Her heart throbbed as she climbed down from the trellis that leaned up against her house. Was freedom really this easy to attain? She almost slipped at the thought, but pulled herself together and deftly maneuvered her way to the ground. Carefully unwinding herself from the clutches of the ivy, she stood, and was able to thoroughly evaluate her situation for probably the first time that night.

Here she was, a fifteen-year-old girl with passion and a head full of dangerous logic, standing outside her house in a pounding rain and feeling more and more lost with every passing minute. Her head told her to go back, that it wasn't too late and that everything could still be just the same as it was before. But another part of her screamed about the injustice of it all, lamenting how a decidedly-grown-up teenage girl could not just go jaunting about in the rain for reasons of her own.

Luca's indecisive personality required her to stand, contemplating, for a full ten more minutes before she was able to come to a conclusion. Breathing in deeply, and watching the mist form before her as she exhaled, she determined that she was ready to go, ready to set off on an adventure that she, as the typical obedient daughter of the day, had never even considered before.

She took a step, and her freshly-placed foot slowly sunk into the soggy mud as the rain came down even harder than before. Wet, and shivering to no end, Luca took another step, ignoring the way that her hair was stuck to her head in a sloppy, windblown way, and how her beloved sneakers were so covered in the filthy, squelchy mud that they were no longer recognizable, even to her. She ignored the fact that she was only in a t-shirt and jeans, and that what she was doing was beyond the realm of normal sanity. Luca stepped again, this time with more furor and more self-confidence. This is what she wanted to do.

Feeling all restraint slip down with the raindrops that were rolling off of her body, Luca proceeded with what she figured was a dastardly plan of self-destruction. After all, how many people would go to such great lengths, and in such weather, just to prove something to themselves? She supposed that she was one of the crazy few.

The blue sky, blue air and blue mist were slowly evolving into a dark magenta, with wisps of gentle cloud swirling into the sunset that came to her from the west. Dark outlines of trees stood out against the fog, surrounding her and concealing her from everything she didn't feel like seeing. Soon it would be dark, and her parents would check for her, to remind her that dinner was ready and that she should come down to eat.

Distantly, she wondered if her parents would call the police. Would they scream and hallucinate, would they think that she'd been abducted when she had actually left on her own accord? In her reality, if you were unaccounted for for so much as a spare second, you would be in trouble before you could even count to five. Had it always been that way? Luca figured that she had been trained from the beginning to think that if she ever stepped outside, on her own, without letting her parents know where she'd be and when she'd be back, that something terrible would happen. Such was the length of her parents' paranoia. But now was the day to challenge that. She was on her own, in the rain, and her parents were neither aware of where she was or when she'd be back. Quietly, she sang to herself, 'This is the way it ought to be.'

She was reminded of happier times, quirkier times, when she'd thrown paper planes, run screaming through the house and purposefully defied her teachers. Times when less was expected of her, times when drawing on the white walls of a Kinkos store with pink and yellow crayons was merely cast off as "something a child would do." You didn't get in trouble then, because it was assumed that you knew no better.

But she knew better now. Less-intelligent people would know better now. Yet... she still had a lot to prove to herself.

The rain stopped, and pulled her back to her long-awaited foray through suburban driveways and carefully-tended gardens. Immersed in a world of cloistered neighborhoods and succinct societies, she was able to appreciate the danger of being out alone. But dark was falling around her like snow, and so was the anxiety. Where was she? What was she doing? Hearing a police siren wailing in the distance, she decided that the time to be free was not now, could never be now, and would never be now. She'd just have to wait for her true liberation.