“Mom, I’m home!” she said, closing the kitchen door behind her.
“Hi, honey!” her mother called out in response.
Alex went straight upstairs to her room to practice her self-defense drills in front of the full-length mirror in her bedroom. She did her elbow strikes and palm strikes. She had started her shaolin kempo karate training at a dojo in Boston a little over a year ago. She’d known nothing about defending herself back then, but she had shot to the top of the students in her class. She had learned how to strike with her hands, elbows, and forearms, how to break her opponent’s balance, and how to take them down. She had also become proficient with knives, swords, and nunchakus.
She practiced removing the switchblade she had taken to fastening to her arm just below her wrist with an elastic headband and bringing it to an attack position in one fluid move. The she practiced the jabs and the slashes. When she had started training, she had cut her hand badly. She’d managed to hide it from her mother until it healed over—she didn’t want anyone to know about the knife. Now, she never cut herself anymore. In fact, it looked like she could really do some damage with the short blade.
Up until recently, her room had still been a little girl’s room. Her stuffed animals had occupied almost half the bed, which had a pink ornamented headboard, and she’d had a pink dresser to match, covered with old stickers that she had put up in her preteen years. It had undergone a drastic change since. There was nothing pink to be found at all. She had a plain adult bed with no headboard now, and a simple wooden dresser. On the walls she had posters of rock climbers and runners. On one wall she had her exercise routine, and a calendar where she had checked the days that she had performed it. The chain of checks was unbroken for three months now, and she was going strong. She had become obsessed with physical training, with the goal of being able to defend herself in any situation.
Once she was done, she took a shower, dressed, and made sure that the blade was secure and well hidden under the sleeve of her fleece shirt, then she went downstairs to the kitchen to get some water. She mixed cold with room-temperature water in a glass and downed it. As she put the glass down, she thought she saw something out of the corner of her eye.
“Mom?”
“Yeah, Alex?” her mother called out from her room upstairs.
“Nothing,” Alex replied. “Never mind.”
As she walked back up to her room, she thought she heard footsteps downstairs. She stopped dead in her tracks.
“Dad?” He was supposed to be in the city again, but it was always possible that he would come back early. “Is that you?”
When she reached the bottom of the stairwell, two men in black ski masks appeared in front of her. She screamed, but it was cut short when one of them grabbed her and put her in a chokehold from the rear. She could feel his breath in her ear, and was disgusted by the warmth of his body against hers.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the other man heading upstairs. Alex tried to elbow and kick the one holding her, but it was no use. In training, she could break anyone’s headlock—but this wasn’t training. There was no sensei to call off the strike here. Thinking quickly, she slipped the switchblade from under her sleeve, just like she had just practiced. Clutching it in her right hand, she thrust the knife backwards, into left side of the man’s neck. She felt his blood splattering on the side of her face and head. He roared and released her. He fell to the ground, grasping at his neck to stop the bleeding.
Without thinking, she went straight out the back door. She jumped over the fence and just kept on running, through the Harrisons’ backyard, from there out into the street, just running farther and farther away. She cried as she ran, choking with ragged breaths. The tears streamed down, her mind filled with the single purpose of getting as far away from the house as possible. Far, far away. She ran for minutes, but it felt like hours to her.
Her wits started to return to her, and the first thing that came to her mind was her mother. Her mother was in the house. Alex had panicked and left her mother there with the other masked man. The horror hit her all at once. She stopped running and, for a moment, just stood there, her fear on a perfect balance with her need to do something. Then she turned to run back to the house.
She ran as fast as she could, her already fatigued legs burning with the effort. The pain made her grit her teeth, push harder, go faster, each moment of ache a barb that, in her mind, was penance for having run away. As she ran, she imagined having done something different: that she had used one of her father’s guns and taken the other man out by herself. This fantasy sharpened the pain, because in reality what she had done was flee.