Aftertaste | J.JK

My Second Contact

"Elle!" My mom fusses, her eyes wide and shocked. She's looking at the room thermometer, and going insane that the temperature had dropped one degree. "Why in the world did you let this drop? It could affect your health!"

As you can see, my mom isn't the hardest person to faze.

"Mom," I groan. "It's one degree. I'll be fine."

"You will not, young lady. The doctor said constancy of temperature. And the last time I checked, constancy means to—"

I bite my lip, tuning out her voice like I always did when she got like this. She worried about everything. Even the slightest shift in temperature, just the tiniest amount of outside air—

Apparently, according to her and her precious doctor, could kill me.

"Mom." I repeat, going over the usual answer to one of her episodes. "I'm sorry, and I won't let anything like this happen again. The temperature will always be 68 degrees, and will always stay 68 degrees."

"It better be," She sighs, adjusting the dial furiously. "Remember your medicine—at exactly 4 o'clock. Take it with 100 milliliters of water—not one milliliter less or more."

As always.

"I know, mom." I say in practiced monotone, watching her close three layers of doors as she leaves the house.

The first one was an air filtration system—so that not even a single molecule of "contaminated" air—according to my mother—could get in. The second door was a system that cleared the visitor from all outdoor contaminants, and the third a regular door that was locked from the inside at all times.

I thought we only needed the third door.

She believed that we needed one more, just in case anyone decided to break into the house.

When I heard that, I told her she was delirious, and she scolded me for not caring about my precious life so much.

And then I told her I technically didn't have a life—with all these walls separating me from the outside world—and she told me to go to my room.

Knowing that my mother would constantly be going over the many cameras in the house, I decide to follow the tedious protocol—check if all the windows were locked, if the doors were all working like they were supposed to.

It would make her happy to see me doing that, and I intended to keep the only person who'd ever been in my life pleasant.

The only glimpse I could ever get of the outside world was through the large windows my mother had workers built all over the house. As if it made her guilty that her seventeen year old daughter had never gotten a chance to see what world actually looked like, she had basically made the house into something she thought would keep me satisfied enough to not venture out.

But if she thought that real world was full of soft, artificial grass and blooming flowers, I couldn't disagree with her more.

The real world was nothing like the paradise built into my room.

Pressing my forehead against the cool glass, I look out at the house next to ours.

It'd been empty for months, ever since the boy living there had accidentally broken the glass with a drone.

And my mother had been so angry that she took the matters to court, where I guess people went to to get kicked out of their houses.

Because that's exactly what happened.