BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM!
Gunfire!
Then another barrage of gunfire. BOOM, BOOM BOOM!
I jerk awake, trying to figure out what’s happening. BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, my stomach seizing, recognizing the sounds but panicking because I have no sense of where they’re coming from.
“Gia, Anthony, get down, get down on the floor under the bed!” my dad yells as my mom screams in panic.
Like a terrified kid who wakes up with nightmares, I dive under the bed for cover, pressing my hands over my ears to muffle the deafening sounds and trying to stop my body from shaking like I’m having a seizure.
BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, the shots continue, hitting the windows and sending chunks of glass raining down, crashing everywhere, splintering and cracking, our home being shot up and destroyed, like we’re in the middle of a war zone—only we’re letting it happen, powerless, unable to fight back and we’re all cowering on the floor like scared sheep. I want to run down the hall into my parents’ room but it would be stupid to stand so I stay scrunched up under the bed, my heart pounding so hard I’m sure my parents can hear it.
“Gia, stay where you are, but answer me!” my dad yells. “Are you okay?”
I try to answer but can’t at first. “I’m okay,” I manage to say, my words coming out haltingly, ragged, through my tears.
“Gia, are you okay?” he yells again.
“Yes, Daddy, I’m okay!” I manage to shout.
“Thank God!” my mom yells.
We all wait one minute, two minutes, three…and then hear sirens and know that help is coming and whoever did it is probably far away already. I crawl out from under the bed and make my way to the door. The floor is splintered with shattered glass and my feet start to bleed from the cuts, but I don’t care and keep going.
My parents are crouched on the floor of their room, huddled together and it’s like I’m seeing them for the first time because they look old and scared and helpless. My mom is lying there with her legs pulled up and I see red veins crisscrossing her milk-white skin and she’s crying and screaming, “God help us, God help us, what’s wrong with this world?”
Anthony comes in and his arm is bleeding because a bullet must have grazed it, and my mom yells, “Oh my God, what happened? What happened?”
“It’s nothing, Ma,” Anthony says, but the blood is dripping down his arm in a steady stream, leaving a red trail on the pale blue carpeting. My mom jumps up and goes to the bathroom to get peroxide and gauze and I grab a towel to press against his arm to stop the bleeding. And my dad is calling 911 for an ambulance and Anthony’s yelling, “they’ll pay for this,” and everybody is searching for their clothes and I run back to my room to find jeans and shoes and when I come back my dad is buttoning his shirt and standing by the side of the window. He presses numbers into his phone and stares into the night.
“You know what to do,” he whispers. “Now.”
And just the command of his voice makes me feel sick inside. When will this war ever end?
When someone tries to wipe out an entire family—or at least scare an entire family—that’s big news.
“If it bleeds, it leads,” TV reporters say, so pictures of our house with the windows blown out are all over the papers along with pictures of Anthony being driven to the hospital in the ambulance even though the bleeding slowed down and the bullet didn’t lodge in his arm.
The phone is ringing constantly and flowers start arriving, which is dumb, but people like to show they’re sympathetic. And I am walking around thinking about Michael’s warning and how he knew something and then in spite of everything around me spiraling out of control, it happens to be a school day, so I bandage all my cuts and stuff my feet into boots and get dressed and go.
Everyone is either looking at me like I’m radioactive or coming over and saying, “Gia, Gia, I’m so glad you’re okay.”
“I’m fine, thanks,” I say about a thousand times, only I’m not because I’m totally freaked by the thought of going home and sleeping in my bed again. If that isn’t enough, my mind keeps replaying the warning from Michael, but I don’t have to think anymore about him because my phone rings at lunch and it is him.
“Gia, are you okay?”
“I’m fine, we’re all fine, except a bullet grazed Anthony’s arm and he had to have stitches.”
He exhales. “I was worried. I’m glad you’re okay.”
But that doesn’t exactly do it for me and I have to go to class so I hang up and this time I try not to think about what could have been.
We move into Ro’s house for a few days while our windows are being replaced with bulletproof glass. It feels weird to move next door, but Ro’s family is like mine, and her mom is like my mom’s separated-at-birth twin, and our dads work together, so there’s constant food and noise and I feel safer there. Then I start to think about Christmas in Europe with Clive, which could not come at a better time, so I ask my parents.
“Go, go,” my dad says, relieved that he has a place to send me. “Yes, you can go, if the parents are with you.”
I begin to count the days, the hours, and the minutes, because I need to escape.
From New York.
My family.
My school.
And my life.