That was great, Annie! I think that by 'change it to plain text', the Admin meant to change the font to Times Roman.

Here's more!! :D And I hope I properly changed it to plain text...I'm not quite sure how, but thank you anyway :]

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I was discharged from the white room the next day by my
aunt and uncle the next morning, just as the doctor had promised. Aunt Janet
took my broken arm in one of her pudgy hands, and began pulling me towards the
hospital doors. Uncle Rudy followed behind us, his toothpick arms crossed and a
frown of anger and distaste clouding his froglike face. No hugs, no murmurs of
“Hello, Gail!” and “We’re so glad you’re not dead, sweetie!” Only mean stares and rock-hard fingers on my bandaged
elbow. We walked through the shiny sliding doors, and I was unceremoniously
stuffed into the backseat of the car. When my door was shut and we had begun
pulling away from the curb, Aunt Janet began letting me have it.

“You listen, Gail Lawson, and you hear me well,” she
hissed, making a pointed use of the last name that I had kept different than
theirs. “ We leave you alone in our house for two days, with explicit
instructions not to damage any of our property, and you set our house on fire. When your uncle and I have
business to do, we expect you to be on your best behavior, but being the
delinquent teenager that you are, you feel some insatiable need to disobey us.
We are in the middle of important business negotiations, and your uncle gets a
call that you are in a hospital and we need to ‘come and get you, because more
patients need the room’. So we come all the way back here to find that we have
no house, and have to pay some $3,000 medical
bill? Let me tell YOU something, missy, if it weren’t for the fact that I
promised my sister that I would take care of you, then you can bet your bottom
dollar that you would be sitting in a foster home right this very moment. Am I
or am I not making myself perfectly crystal clear?”

At this point, my aunt seemed to be having some internal
breakdown, so I told her what she wanted to hear. “Yes, ma’am, you are.” Then,
because it appeared I had a minute to speak, I put in, “But, you have to
understand! That fire wasn’t my f-“

“Don’t you dare try to tell me that any of this wasn’t
your own fault! That is exactly your problem, Gail, is that you never take
responsibility for your actions. Now, if you didn’t start that fire, then can
you tell me who did? That’s right, you can’t. You have nobody to blame for this
but yourself.”

Uncle Rudy had been silently driving the Volvo throughout
this entire verbal bashing session, and at no point had he seemed to feel that
he should speak over his wife. I didn’t blame him for a minute. Aunt Janet put
the ‘bear’ in ‘overbearing’. She was vicious, controlling, and never stopped to
think about what she was saying before it left her fat lips. I suspected in my
gut that much of this anger was coming from Uncle Rudy, but Aunt Janet had
beaten him to the punch. She was usually the one speaking instead, and in fact,
I had rarely heard my uncle say anything in the nine years I had lived with
them. However, now he felt the need to say something. Just one sentence, but it packed the punch.

“Of all the stunts you’ve ever pulled, niece, this has
been the worst.”

The rest of the drive was silent, and the air so thick
with tension that my aunt could have sliced it with one of her fake nails. I
realized quickly that we were not going home. There was most likely nothing
left of our ‘home’, anyway. The sights here were no longer familiar, and
although we were somewhere relatively near our old neighborhood, it was not
going to be the same.

We stopped in front of twin ten-story motel buildings,
aptly named “Black Tide Towers”. They were made of coal-colored bricks, and
connected with a long tunnel on the top floor. Uncle Rudy pulled three
suitcases from the trunk of the car. He handed one to Aunt Janet, and a
carpetbag to me. We entered the building on the right through a thick metal
door, and walked up to the front desk.

“Reservation under ‘Dentworth’,” Uncle Rudy said to the
man at the front desk. He nodded, obviously a bit frightened by Aunt Janet’s
grizzly face. His thin fingers drew to room keys from a rack behind the
counter, and slid them across the countertop towards my uncle.

“Thank you,” growled Aunt Janet.

“Enjoy your stay at Black Tide T-Towers,” the man
stuttered, and stepped aside as our entourage stepped into the elevator. On our way up, Uncle Rudy handed me one of
the keys.

“You’ve got your own room,” said Aunt Janet quietly, in a
deadly ice whisper. “Hopefully you won’t burn this one down.”

I grunted. That was below the belt. I was going to make a
pointed argument against this last statement, but then realized that my aunt
was never going to believe me. She was never going to understand that I was
innocent. So I decided not to waste my breath. We got to the third floor in a
matter of seconds, and my aunt and uncle turned immediately left into another
room, shutting the door loudly behind them. I let out a small scoffing noise,
and then walked down the hall further, which was painted a dark grey. It was
thoroughly dismal, similar to my mood. I looked down at the room number on my
key. To my surprise, it was 303, the same number as my room in the hospital. I
shook my head slowly. What a strange coincidence.

I found the room not far down from my aunt and uncle’s,
and stuffed the key in the lock. It swung open to reveal a large room, with a
bathroom, a double bed and a mini-fridge in the corner. A small black-and-white
television sat in the corner, untouched for a while, it seemed. The room was
freezing, and I rushed to the thermostat to crank the heat. But the highest it
would go was 65 degrees. I flung my bag down on my bed and began rummaging
through it. The first thing that met my hands was a sweatshirt. I pulled it on
over my thin black tee shirt. There was also a pair of pants, a ten dollar
bill, and a book entitled ‘Common Sense’. I immediately stuffed this in the
dresser drawer.

For a while afterward, I stayed in my room and watched
old re-runs of fuzzy television soaps from the 60’s. It made me a bit nauseous
to watch them, but there was limited choice, and I didn’t feel much like
leaving. Later that afternoon, there was a loud knock on my door. “Cleaning
service,” said an accented female voice. I sat up on my bed, and then something
poked my leg through my jeans pocket.

“Ow!” I exclaimed, rubbing my leg. I reached into my
pocket to see what had prodded me. I pulled from it the card that I had
received with the flowers the day before. ‘You have been gifted’, it told me
again. I could almost hear a soft male voice behind the words, a soothing
reassurance to my situation.

“Cleaning service,”
the woman reminded me, now more urgently. I slipped the card back into my
pocket, stood up, and grabbed my key as the cleaning lady pushed past me into
the room.

That was wonderful!

Thanks very much! I've hit a sort of barrier in my writing but I hope to continue more soon. Thank you for your nice comments :D

Hello everybuggy! I've progressed a lot more in this old story and have much more coming. Thanks! Happy reading, if you want!

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There was reallynowhere for me to go. I didn’t think that I would end up down in the lobbyasking the concierge where Baker street was, but that’s exactly what I did. Forsome reason, I felt compelled to go see the remains of my old home,  just one more time.

            “Down the street, go onto the main highway until you seethe Barnes’ Pharmacy on the corner. Turn right, go straight, and then rightagain at the next intersection,” the man said with a polite smile. “Would youlike me to call you a cab?”

            “Yes, please,” I replied. I could hardly remember a wordof what he’d said, anyway. The man put two fingers in his mouth and let out ahigh-pitched double whistle. Almost immediately, a yellow checkered cabscreeched up to the curb and shuddered to a stop. I climbed in without anypretense.

            “Where to?” the man in the driver’s seat asked. His voicewas gruff, like rain rattling down a drainpipe.

            “2719 Baker Street, please, and fast,” I replied.

            He looked at me suspiciously, turning his thick neck tolook at me, and the smoke from his cigarette swirled around the back of the cab.“You got any money, toots?”

            “Yeah,” I replied, dragging the ten-dollar bill from mypocket. Now that he was sure I wasn’t going to stiff him, the cabbie drew awayfrom the curb. We sped around corners, got honked at by other cars, and rippedthrough the late afternoon traffic. I didn’t mind that we were going quickly,but the other drivers did.

            It took all of fifteen minutes to clear the traffic ontoBaker Street, and when we pulled to a halt at my old house, the cab driverturned around and looked at me with a look of confusion on his wide features.

            “We’re here,” he said gruffly, and then held out a handfor the money.

            “I’ll pay you when we get back,” I replied.

            “You ain’t got enough to go two ways. Pay up, and getout.”

            This presented a problem, especially when I hadn’t thefaintest idea how to get back to the motel. But, since I had no choice, Ihanded over the only money I had in the world and stepped lightly out of thecar. The cab sped away from the curb as fast as the man driving could step onit, and I watched it disappear into traffic before I turned back to stare atthe place used to call home.

            There was nothing left. At least, next to nothing left. Itmust have been more terrible than I had imagined, for the damage done was worsethan I had thought it would be. The charred black frame of the house wascollapsing even as I looked at it. The base still had bricks somewhat intact,but the rest of the house was simply ashes, and soot. Few things were leftinside the crumbling frames. A thin strip of yellow tape labeled ‘Do Not Crosssurrounded it in a roped-off circle, but I ducked under this, disregarding itwithout much conscious thought. I walked closer, up the sooty path, past theburned grass, and through what remained of the doorframe.

Therewere a few things that had barely survived. A few metal chairs, pieces oftwisted and bent metal silverware, half of a burst open washing machine, andseveral scraps of metal blown and scattered to the rising winds. I walkedthrough each room: dining room, living room, front room, hallway…Once I reachedwhat had been the stairs, I looked upwards to where my room had once been.There was nothing there but burned boards, as far as I could tell, except whenI looked down. A lean, crossed rack of charred metal lay very nearby my feet. Irecognized it as the shelf that used to be in my bedroom closet. Underneath it,however, was something that was not black or burnt. I lifted the rack carefullyaway from the ground, careful not to wreck the precious object beneath.

Asingle red rose, like the ones that had been in a vase in my hospital room, layforlorn and forgotten on the earthy ground. It was so brightly bold that itmade everything around it look grey and fuzzy. I dropped to my knees, my entirebody trembling, and carefully slid four fingers under the delicate stem of theflower. I turned it over once in my hands, feeling the soft silk of the petalsagainst my skin like calming medicine. Then, I saw that there was a small pieceof notepaper wrapped tightly around the stem and stuck to the only thorn.Gently, I took it between my fingertips and unrolled it, folding it back ontomy open palm.

“Hello,Gail,” it read. “I said at five. You’re late.”

Idropped both the note and the rose like they had suddenly burned my hand. Ithen quickly spun my head around, eyes wild.

“Whoare you?” I shrieked to the night. “Stay away from me!”

Therewas then a full minute of uninterrupted silence as I stood, like some palemarble statue, among the ruins of my house, with only the sound of my wildlybeating heart echoing around the small space, then slowing and coming to rest.It was only after I was positive that I was alone among the trees and the emptystreet that I could move my legs, one after the other, slowly backward out ofthe front door and back onto the sidewalk.

Itwas then that I began to run.