One afternoon, a few years later, my mother strolled out of the house in her finest gown, the first time she worn one like it in ages, off to a close noble friend tea party. Exactly three hours later, Charlie and I were setting up some of his toy cars to play with in the wooden front hallway, when all of a sudden the door slams open, and my stone cold mother comes stumbling inside, dress torn, hair unraveled from her fancy updo that took four hours for her to get right, one slippered foot dragging a bare one behind it. Did she lie about the party? Were they serving spiked beverages? My head races around itself, trying to formulate how she could have gotten so drunk at a simple garden party, while I'm physically doing everything I can to send Charlie up to his room, or any other place but this front hallway, so that he's safe, but he stands, transfixed, with his little head ever so slightly to the left, not moving, barely breathing, lost in some far off world in his mind. My mother, in her confused, drunken state, stumbled over to him, arms outstretched, as if to hug him, but he flinched away, ever so slightly. But that one tiny little flinch was enough to send my mother into a rage. She takes three little steps back to a delicate vase, screams, then picks it up and shatters it at his feet. Seven pieces, barely seen with the nude eye, fly into his hands, piercing them gently, and he peculiarly turns them, palms up, towards his sweet face. In his eyes, a switch flips, and he's no longer my sweet baby Charlie, but a rabid, vicious animal. With a snap of his neck, his head jolts up and locks eyes with my mother, and lunges at her, throwing his body weight on her and knocking her into the parlor, and begins beating her with his puny seven-year-old fists. Alarmed, my eyes progressively get wider and wider, and my feet begin to move, seemingly without command, out of the front hallway, and twist and turn throughout the depths of the house, up to Charlie's room. His nanny is gracefully moving around the room, cleaning up the day's toys, as she only arrived here a half hour ago. She glances up for a second, and I'm already right beside her, clamping down on her wrist and pulling out her out of Charlie's room, dragging her through various flights of stairs and hallways, explaining everything that's occurred, and by the time I return to the parlor, we are set and have some ideas on how to stop this. She peeks in the doorway tentatively, and I'm sure the servants in the kitchen can hear the sound of her jaw hitting the floor, so I decide to see for myself, and what I see astounds me.
The grand, fancy parlor, that was set up the way it was for seven generations, the exact one that was Mother's pride and joy, the one thing in this house that hadn't been disturbed by two children, a drunken mother, and a once here father, was gone. Priceless figurines carefully hand placed by my grandma: gone. Shattered on the floor that my mom and brother are currently rolling on. All of the flowery décor: trampled. And as far as I could tell, both my current family members had several injuries, caused by either each other or the glass or a culmination of both. Charlie's nanny and I, both of us shell-shocked, slowly turned our heads towards the other.
"We have to separate them, or my mother is going to rip enough skin off of him to make him bled to death," I whispered to her, for once not treating her as a servant or someone else below my station, but as an ally, an equal. Within the next 3 seconds, we finalized on one of our initial plans, and, in essence, charged in on them. Amy, the nanny, broke their grip on each other, and wrestled my mother to the ground, began trying to knock her out. I scooped up Charlie, thrashing around, and carried him out to the common living room, with its soft, non-glassed carpet. Laying him down, I, unhappily and very unladylike, sat on him stoutly to keep him from going anywhere, or even moving at all.
I screamed, "Charlie! Charlie! You have to wake up! Charlie! Please, come back!" over and over again. But It was like his mind had been taken from him, and all that was left was this animalistic sense of rage. My poor, sweet, baby brother, now this ravaging beast that would not stop punching and kicking and thrashing under me, and after a while, my body went limp from being stiff for so long, and Charlie was able to push me off of him. But he didn't stop there. He just kept punching and kicking me, while I started crying, and screaming, hoping against all hope that he would just stop and hear me, or a servant would come rescue me. But they never came, taking too close to heart the saying, "Don't interfere." I lost consciousness, but I couldn't hear anything from the parlor next door, and I could only hope that Charlie's nanny had found some method to knock my mother out, and would find me soon, before Charlie, my adorable baby brother, now a mad man, beat me to death.