Prompt: Nothing's gonna change (06/08/08)

So, yeah, I took some time before I actually started to do prompts again! Anyho, this one is...okay, I suppose.
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(June 08 ’08)

Prompt: Nothing’s gonna change

Time: 15 min.

Words: 389

“Nothing will ever change, don’t you get that?!” My older sister’s voice was loud and mean. If I hadn’t known her better, I would have thought she was drunk.

“You will grow up here, surrounded by this…”she struggled for words as she angrily kicked some trash that was lying on the carpet which looked dark enough to be called black-even though the original color had been tan.

“This-junk, and you will grow up just like us, just like the rest of us trash in the park. Don’t you get that?!” Tears were now streaming down her face as the angry-tinted red checks reflected the glossy glow to my eyes. I did my best to ignore her words, no matter how much truth rang in them. Moving my eyes to the dirty carpet, I slowly pulled my hand up to my face, feeling the welt that was starting to rise.

I should put some ice on that, I thought, but made no move. Sure, I was almost certain that Mark wouldn’t be back until late this night, when he was drunk, but I could not be certain, and did not want to risk igniting his anger again. A soft movement of white, standing out completely from the dirty floor, caught my eye. From my vantage point on the floor, only the scribble of my favorite teacher was seen.

So this is what started it all, I thought, feeling too tired and too weighted down from my tender age.

“Are you even listening?” The anger had mostly emptied from my sister’s voice, and I heard only the broken spirit left within the girl. She had been like me once, I know that now. She never told me, but others had. She had been smart. She had wondered-like I had. And she knew the consequences.

I could feel no anger toward her, no matter how loud or mean her words. She was just trying to protect me, that’s all. She wasn’t like Mark, no not at all. My sister didn’t come home at midnight, drunk with a new ‘girlfriend’. No, she was the only one in our little broken up ‘family’-oh how naive the word-that worked, a hard, low wage job that scraped some food together for us. She was the glue to this whole mess, the mess that was my existence.