I was sitting at my kitchen table with my son, as we dug into two, large bowls of cereal. I looked up, and saw water dripping from my ceiling, in the same place we had experienced a leak the first night we moved in, three years ago. The water went from a small drip, to a stream, to a gushing waterfall. I jumped up, grabbed my son, and ran to the living room. I picked up my phone, and called my landlord, explaining the situation to him. He told me to talk to my neighbors, and hung up on me. I looked outside, and saw that my upstairs neighbors weren’t even home, and I could not figure out where all this water was coming from.
I called the police, and told them what was happening, and that my landlord wouldn’t do anything about my flooding apartment. They came over right away, along with some firefighters, and cut an even larger hole in my ceiling, so that they could fix the leak. As they were fixing it, I tried calling my landlord again, but after one or two rings, he sent the calls to voicemail. Sobbing, I asked a police officer if there was anything they could do, and he told me that they had had a lot of problems with my landlord in the past. He handed me a huge roll of cash, and told me to get my family into a hotel room. As we were talking, I suddenly noticed that there was very loud music and noise coming from upstairs, even though my neighbors weren’t there. The officer noticed as well, and when I told him that she wasn’t even home, he went upstairs, broke open her door, and turned the noise off.
The police and firefighters left, after fixing the leak, and I stood in my living room, with water up to my ankles. Still carrying Liam, I called Kyle, and told him what had happened, and he came home right away. He tried to call the landlord when he got home, and was ignored as well. So we started packing a few bags, and drove to a hotel.
From the hotel, Kyle looked up a lawyer that we could call. And I looked for a new apartment, or a house, on my phone. My phone rang, and it was my neighbor. She was yelling at me about her apartment being flooded, and her broken door, and I told her it was her own damn fault, and that she had flooded my apartment as well. She told me if I wasn’t such an annoying bitch, she wouldn’t have left her water running, and her TV on, when she wasn’t home, just to annoy me. I hung up on her, but she just kept calling me, which made my phone impossible to use, so I turned it off.
It was the next morning when I drove back to our apartment. Everything was dry, as if nothing had happened, and there were huge, weird vacuums all over my apartment, like someone had just sucked up all of the water. No one was in the apartment, so I got to work packing up all of our belongings into boxes. Someone started pounding on my front door, and I ignored it, assuming it was my upstairs neighbor. I could hear her screaming in the hallway, and just kept on packing.
I packed up everything we owned in a matter of hours, and loaded the boxes into the large moving truck, which was already parked in front of our apartment. My upstairs neighbor was screaming at me from her window, but nothing she said made any sense, and just sounded like shrill jibberish.
I was still loading the truck when Kyle pulled up with Liam. They helped me with the last couple boxes, and I told him about our neighbor. He just shook his head and told me that we would be out of here soon. Apparently, we still had not found a place to go, but all of our stuff was packed up and loaded into the moving truck, so we would have to go somewhere.
I tried to call my landlord again, and again, and again, but still nothing. A guy appeared out of nowhere to drive the truck for us, and Kyle, Liam, and I got into our vehicles.
Then, we were at Steak ‘n Shake, and my phone was ringing, but I didn’t answer it.
That’s the last thing I remember before I woke up.
My Life as Jan 