When she awoke she was in a hospital bed. She didn't feel any pain, and couldn't move anything. She tried remembering what happened and how she would have ended up here. Looking to her left she saw Steven sitting in a chair looking at her, worried.
"How are you?" he asked. "You took a pretty big fall."
"What's wrong with me? I can't feel anything!" she rasped out. Her mouth and throat were dry. She looked down to see a needle and tube going into her hand. She followed it up to see it attatched to a bag with clear liquid in it.
"Sedatives," he told her. "You lost your shit with them when you woke up the other day and ripped out your IV."
Helga looked at him confused. "What am I doing here?"
Steven was silent for a while, before he finally started to tell her.
"It looks like you were trying to run away," he told her. "You fell. You were still holding onto the piece of guttering when Colin found you. Your bloody lucky one of the workers just happened to see you fall, otherwise no one would have known until the next morning and you could have been dead by then." He had started to sound angry at her. She looked down, remembering all of a sudden.
"Someone locked my door," she said. Steven stared at her like she was mad.
"You know you could have died," he said. "You have a fractured skull, you broke your wrist and dislocated your shoulder. . ."
"I just wanted to get away from Olga, Steven," she whined. She couldn't believe she was whining. Her. Helga G. Pataki . . . whining.
"Yeah, well, now your stuck in a hospital room, then after that the house," he told her. "You've really screwed up."
"I screwed up?" she demanded. "She locked me in my room!"
Steven just shook his head and left. Helga felt herself starting to cry. About an hour later a woman came walking into the room carrying a clipboard.
"Hi Helga," she said, giving her a plastic smile and taking a seat in the chair next to her bed. "I'm Barbara. I'm one of the youth social workers here at the hospital."
"Emancipation," Helga stated. The woman blinked.
"I'm sorry?"
"I want emancipation," Helga told her. "Now."
"You can't just demand emancipation, Helga," the woman told her. "There needs to be grounds for it."
"My sister keeps me trapped!" Helga yelled. "I'm not allowed to contact any friends, and she broke my cell phone. She was keeping letters from me. She tore them up!"
"Whoa, whoa, slow down, please," Barbara said. "I want to write this down, so your going to need to start from the beginning."
Helga took a deep breath. "I'm being home-schooled. I'm only allowed access to the internet under supervision and for school work. I'm not allowed to use email or social media."
"Uh huh," she said, writing it down.
"And I can't have any friends over. Except that one time Lila came, and left a cell phone with me so I could contact Arnold."
"A boy?" Barbara asked.
"Of course a boy," Helga told. "It's not a girls name! Anyway, my sister found out I had it and broke it,and she also tore up all the letters Arnold had written to me after having kept them hidden in her room. She read them!"
Barbara stared at her a moment. "So what your telling me, is that you want emancipation, because your sister and her husband don't give you unlimited access to the internet unsupervised, and have let you have one friend to stay in the whole time, keep you home schooled so as to avoid a very long bus ride to and fro, and kept letters from a boy away from you. Oh, and won't let you have a cell phone to contact said boy?"
Helga stared at the woman a while before she started replaying what she had said to her, but thinking outside her own head. She sounded like a bratty, whiney teenager!
"Helga, were planning to run away and meet this boy?" Barbara asked.
"What?" Helga asked.
"I've read over your notes," she said, looking down at her clip board. "And your sister has filled me in on this obsession you had with the boy as a child. It doesn't look very healthy to me."
"Okay, so I had a crush on the guy when I was a child," she snapped. "Big deal."
"Helga, you risked your life to go to him."
"I never said I was going to go to him," Helga said, shaking her head.
"Then what were you planning to do?" Barbara asked, sitting back. Helga shrugged. "See, I get the feeling, as did your sister, that you were planning to run away, show up on his doorstep and try to stay there. She locked the door to your bedroom to keep you from doing that. Helga, girls your age go missing, and do you know where some end up? Dead. In ditches. Or they're trafficked as prostitutes. I once met a girl who was raped by 40 men a day. For three months. She was taken all over the country. It's not nice."
Helga looked down at her hands, trying not to cry again.
"A teenager is a very big responsibility," Barbara told her. "They should be having their own kids, and raising them, but instead they're raising you. And you pay them back by trying to run away and trying to get them into trouble. Helga, supervising and limiting your internet is not grounds for emancipation."
"But the letters-"
"Your sister is worried you'd get into trouble with the boy, and probably just did what she did out of instinct."
"She tore them up," Helga said through clenched teeth.
"Did you see her do that?" she asked her.
"Well, no, but-"
Barbara held up her hand. "There is nothing you have told me that rings any alarm bells. Who was going to pay the cell phone bill?"
"What do you mean?" Helga asked. "It wasn't on a plan."
"But once credit ran out? Who was going to put money on it?"
Helga was silent. She didn't know . . .
"Helga, your sister and Steven are doing the best they can," she told her. "I have to get going, but I've taken a note of everything you've told me."
"So your not going to do anything?" Helga asked.
"Helga, there's nothing to do anything about," Barbara told her, before leaving and closing the door behind her.
Helga just started to cry.
. . .
Three days later her sister and Steven were both there to pick her up and take her home. Helga was wheeled out in a wheelchair, feeling stupid. She could walk, a little bit, though she was still getting bad dizzy spells.
"Just rest," a doctor told her. "And don't go hitting your head. And watch that wrist."
Helga just nodded silently, before being wheeled away out to the waiting limo. Some of the patients were at the window gaping at it, and Helga suddenly felt embarrassed. Steven helped her in as Colin opened the door for Olga. Once the doors were closed, and everyone was settled, olga started to speak.
"Well, I hope your happy with yourself," she sniffed. "That took a nice chunk out of your inheritance."
"What?" Helga asked, shocked.
"Your stupidity, your money," Olga told her. "I wasn't going to pay for your folly."
"Not now, Olga," Steven said, leaning back and rubbing his temples.
"If not now, when? huh?" Olga demanded. "Stop trying to protect her!"
Steven shook his head a looked out the window. The rest of the drive was silent, and Helga fell asleep at one point. She woke up when she heard a door slam. Olga had exited the car and gone inside, leaving Steven to help her out and up to her room. Colin came up behind them.
"Are you okay?" Steven asked.
"I feel dizzy and tired," Helga confessed, leaning on him. Steven nodded.
"I'll help you up to your room," he said, and true to his word did. Once in there he helped her get into her bed, then sat on the side. "I know you want to see your friend, and when your feeling better I will try to sneak you into the city to see him. But for the love of God Helga, please, just make things easier on everyone and just go along with your sister."
She just nodded. He leaned over and gave her a quick peck on the cheek.
"Call me if you need me," he told her, then handed her some pills and a glass of water. "For your head."
Helga took them from him and downed them. Then she watched him leave, and before long was asleep herself . . .
