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Sometimes I lose my head. It must be a sign of my old age.
Emma laughed to herself and leaned back against the door that led out to the roof of her foster parents' apartment building. She sat up here a lot, mostly just to think. Sometimes she brought a bottle of alcohol up with her too. Tonight was one of those nights, but all she had managed to steal from the gas station that day, her birthday, was a tiny bottle of rum. It would have to do.
At this point, there were only a few shots of liquor left at the bottom, but the newly-16-year-old Emma was hardly able to stand, anyway.
I should go for a walk, she thought. Obviously, her head wasn't quite in the right place.
Emma pulled herself to her feet using the door handle behind her and swung the heavy metal barricade open before slipping silently back into the building. By clutching onto the railing for dear life, she slowly stumbled down two floors to her own apartment. Thankfully, her foster dad was working the night shift again, and Karen, his stupid girlfriend, was still asleep, so the front door was unlocked just as she'd left it. Emma silently made her way into her closet of a bedroom that she shared with three other foster children, all much younger and asleep, thankfully, and grabbed her sweater from under her bed.
When standing up, Emma slammed her head on the bunk above hers. There was no pain, but in her dazed state, she looked around as if not realizing what had happened. In doing so, she noticed the little lines scraped onto the surface of the upper bunk. She couldn't even remember when she'd stopped making them. It'd been too long.
Since she had been deemed too young and irresponsible to have her own key to the building, Emma yet again found herself opening the bedroom window as wide as it would go and putting one leg at a time over the sill so that she was standing on the fire escape. After closing the window after her, she slipped into her sweater and carefully made her way down the fire escape, still too unsteady to take more than one step at a time.
This is just what those selfish bastards deserve for forgetting my birthday. Maybe I won't even come back. They wouldn't even notice, Emma mused.
Once she'd made it to the last flight, she slid down the final ladder to the ground, barely managing to remain on both feet as she hit the pavement. A smile crept onto her face, but she knew a laugh could give her away, so she let the ladder slide back up into place and walked out of the alley and onto the street as confidently as possible.
"Where will we go today?" she asked herself under her rum-scented breath.
All Emma could really do was follow her feet and try not to fall on her face as she made her way down the sidewalk. It seemed as if no matter how often she went out like this, she never ran out of places to go. Exploration was in her blood. Sometimes she even imagined that her real parents were adventurers, who only gave her up so they could keep traveling the world, and that one day they would travel back to her.
This time, Emma did laugh. How stupid could she be? Her parents were probably just some useless scum who didn't care about her at all, if they were even alive.
So far, she was planning on following their example. She was nothing.
Emma had no idea how long she'd been walking, but the scent of sea water made its way to her nose, and a sudden wind blew through her sweater and made her skin break out in goosebumps.
I've never gone to the docks before, she thought as she felt her feet hitting the hollow-sounding boardwalk along the shore. But this is a special occasion. She could hear the waves gently washing over the shore, and the sound relaxed her for a few moments as she made her way along the path.
Emma felt around in her sweater for a cigarette and was happy to find that there was still about half a pack in her inside pocket. She sat down carefully on the edge of the boardwalk and pushed herself off so that she landed in the soft sand of the beach about two feet below.
Walking closer to the sound of the waves, Emma kept fumbling around in her pockets for a lighter.
"I fucking forgot it again, didn't I?" she said aloud to herself, looking down into her pockets and squinting in the darkness in an attempt to see into them.
Suddenly, Emma slammed into something yet again, but this time it was much bigger and sent her falling back gently onto her ass. She realized she'd dropped her cigarette on the ground, and began crawling on all fours trying to find it.
"Oh, fu-" she began, but then she saw a figure crouching down right in front of her, holding out the cigarette to her between two fingers.
"Thanks" she said. She tried to stand up quickly, but just about fell right into the dark figure again as her head swam with visions of rum bottles dancing on top of her shriveling pride.
"That was…" Emma began, but the sound of her heart pounding in her ears because of the thing's arms around her was too loud for her to think of what to say next.
"Not a problem," said a rough voice from above her.
Emma looked up, blinking from the glare of the streetlights behind them. She couldn't make out a face, but it was surrounded by dark hair and belonged to a very tall, firm body.
"I should go…" she said quietly as she tried to wiggle away from the hard grasp of his hand on her arm.
"I'm not going to hurt you," the figure said as his grip loosened slightly. "You shouldn't be out so late by yourself. Are you okay?"
Emma could have sworn that the voice was accented with some strange twang, perhaps some form of British, and she could smell the scent of rum on his breath. Or was that just her own mistakes on her tongue?
"I'm fine," she said as she finally pulled away and rubbed her arm.
"I'm sorry if I hurt you," the voice said. A face was starting to come into view, but all Emma could gather was that it was young and had eyes that drew her in as if she were under some sort of spell.
"I'm fine," she said again.
"You shouldn't smoke," the eyes told her, and she found herself smiling again even though she had no reason to. She knew this was bound to happen to her eventually, and that she should be terrified. That she should run away.
But she didn't. She couldn't.
"Why, because it will kill me? Why should I care when no one else does?"
"So you've lost someone. I get it, I've lost someone too."
Emma laughed again.
"Please, I'm not in the mood for this deep shit. My doctors try it all the time. None of you actually understand."
The figure shook its head. Emma had also noticed that he was dressed in black from head to toe, and not just black, but what looked like black leather.
"I care," he said with those shining eyes looking right into hers.
"Whatever. Can you just give me a light?"
The man shook his head again, but pushed his hand into a pocket and pulled out a little box of matches.
"As you wish."
"Wow, how vintage of you," Emma mumbled as she watched him light the cigarette in her hand with a little match.
"What?" he asked, but Emma just ignored him while closing her eyes and taking a long drag. She blew the smoke out slowly, but with her breath also went her consciousness, and she felt herself falling for a moment before going completely black.
The next morning, Emma awoke in her bed with one of the worst hangovers she'd ever had, and knew right away that she wouldn't be going to school today. It seemed as if her foster parents had known as well, since neither had come to wake her up and the clock on the wall said it was already almost noon.
As Emma rolled over to go back to sleep, she remembered flashes of what she later deemed to have been some really vivid dreams brought on by that bottle of rum.
She saw a ship, but instead of it just floating away on the water, it rose up into the sky, all its sails billowing in the night air. She saw the ship's shadow on her bedroom window, and then her bed rising up to her body to swallow her whole as the feeling of soft leather on her cheek left it warm as she fell asleep smiling.
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