolent ones can be pretty freaking scary. I couldn't make a hold up or a mugging seem anything but forced, so I tried a break-in. Why I chose Tina, I don't know, but I used to really like her character (I kind of lost interest in her when I learned her stutter was fake, which seems terrible of me, but I can't help it). Writing this made me like her a little more.