February
Lucy's Age: 16
So Ryan and I have continued passing notes to each other by way of our windows. He's really funny and his dad sounds like a complete jerk, so we have a lot in common. Actually, I guess Geoffrey has been pretty good in the jerk department lately but if I just asked for permission to go out on a date with Ryan I'd definitely be told no.
Around Christmas Ryan started telling me that he wanted to meet face to face, and I had a hard time telling him no. His girlfriend had just broken up with him and he was getting a lot of pressure from his dad to pick a college, which was the last thing he wanted to do because it wouldn't help him with his goal of becoming a DJ.
I put him off for weeks and weeks, but finally I decided that I was going to give myself a birthday present even if Renworst and Geoffrey were going to forget about my birthday.
Coming up with a plan to get out of the apartment wasn't easy. We live on the fifth floor, but unlike Ryan's building, mine actually has a fire escape. My window, just like all of the windows in our apartment, is wired into the main security system, but I did a little reading and figured out that the contacts on the system are all magnetic.
The filter on our internet is super restrictive, but a couple of years ago I found an educational site that is whitelisted for some reason that has all kinds of stuff that Renworst probably wouldn't want me reading about.
Once I solved the problem of the alarm system then the only remaining hurdle was Renworst, who usually checks in on me a couple of times per hour during the day. The simplest solution seemed to be the best, so I just started adjusting my sleep schedule over the course of the few weeks leading up to my birthday. By the time my birthday actually arrived, I was habitually getting up at 4 a.m. and going to bed at 8 p.m.
Boredom has driven me to do some pretty crazy stuff over the years, so Renworst just rolled his eyes at me when I told him I was going to start watching tai chi instructional DVD's super early every morning. He adjusted his sleeping schedule slightly to increase our overlap, which meant that before long he was going to sleep by 9 p.m.
Ryan and I arranged our rendezvous through our normal channel of communication and then, almost before I knew it, the day for us to meet arrived. I made all of the usual preparations for bed and then closed my door and waited for Renworst to quiet down and go to bed himself.
I'd seen Ryan's family leave earlier that day, which meant that we were going to have his apartment to ourselves. I'd tried to convince him that we should go outside somewhere, but he'd correctly pointed out that it was too cold to spend much time outside unless we wanted to court a case of frostbite.
Once I was sure that Renworst was asleep, I snuck out my window and down the fire escape. Ryan buzzed me into the building and then met me at his door. I practically had stars in my eyes for the first hour we were together. It was everything I'd missed about being around Parker.
We just sat next to each other on the black sofa that his mom had purchased a few months before and talked. Ryan and I didn't have as much in common as I'd had with Parker, but he was funny, and he had all kinds of incredible stories. I made it until midnight before exhaustion started really setting in. I wanted to go back home, but Ryan waved off my announcement that it was time for me to go home and put a movie on instead.
I tried to stay awake for the movie, it was the kind of violent thing that neither Renworst nor Geoffrey ever would have let me watch, but by then I'd been up for twenty hours. I fell asleep before the first massacre really even got started.
I woke up halfway through the movie as Ryan was trying to put his hand down my pants. The reflexes that I'd spent the last few years training just kind of took over. I hit him with a palm strike to the base of the neck pretty much without even realizing what I'd done.
I did manage to pull most of the force behind the blow at the last second, but I wished that I hadn't a second later when he backhanded me off of the couch. I converted my fall into a roll and made it back to my feet about the same time that he came up off of the couch swearing and angry.
At the time I didn't realize that he was probably trying to rape me, but I didn't need to know the full measure of what he was planning because the way that he came at me told me that I needed to defend myself.
Apparently the techniques I'd learned when I was five were more reflexive than I'd realized because I took control of his arm and used his own momentum to put him headfirst into the wall. I expected that to deter him, but he came at me again so I put a knee into his groin and then used an elbow to break his nose.
That knocked him out, so I stumbled out of his apartment and back across the street. The experience rattled me so badly that I just went inside my building and up the elevator like I normally would have done.
I didn't realize my mistake until I was already inside of my apartment and Renworst came out of his room with a baseball bat in one hand. To say that I was in trouble would have been a complete understatement. I think that if Renworst had been able to get Ryan's name and address out of me that he probably would have gone over and beaten Ryan to death right then and there.
Renworst ended up calling Geoffrey, so now we're just waiting for Geoffrey to make it over here and decide what my punishment should be.