It was morning in Melanie's cozy apartment in Santa Ana and she practically leaped up the moment her eyes flew open. She found herself alone in her bed which she had shared with her mother the night before, because of the nightmare incident. Confused a bit, she shrugged and climbed off the bed. She stretched, raising arms into the air in a rise and shine manner and yawned, not feeling well rested. She wore her yellow and blue minion flip-flops and trudged to her bathroom. Her eyes were dull and retained evidence of all-night sobbing. She rubbed them as she walked.

She reached her bathroom and picked up her toothbrush. As she brushed her teeth, her dull eyes gazed back at her, unloving and unfamiliar, for she was a shadow of herself. She looked pale and lifeless and her short scattered hair worsened her demeanor efficiently. It flashed through her mind, like a movie trailer, the nightmare she heard, the memory it rekindled. She saw a flash vision of that moment she fell over the railings and twelve feet from the top of the stairs. In reflex, she grabbed that arm where she was hurt. Her heart paced faster and her eyes widened as if the horror happened around her right there in the bathroom. Gradually, as she got hold of her present reality, she slowly let go of that arm and stared at the gecko-shaped scar through the mirror for a while, recalling the horror night. She shook her head with her eyes shut in attempt to get her mind sharp and back on track. Then she placed her focus on brushing. She brushed and spat the paste into the sink.

She finished quickly and was rinsing her mouth with a mouthwash when Junior startled her. "Good morning sis!" He greeted with a usual wide smile that exposed the dramatic gap between his front teeth and the cute pair of familiar dimples he had. He always did that, go into Melanie's room unannounced, when she stayed in bed late and scare her awake.

Junior was a fine curly-hair six year-old who grew up without the privilege of ever meeting his father before he was gone from him. He was named Michael Blake Jr. after, and in memory of Michael, due to his striking resemblance as a baby.

Melanie was so startled that she swallowed some of the mouth wash. She coughed repeatedly and beat her chest to subside the uncomfortable effect. "What the hell J'?" She yelled amidst kinks.

Junior laughed mockingly at her, proud of himself. "Scared ya again!" He laughed again and then just stopped. "I thought you'd be dressed." He said. His voice now sonorous. "Yesterday you said you'd be meeting customers today."

At that, the breath Melanie had managed to catch stuck in her throat. It all came back to her all at once and she suddenly grew nervous. Someone had come across her online advert, the one she had forgotten that she posted months ago, and he/she was interested. She didn't want to show it but anxiety was creeping beneath her skin. She straightened and replied with a coperate tone. "Yeah well . . .  it's not till 9:30. There is still time to get there. I guess..." As she talked, she grew unsure and began to wonder what the time really was. Looking at Junior, who had an expressive smile on his face and was shaking his head, Melanie's doubt escalated steeply. She pushed him out of her way and rushed to the side drawer on which her alarm clock stood. Grabbing it, She found that the time was already 8:42. Bewildered, she checked its setting and found it tampered with. She didn't have to wonder for long. The culprit was obvious. "Mom!" She shouted.

Junior was startled and Verena heard. "In the kitchen hon." She answered and was lost at what provoked the bitterness in Melanie's voice.

Melanie dashed into the kitchen, with the clock in hand. She looked quite aggravated. She entered the kitchen to find her mother in her old apron, pulling out pies in a large tray from the oven. So many more pies were already arranged in rows on the kitchen table. The whole scene was messy, but the aroma was divine. Melanie knew from so many clues that her mother had been up and busy for a long time. Perhaps since before dawn.

Verena noticed Melanie whose face was not smiley, enter the kitchen. "well hello there, sleeping beauty." She said mockingly with her focus on cooking. She stirred a mix busily in a yellow bowl.

"Why on earth did you disable my alarm?" She thundered.

"Oh! So sorry hon'." Verena replied calmly. "You know? You didn't have a good sleep last night. I was awake the whole time and so I knew you didn't really sleep. You pretended of course, but I knew you found it difficult after the . . . nightmare."  She paused for a deep breath and continued. "Well . . . I had to wait for you to fall asleep and when you did, it was almost morning . . . so I thought to turn off the alarm so you can get some sleep. Especially since only one of us could."

Junior cut in as he entered the kitchen after Melanie. "What nightmare?" His curious eyes shone.

Melanie and her mother froze and for a while, they just stared into each other's eyes, saying nothing, yet they communicated. The silence was a whole conversation beyond Junior's comprehension. They never told him about the past, about the nightmare he was lucky to have missed and they have no intention of ever doing so. For all Junior knew, his father and brother whom he was named after, slept but didn't wake up, because God loved them so much and wanted them to himself in a better place. Melanie and Verena never spoke about the past to each other either. They only wished to bury it and convince themselves that it never happened.

"I gotta go mom." Melanie finally said with subdued aggression. She pushed Junior aside again and made her way back to her room in huge paces. "If I land enough money today, I'm surely moving out." She mumbled as she went.

"Yeah right." Verena said under her breath. You said that last week and the one before. At a thought she stopped mid step and was confused. "Huh? Are you going somewhere?" She shouted out to Melanie, but got no reply from her.

"She's meeting facebook friends, remember?" Junior chipped in with a grin after considering how odd his mother and sister acted sometimes. 

Verena was lost for a moment before she understood. She gasped and exclaimed "Oh!" Melanie had mentioned it before. Some strangers that contacted her through the internet, wanted to pay her in exchange for skating lessons. "Damn! I didn't remember that." She mumbled, filled with regret. "And I was busy baking all these, hoping you two would help me take it to the shelter . . . Gosh! It totally slipped my mind." She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted to Melanie,"I'm sorry hon'." then she pouted submissively and turned to Junior whose smile beamed. "Sweetie do you think I'm a bad mother?" She asked. Junior shook his head, and his pretty face warmed her heart. So she took a knife and cut out a slice of pie "Come on here hon'. Have some." She gave it to him and ran her fingers through his thick curly hair.

~•~ ~•~ ~•~

Melanie was rushing into her bathroom when she heard her mother's shout of apology from the kitchen and she decided to ignored it. She jumped off the tub as soon as she was done and dragged her towel along. She dried herself up quickly and as she did she moved to her closet and produced her favorite comfortable outfit; a tasteless khaki knee length short, and a black fitting T-shirt captioned:

LIVE WHILE YOU LIVE ;-)

In a swirling white calligraphy. She flung them onto her bed.

By that time, she was through with the towel so she threw it at a wall hook, but missed, so it fell awkwardly. In a flash, she was done putting on her clothes. Her black T-shirt clung to her torso and flaunted her neat lady curves but still managed to make her look tough at the same time. Sort of like Lara Croft's. She took a grey sweater that she was not planning to wear and tied it around her hips by the sleeves. Lastly, she pulled her black leather gloves and wiggled her fingers in the air with a smirk. The gloves usually made her feel like a bad-ass, capable of taking on any physical.

She was ready to go, but then she noticed her towel still lying on the floor. She picked it up to hang and as she did so, with her hands lifted up, her short right sleeve pulled back to reveal that  scar on her biceps area. Her body went cold and slow for a moment and her mood dived into a dark, cold, hollow place. She swallowed and headed to her drawer. She pulled it open and brought out one of her black arm band that was meant to be worn over elbows, to protect them from bruising on the event of a fall. But Melanie intended only to wear it over her scar, to protect her thought from that dark place. Slowly she slid it up her arm, to conceal the scar and as soon as she covered it, the dark atmosphere around her lifted. She sighed in relief.

"Oh my God!" she exclaimed when she noticed the time. She barely had twenty four minutes to get to the rendezvous point. She grabbed her kit backpack from under her bed and dashed out of her room, but returned quickly and picked her phone along with her earphones from her table.

She dashed out again to get her roller skates, but at the door already, her mother was standing with the cream old wheeled boots in her hands. She noticed that they were sparkling clean. Obviously, her mother had cleaned them and got them ready for her. She felt both embarrassed and glad, because she had always needed to clean and polish them, but was always too lazy. She smiled. "Thanks mom." She said and pecked her on the cheek. "You are the best." Quickly, she grabbed them, leaned on the wall for support and wore them.

Verena watched her quietly for a moment before she spoke; "Sorry I turned off your alarm."

Melanie was done and she stood tall on those boots. Verena barely reached her chin. Melanie shrugged off her mother's apology and skated away with agility. Verena just stood and watched her with a smile on her face. My little daughter is all grown now and have changed so much. Verena thought proudly, but still had to admit anyway, that she wished that Melanie had turned out a little different, a little happier, a little more effeminate and unburdened.

As soon as Melanie got into the elevator, she put on her earphones and scrolled through her music player. Finally she found her favorite song. iRobot by Jon Bellion. There was something about the song that had her hooked. Somehow the symphony allowed her to be at peace in her body, to need nothing else but herself.

🎶I was a human, breathing and thinking
Eating and drinking, philosophizing
I was a human, before you killed me
And ripped my heart out, I knew what love was🎶

The elevator beeped and opened up at the ground floor of the building. She slid her phone into her left pocket and skated off into the slightly busy street. Melanie regretted that she had not been ready on time.

"Excuse me! Excuse me sir!". she said to passersby, whom were in her quick way. Men and women who had their own peculiar burdens and masked them with laughter and distracted themselves with busy life. She skated at an alarming speed carefreely.

On her way, they just kept flashing through her mind again: the images in her memory, from the past. She remembered tumbling over the rails. She remembered the silly long braids she blamed for making her to get caught. If she didn't have them ridiculously long, that man would not have caught them. She remembered how she got into a room afterwards, found a pair of scissors and cut them short. Her braids fell on her feet as she began to hear the distant police siren . . . and that short, was how her hair remained ever since. She remembered seeing his brother fall off that cliff. She remembered being molested by that faceless pervert. The memory was so clear that she remembered the alcohol scent in his breath. She remembered those words he said to her. She remembered walking out of that room dumb and in shock and found her mother sitting next to her father who lay in his own blood. She remembered that the stupid TV was still on, showing something that would have been funny on a regular day. She remembered that she stood there and felt that something had gone terribly wrong with her. She was detached from her feelings, she could not talk, she could not feel the pains that cycled through her body and she could not cry even though she knew that Michael and her father was gone. She remembered that she just stood there, watching her catatonic mother for a while. She remembered that she later went away and dialled 911 herself and that she was just sitting on a couch after for a minute when she watched her mother sit and stare into nowhere, oblivious of anything that happened around her. She just sat next to her fathers body till when the police came with medics and they took her mother away and placed her on a psychotherapy program that lasted fifteen weeks, leaving her behind with Natasha whom she later grew to love and bond with like a sibling. She remembered how they got Michael out of the water but didn't allow her to see him. She remembered how they told her mother that they didn't find any other person's body in the water. She remembered that they took reports from her account of the incident at a hospital and that nurses swapped her body and in-between her thighs for substances to run tests with, but after so many years they continued to claim that the case remained unsolved. The police sealed off their new house with yellow tapes for months as a crime scene, so they had to move to an apartment in Santa Ana, leaving everything behind. She remembered how the changes and medical bills devoured their income. She remembered the months she spent with Natasha beside Michaels hospital bed. His skull was cracked by a rock he fell onto and for six months he remained in coma and underwent too many surgery. She remembered that she was away, living with nuns when she was told of Michael's death. "He had breathed his last." Sister Margaret had told her sadly, but when Melanie's heart broke was when she added; "...And the lady . . . your sister-in-law . . . She was so dreadfully hurt that she overdosed on pills . . .  on purpose. She died too, Melanie. I'm so sorry." Her heart was very heavy that evening and after three sleepless and tearless nights, it was the last time Melanie ever really smiled.  She remembered growing up  struggling to heal, to forget and failing completely in that endeavor.

A car horn forced Melanie out of her stream of thought. She jerked awake and the car wheels squealed against its brake pads, and narrowly missed her while she was lost in thought when she wheeled fast into a juncture without the slightest caution.

"Hey!" The driver peered from his window and yelled. "Are you fucking high? You could have been killed. Don't you..." The driver continued to rant but  Melanie glided off, paying him no attention. Soon, she was in the almost empty parking lot opposite the busy Chinese restaurant where a giant balloon chef in a funny chef hat floated high in air. She was there, the rendezvous point, but there was no one else.

She pulled out her phone, glanced at the time and it was already 9:45am. Fifteen minutes late. She cursed under her breath and worried. Perhaps the customers had arrived, waited and finally gave up. Hurriedly, she dialed their number, waited anxiously but was disappointed because the call was not picked. She thought that she had failed and she loathed herself. I really needed this. She thought, worried that she had, yet again, failed to pick herself up.