It was her house

It was her house.  She knew it was her house because she had the exact three steps that creaked on the stairway after stealing a midnight snack memorized.  She was convinced that her toilet was the loudest in the house, the loudest of all her friends’ houses, and that the water from her sink never really got hot.  Her backyard was trademarked with the play house that her father had built for her and her sister when they were still small enough to pass through the door frame without crouching.  She knew that there were two goldfish and a gerbil buried in the corner of the back lawn, tight up against the fence.  She knew how not all of the sprinklers worked in the front yard and that a small strawberry patch had cropped up one year on the side like a bonafide miracle.  The giant telescope and framed newspaper articles with her father in uniform had been in the garage since before she could remember.  Though all her friends found it invasive, she was comforted by the commanding chimes of the grandfather clock that echoed throughout the house.  She hated the piano that gleamed in the front window, beautiful ebony that it was; she had sat restless through one too many lesson.  She knew that it was her house because she had her favorite spot picked out, the final cushion on the green couch that sat under the window in the living room.  She settled there after school to read.  She had painted the mural herself in her bedroom, and had helped to scrape the jungle wallpaper off her sister’s walls after it had been deemed too silly.

She knew that this was her house, and yet they told her she had to leave for another.  Another house which did not have the same smell or the same sounds and which she had not chosen and which was, most definitely, not her house.