Books

My family and I moved into this apartment in the middle of July. The house didn't have any power when my mother finally took us to review it, so of course, the house was unbearably hot. I decided that I wanted to take a tour of the place, in order to claim the best room for myself, of course. When I got to the back of the apartment, I fell in love with one of the bedrooms. It was the smallest room in the house, but despite the Georgia summer heat, the room was nice and cool. I had to have this room.

The apartment was a great steal. It contained four bedrooms, large kitchen and living room areas, an upstairs/downstairs floorplan, a big spacious bathroom upstairs and a moderate sized half-bath downstairs. This apartment contained all of this for a mere five hundred and fifty dollars a month.

Being in a family that contained three girls and one boy, this was the first time my single mother could afford a house big enough for me to have my own room. I loved my room, even though after living there for only a week I suspected that something was wrong with it. Things started to happen almost immediately. For example, in order for me to sleep in any room, anywhere, the door has to shut and locked. If the door is not shut and locked, I can't go to sleep. Well, every night I would close and lock my bedroom door. And every morning I would wake up and my bedroom door would be wide open. Noone in the house had the ability to open my door like that. Especially, without waking me up.

There were other little incidents that occurred. I wasn't scared for the most part, just curious and a little annoyed. Then it happened. I was in my room, rearranging the furniture, as I often did. I had just finished moving my dresser my the door. On my dresser I kept some of the books I had collected over the years. I was loading these books back onto the dresser. As I was doing this, a little girl in a red dress ran past my room, knocked my books off the dresser and ran into the half-bathroom.

The structure of the house was organized in a way that if you stuck your head out my door and turned to your left,you were looking inside of the downstairs bathroom.

Coincidentally, one of my younger sisters had a red dress similar to the one that this little girl had on and they were about the same age, so naturally I thought that she was my sister playing a joke on me. This made me angry, so I went to the bathroom door and started trying to get in. The door was locked, so I began to yell that I was going to tell our mother if she didn't open the door. The door didn't budge. So I went into the living room where my mother was watching television. When I walked in I lost my breath for a minute. Sitting on the floor, innocently watching television, was both of my sister and my brother. My mother was sitting on the couch. Neither one of my sister was wearing the red dress, or anything red for that matter.

I ran back to the bathroom and turned the doorknob. It easily opened this time. I just stood there dumbfounded, staring into the now empty bathroom with my collection of books around my feet.