1 There's a Door in the Alley Wall

I walked home on my own. Yet again my older brother had already driven home instead of giving me a ride. His name is Adam and he's twenty one and is a member of the basketball team. Thankfully he doesn't let the popularity get to his head, he's nice enough to me but he's oblivious to the struggle that i'm going through. I feel invisible to my family. My dad is always gone on business trips and my mom works late hours at a hair salon. She loves her job but I guess hates being home. That's why she takes shifts that last all day till late at night voluntarily. I raised my head to get my bearings and to my relief I was halfway home. Passing an elementary school a fire station and a park I then cross a street and walk past the hair salon and finally a bank about a mile away from the hair salon to at last reach Lower Cathedral road, the road I live on. Sighing I dropped my head in an effort to keep going since I was only at the fire station. Excited shouts made me look up and I beheld a few kids running and playing; they looked happy, the joyous shouts were like music to my ears. I wished I could join them but sadly the world wasn't like that.

Sighing again, I dropped my gaze and walked around the park finally making it to the traffic light crossing. I waited for the light to turn red in order to cross the street to the hair salon, leaning against the pole in exhaustion. The light finally turned and I walked across the street not paying any mind to the hair salon. What did my mom care anyway that I was walking home ? She probably did but not very much, and besides I'd tell her that he refused to give me a ride, which is probably true. I passed the bank and began my final trek towards my house, which was a gigantic colonial style house with a large spacious drive way and a brick wall built in between us and the neighbors. I've looked at this wall maybe a hundred times before and it was truly nothing special it stretched to the back of our house, then connected to a wood fence built around the back of our property, then ended in a small yard. I stepped onto the blacktopped concrete. Something caught my eye and I looked up at the wall. My eyes grew wide ! There was a metal door set into the wall.

I walked over and stood in front of it, blinking a couple of times to make sure that I wasn't dreaming, and yet there it was, still cocking my head to the side I reached out and touched it's cold metal surface. The door was about five feet tall maybe taller since I'm 5'4", it had a single wheel handle in the center of the door like a ships door. 'If I'm not hallucinating then I should be able to open this door' I thought to myself and this seemed like a reasonable idea so I adjusted my backpack on one shoulder grabbing the wheel handle with both hands and tried to twist it. But I wouldn't move. I tried to twist it in both directions to no avail. 'What? Is it locked?' I thought confused, and leaned forward to get a better look at the door finding that the base of the handle was rusted. 'Oh that's the problem,' I thought triumphantly and considered what I was going to do. An idea struck me suddenly. I turned running into the garage dumping my backpack by the large work bench and crouched searching through the numerous bottles of liquid and found what I was looking for. Oil, the kind commonly used to loosen up rusted gears. I grabbed the bottle and ran back to the door dripping some oil on the wheel and jiggling it so the oil worked into the mechanism connected to the wheel. Then after a couple of minutes I gave the wheel another twist and this time it turned easily with a metallic thunk from behind the door. With a low groan the door swung open.