Chapter 12

I carefully turned the worn brass knob and tried to sneak out the side door like a shadow. But I wasn't stealthy enough.

"Hey, poor little girl! Why aren't you dead?" My life-long neighbor stood on his front porch in a loosely drawn bathrobe, pajamas underneath. Arms crossed.

"Not now, Mr. Ibrahim," I said.

"No. Yes, Now!"

I put my napsack down and drifted over the driveway that separated his land from ours. "What do you want from me?" A quiver in my voice.

For the first time I could remember, I saw a glint of kindness in his eyes. "I'm glad you're not really dead. I know who you are."

Him too? Am I the punchline to some secret joke. What the hell? I climbed up the steps to his porch two at a time and rushed him.

"How is it that I'm the last one to know this secret? How long have you known?"

"I've always known."

"Then why have you been so mean to me? Throwing stones at me? Teaching your girls to sneak attack me? Forcing Omar to beat me up?"

At the mention of his son's name, Mr. Ibrahim dropped his crossed arms.

"I do this for you...not against you. To make stronger. To prepare--"

"Prepare me for what?"

"To prepare for this!" He waved to the heavens above and the world around us, which had fallen and collapsed in on me in the last 24 hours.

He was right. Through kicked shins and pulled hair I had learned to take a punch I knew I could take, and how to avoid one I needed to miss. Dammit; The Ibrahim reign of torture had saved my ass this afternoon. The soldiers didn't know that they weren't the first kids on the block to try to ambush me.

"What now?" I ask him.

"First, you run. Run fast, run far. Go with Raznofsky. Into the woods. And when you're ready to go to war, just come back for me."

"War? What do you mean? What war?"

"The war they declared when they took all of us...when they did this to you....when they took my son. My only son. Every time I cry for him in the night, I wake up the next morning and get a gun."

"Guns? We're not supposed to have--"

"I have cried many times. So I have guns. I have phasers, lasers and tasers. I have pellet guns, bean bag guns, dart guns. Sonic blasters, flame throwers, bayonets, rifles. They are in my basement. I show you sometime."

"Look, Mr. Ibrahim, I'm not a soldier. I'm a...a....Junior in High School!"

"Not any more. Now you are dead Junior in High School. Only on the books. But if you stand still too long, then you'll really be dead Junior in High School." He crosses his arms again.

I jump down the stairs and stare at the spot in the driveway where I had written my name alongside his: "Silvia and Omar." I turn back to him over my shoulder. He silently motions to my bag.

I lean down, grab my stuff and say goodbye to my house. To my Dad. To Highschool. To Life.

I turn away and head back into the darkness.

"Wait, Poor Little Girl. I almost forget." Mr. Ibrahim stood on his son's name and threw something at me.

I caught it before I knew what it was.

"Good reflexes, yes?" He was proud.

I look in my hands and see a small, shiny black handle. I push the silver button on the side and a blade pops out. I push it back into place with a quick.

"It was your mother's."

"You knew my mom?"

A helicopter whizzed by, too closely in the night sky.

"Run, little girl. Run!"

So I put the knife in my pocket and ran back into the woods behind our neighborhood.