The girl cringed as the hinges on her door creaked open, her bottom lip moving slowly towards her teeth as she peeked her head out into the hall, checking to see if there was light coming from under any of the other doors. There was, just a tad, from the night-light in her little sister, Camelia’s, room, but other than that, nothing.
She ducked back into her room, putting on her shoes and tying them tightly before grabbing the garbage bag. She checked the hallway one more time, to make sure nobody had woken at the sound of her door opening and sleepily flipped on their lights, then stepped out. She knew better than to try to tiptoe in those shoes, so she had to take her steps slowly, gingerly moving ever so slowly towards the front door.
She was about halfway there when she realized that she should have shut her bedroom door behind her – if anyone happened to glance into her room, it would be obvious she wasn’t there, and if they stuck their heads just a little further in, they’d be able to notice the lack of light coming from under the door of her private bathroom. Her sisters wouldn’t care enough to do anything, most likely, though they might ask her about it the next day, if they remembered. Her parents, on the other hand, might decide to investigate.
Maybe she could just say that she’d forgotten to put her garbage out in the can earlier that evening – why she had decided to do so in the middle of the night instead of waiting until that morning and hoping she beat the garbage-man might be more difficult to explain.
But what were the chances they would happen to wake up and come out into the hall, anyway? ‘They get bigger the longer you stand here debating,’ she reminded herself. And besides, if they did wake up, they’d probably hear somebody wandering through the house, so perhaps seeing that her door was open would assure them that it was just her, searching for a midnight snack or something.
She had to slow down even more once she was through the hall. It was always hard to tell just what configuration the chairs in the dining room would be in, and then once she was in the living room, she had to try to avoid any of Camelia’s toys that might have been left there when she had been sent to bed. And, of course, there were the couches and the various end and coffee tables to avoid – she was pretty sure she knew where they were, but every time she let herself get too confident, she’d end up running straight into them.