If you could read my mind you'd be in tears. (A Day to Remember)

My mother and I were watching in the window. Our excitement to see our boys back home turned to terror. My mother was paralyzed. She just stood there with a flabbergasted expression and a slack jaw. I tore through the house and collected as much heroin and many guns as I could find before they started banging on our door. I knew with a plane full of heroin there were no sweet words that would save Senior now.

I broke my mother from her trance when I ran by with my arms brimming with illegal matter. “Just go to the panic room, there’s no time,” I cried as I ran past her.

Paradoxically, she ran down the stairs.

“What are you doing?” I called after her. “You can’t help them. There’s nothing you can do now.” She ran out the front door. I continued to Senior’s bedroom. I flung open his false bottom desk drawer and typed in the code that parted the bookshelves and slid open the titanium door. I returned the false bottom to the drawer before escaping into the panic room. I opened the security monitors and silently watched my family being carted away. I watched men in black tear apart my home. I watched the chaos turn to emptiness. I watched the safe light of day turn to darkness as I was left alone.

I’m not saying I wasn’t brave back then. Hell, I’m the bravest fifteen year-old you could find, but my God, I was scared. I called Uncle Rider and I told him what happened. He promised to be there by morning. I curled up on the mediocre panic room sofa and wept. I snorted some heroin and I looked at the guns. I thought about what Vincent had done. Suicide wasn’t an option yet though. There was still hope. Those men that had raised me excelled at what they did and they would be home; this was what I assured myself, but the realistic voice in my head reminded me that they had a plane of heroin. How do you talk your way out of that? The heroin is all confiscated, how do you pay back the suppliers? Maybe the safest place for them is jail. What happens to me? Things were getting thick quick.