Down in the bustling streets of The Big Apple, there lived a girl in building 203, apartment number twenty-six. She is fourteen years old, and has a dark life.

Okay, maybe not completely dark. You see, light can shine in the darkness at any time. You just have to light the match. And this young girl has lit plenty of matches in her dark, yet happy life. In fact, she just lit up another one: She stood up to a bully.

Thwack! The sound of fist meeting face is not a good one. Especially if the person punching you actually knows how to punch.

Arnold Schwach was standing over poor Maverick. Her backpack was knocked off of her back. The contents of her bag were sprawled out on the hard, cold ground. A crowd was starting to gather, as usual.

Not even out of the school doors yet, and Arnold has a good enough reason for him to beat up Maverick. Again.

"What did you just say to me?" he yelled.
Maverick groaned, and managed to get her feet under her. She felt her right cheek with her fingers. That's gonna leave a mark, she thought. She faced Arnold.

"I said, I'm not giving you my journal!" she yelled back at him. She clutched the said journal in her left hand.

Arnold chuckled, "I just want to see what's inside. No harm in sharing stories with each other. Right?" he gritted his teeth on that last part.

Like that was supposed to scare her.

"Mm, yeah I think there is some harm in doing that. Seeing that you just punched me in the face,"

He cocked his fist, "I'll do it again if you don't give it to me. NOW!"

She held her journal tighter, and glared at him, "No,"

We'll just say that Maverick left the fight with two bruises underneath her right eye, but she still got to keep her journal. It's actually more of a diary, considering that her entire life is in it. No way she was about to give it up to some reckless idiot.

She walked down the streets with her hoodie up. She didn't want anyone to see the marks Arnold left on her face. One of these days, she thought, I'm gonna kidnap that jerk, and tie him up in a dark alley where no one will find him. Good riddance now that I think of it.

But of course, there's no way she'll ever be able to pull off that one. The dude was a six foot tall, slab of muscle. He's probably the strongest person in the city right now. Maverick walked down the cracked, concrete sidewalk to her building while thinking of ways she could get rid of Arnold.

Or maybe I could just hire an assassin. Wouldn't that be fun?

Maverick cringed at the thought, and shook her head. It's not kind to think about killing someone, even though you're not actually the one that's killing them. After all, if you hire an assassin to kill someone, you're pretty much the one that's doing the killing. If you get what I mean here.

Instead of taking the normal entrance, Maverick climbed up the stairs of the fire escape to her bedroom window. She learned the hard way to not go through the front door when you have two parents, (or one mom and a step-dad in Maverick's case), that like to fight and argue every hour of the day. So every day when she gets home from school, she'll get inside her bedroom by crawling through her window.

And sure enough, her mom and step-dad were arguing just outside her bedroom door. Not that she cared. Hearing them argue has become part of her daily routine now. She'll wake up to total silence, and she'll come home to two drunk adults who don't know what to do with themselves. The only time they'll act like real adults is when all of their alcohol and drugs have run out. That's when they actually do something for once. Her mom would go to the store and buy more alcohol, while her step-dad would go to some drug dealer to get more drugs. They pay off their debts through borrowed money. And when I say borrowed, I mean stolen. But we'll get to that later.

Maverick put her belongings on the floor, and collapsed face-first on her bed, ignoring the pain that she felt as she hit the hard mattress. That's exactly what life feels like sometimes. A hard solid object that hits you right in the face. It makes you want to fall down and never get back up.

But sometimes, you just have to pick yourself up and move on.

Some people like Maverick don't have a choice.