I walk down the cold dark hallway using the dim light of my cell phone. Crap! It’s dead. Feeling my way around this unfamiliar place wasn’t my plan to getting to my so called bedroom. I was walking like a zombie, one step at a time. I feel my way up the wall, and CLANK! There goes that family picture. Bah! Oh goody I made the baby cry, I’ll be expecting a lecture in the morning. I feel my way down to a doorknob. I turn the cold, old, and hideous doorknob. I shut the door and turn on my light. As I search for my charger in these cardboard boxes that hold my memories, I feel sick to the stomach. This place makes me sick. I find the charger finally, plug up my phone and turn on my heating blanket. Before I get in bed, I will search for a good book to read. I make my way to that box I’m supposed to call my bookshelf for the next five years. I’m disgusted; I turn the light off and hop into bed. Sleep is not an issue for me. It’s really easy to sleep when you’re depressed. The hard part is avoiding the twenty five anxiety attacks a day. I don’t know how I manage to keep all of this a secret. For most it would be noticeable, but I’m good at covering up the truth. My parents always question my lack of friends every weekend, but I just say I’m better alone anyway. I occasionally have nightmares. How I don’t wake up screaming is a question I can’t even answer. All I have to do is thinking of my 7th grade year and I’m smiling in my sleep. I hate the 8th grade. I hate this place. It’s not home; it’s not where I want to be. It’s a hell hole and I’m trapped. In a way, I’m sad that my parents don’t even notice my lack of food intake, my lack of friends, how pale I am, and my constant take of Tylenol. I take so much; we get a new bottle every week. I like it though. I’ve become so immune to it that I can take around 4 or 5 a day, and it barely affects me. I hate that fact that my parents are average, therefore I must be average. Every single time I have an idea they shoot it down! My imagination is the enemy in this war and their plan is to take it down piece by piece. If I’m not average like them, if I’m too different, too exposed to the world then they capture me, hold me hostage and take my last breath away. They take away my last breath of freedom, my last breath that could make me extraordinary. At last I pull out my white flag, claim mercy, and surrender. They unlock the handcuffs; they take the tape of my mouth. Release the chains holding my feet together. I shower, feeling relaxed. Any normal person would think why not come up with a new plan? I can’t because secretly my hands are still handcuffed, my mouth is still taped, and my feet are still chained together. I’ve become a robot. I’ve become one of them, another average Joe. I’m now in training, so when my kids do what I’ve done I can teach them the lesson I learned. I’ll take all the color out of their lives. Strip them of creativity, imagination, and anything that could make them someone. Being different is not accepted in this household and it never will be. As long as this method keeps flowing through the brains of the adults into their children, then no one will ever have a chance. It’s not the ideal world you live in now. It’s the other world. The other world that learns from your mistakes, and permanently takes them away. So we children won’t ever have the chance to make them. From your drug use, to freedom of speech, to even the way you feel towards your own sex. We are living in a mixture of China and the Soviet Union. I would kill to be in a world, where I can be myself. It’s glorified in some places, just not here. My parents have forced me into this place they call perfect. I’ve secretly read those books; it’s not perfect where we live it’s what they call the small town with a lot of secrets. Reading that book about that town was like looking at my parents lives. It was looking at where I live, at my future. Ashamed, disappointed is what I felt. We have no real communication with them. They are out there, we are here. We know everything about them, they no nothing about us. If they did, some would try and help us escape. Some would fight our system with more power than the adults of the community have. They would use their criminal like weapons. It would be a cake walk, getting us out of here. The hard part would be trying to tell us that what we have been taught is wrong. We are brainwashed. Now there is no escaping. We are stuck here, we think like our parents. It’s flowing in our blood; there is no way to get it out without a pool of our blood and our decomposing bodies in the ground. Knowing my mind is officially trapped, I die. We all die. We are just creatures in our world. Just like the ones before us. There’s not much you can do. For you do not know. We cannot be saved. It’s a battle where we lose, you lose and they win. Fighting is no use. It’s over.