♉just Tricia💕

“Tap out!”

She screamed in defiance. Or at least, she remembers she tried to. Her brother had her folded like an origami crane, his weight settled on her feet, the soles of which were flat against the back of her shoulders. Looking back, her only saving race from serious spine injury was her weekly gymnastics classes and fierce adoration of the stretching warm-ups.

She remembers the sound she made. Wet and gurgling, nothing at all like a glorious battle cry. It was bubbles through gravel, the pressure rising in her face to make her blood roar in her ears. Wet spittle fell on her lips as she desperately scratched at her brother’s forearms, drawing jagged lines on the skin the beaded red but didn’t budge him an inch.

She remembers the instinctual panic, the fear. She can’t breathe, can’t think. She needs air, needs it because her vision is fading around the edges to gray and she can’t hear words anymore. She can’t even feel the pain of being bent like this. Just dizziness even though her belly is on the ground. Spinning.

She can stop it. She can tap. Her brother was practically begging for her at this point.

She doesn’t.

She must have woke up no more than a few seconds or a minute later, face on the floor, head cocked toward the leg of a table. The old green carpet under her nose smelled of pet dander and feet, rough and oddly oily, but she remembers her body contorted and laid flat

Remembers pushing herself on shaky arms to all fours, head strangely quiet.

Now, though, she doesn’t know if her brother was there. She can’t recall with any certainty anyone was there afterward.

She just remembers she got back up.