Borrowed Chapter 1
"Ivy!" shrieked her mother in outrage, suspending the silver house key over her face. The gleaming keyring dangled over her light brown eyes, reflecting in her stricken face.
What had she done? Of course, Ivy didn't know that the innocent, childish act of playing with a key was considered an offense worthy of punishment by her mother. But, it was, and so, Ivy had to pay for her crime...
Exactly what was the crime? What was so immoral about playing with a key?
That was years ago, ages of shimmering and fading memories. Ivy was not as young and childish as she had been, now not as foolish. She vividly remembered where the silver key was stashed away, out of her groping hands. There was a small, wooden cabinet hidden in her mother's bathroom, and, all those years ago, she saw her mother throw the key in there to gather dust, and then she locked it with a heavy, golden lock.
"Listen to me, Ivy," she had said grimly, "if your hot little hands touch this lock, in two minutes I'll know."
And those words had stuck with her, petrified in her mind. Fear coursed through her every time she would approach it, fear that she would touch it and her mother would race to the spot, her angry eyes fixed on her with loathing...muttering the life-long threat...
It had had happened once. Ivy, about ten years old, about two years after the original incident, was lumping all of the laundry in the small, tiled, square bathroom together, and she accidentally brushed, a slight brush, the shining, cold lock.
Her mother, heat spewing out of her ears, muttered a variety of words Ivy hoped to never hear come from her mother in such anger again as she walked heavily down the wood hallway. Ivy, breathing harder than she ever had in her whole life, had bolted from the bathroom to across the hall, shoving her white bedroom door shut.
The next hour was torture. Her mother hammered on the door until managing to unlock it with the bedroom door key. She promised to send Ivy off to boarding school if she put her smudgy fingerprints on the key again.
And she hadn't for so many years after...but little did she know that those years wouldn't stretch much further.
Knocking interrupted her thoughts.
Ivy glanced up irritably from a book she was finishing. Legs crossed Indian-style, Ivy stared furiously across the room from her green-covered bed.
Knock, knock, knock.
Ivy straightened up, and walked angerily towards the white closet door. She grasped the knob, and wrenched it open. "Who's there?" she shouted into the dark depths.
No one answered. She slammed the door close.
"Ivy!" came her mother's furious voice,"No slamming doors!"
In her brief spout of anger, Ivy had forgotten one of her mother's most strict rules. She knew that this rule was opposed because her mother couldn't afford the rent on a house, so they lived in a rusty, no-electricity trailer on the outskirts of the woods. There were neighbors that could hear the doors slamming and suspect someone was living there.
Her mother had been an alcoholic for a while before they had been kicked out of their old house, about three years ago, when Ivy was ten. But, after she couldn't afford it, she had stopped, and saved the money she could from mowing lawns and doing yard work for food and firewood, but she had still taken that key.
Ivy slowly eased the door open and tiptoed out. As quietly as she could, she ran to the opposite side of the tiny trailer, to her mother's room.
She knocked.
"Come in," her mother, sitting on her knees, was roasting four hotdogs on a poorly made fire as she invited her daughter in wearily.
Ivy tiptoed in as her mother handed her a hotdog spiked with pink. Undercooked, likely to give her food poisoning, but Ivy didn't care. At she had something to eat.
(Like it? Watch out Chap. 2)
