All For Nothing

NOTE: Ricky is my step mom. I forgot to say.

It was the first day of winter break, and it all started when we got the mail. We lived in an apartment at the time, on the second floor, and you’ll see why this is important at the end.

“The mail man is here,” my dad told me, and it was all he had to say, for retrieving the mail is one of my many chores, along with taking out the garbage, and a several others. So I went down the front steps and, as usual, I forgot the keys. So, I ran back up, grabbed the keys, and ran back down. I put the key in, turned, and pulled. Then, I grabbed what was in the mail box, and sorted it out.

“Dad, Ricky, Ricky… Dad, from Best Buy?” I pondered, as we hadn’t been there for at least 2 years. I went back up the stairs and went back into the apartment.

“What did we get?” he asked.
“Ricky got 2 things, and you got 2, one of which is from Best Buy,” I told him.
“Really? Wow… I haven’t been there for years…” he said as he opened it. He took a minute to read it, and said “It’s some coupons, one if which is half off my next purchase of $15 or more. With this, you can your new game,” he said.
“Seriously? Awesome! Thanks dad!” I shouted in response.

“We’ll go later okay?” he asked.
“Yea!” I again shouted in response.

2 hours passed, and it was 3 PM.
“Are we going to leave soon?” I asked.

“Later,” he replied. This went on for several hours until it was 8 o’clock, at which point Best buy was closed.

“We’ll go tomorrow,” he lied.

About a week later, I had finally bugged him enough that he couldn’t take it anymore, and he finally took me. I put on my winter coat, because it was kind of chilly, and we set out to the car.

“Do you have the coupon?” he asked.

“No, I thought you had it,” I replied.

“You might want to go get it,” He said sharply.

So he gave me the keys and I sprinted up the stairs and fumbled with the lock. I finally got it open, and the coupon was on the bookshelf about 5 feet away. I grabbed it, went back out the door locked it, and started sprinting back down the stairs.

In hindsight, this was a REALLY bad idea, because stairs + running = tumbling down those stairs...

As I was running down the stairs, I started to gain just a little too much momentum, and lost control. I put my hand out to push the bar on the plate glass door, but the bar snapped like a twig between my weight the combined force. I went right through, the door shattered, my body went limp, and I hit the cement. Hard.

My dad, hearing the crash, got out of the car as fast as he could, and sprinted over to me. He checked to see if I was okay, and examined me thoroughly. He thought I just had a little gash on my neck because of the trail of blood flowing down, and a cut on the corner of my pinky.
          He took me back upstairs to the apartment, and washed of the cuts. To his horror, the gash on my neck wasn’t a gash, it was a long cut, about 2 inches long, and the cut on my pinky had a rather large shard of glass in it. As soon as he noticed this, he drove me to the hospital right away.

On the way, he texted my step mom and my mom about the incident. Once we got to the ER, the doctors assessed my wounds. After about 30 seconds, but what actually felt like forever, they carefully pulled the glass out of my pinky and cleaned and bandaged both of my injuries. The paramedic said that had the cut on my neck been 2 centimeters lower, it would have cut my Jugular vein, and killed me. My coat probably saved me from a lot of pain, for it was big and puffy, and sheltered me from a lot of the glass.

But what really upset me, was that I went through all that, and never got my game.