The Points Prison My Parents Built For Me Novel by Margot Sterling _ Novel




The Points Prison My Parents Built For Me Chapter 01

Mom and Dad had one rule, no one in this family got to sit around for free. Every meal, every change of clothes, every night spent in a bed had to be paid for in points.
Breakfast cost five points, and sleeping in a bed cost ten. I scrubbed and swept and carried things until my hands shook, and I still never had enough.
Most nights, I couldn't afford to sleep indoors. The night of my birthday, I came down with a fever.
I was dizzy and burning up, and I wanted to spend my last few points on medicine. Mom looked at me like I wasn't even there.
“Rules changed. Medicine costs double now.” She didn't blink. “If you don't have enough, that's on you.”
So I curled up in the corner and shivered. From down the hall, I heard Mom's voice coming from my brother Leo Sterling's room, all warmth and sweetness.
“Eat up, sweetheart. I'll give you ten thousand points, enough to get that sports car you've been wanting.”
That was when I finally understood what the point system really was. It had never been about earning anything, it was a leash, and I was the only one wearing it.
I left that night, stumbling through the dark, feverish and barely able to stay on my feet.
Down the road, an ambulance sat with its lights off, beat-up and too quiet to look legit. The man leaning against it held out a blister pack of pills.
I took a cautious step back. “How many points is that? I've got nothing left.”
He went still for a second, then shrugged off his old army surplus coat and draped it over my shoulders without a word. “It's free.”
I didn't know what to do with words like that. I swallowed the pills anyway and climbed into the back without looking behind me.
***
The ambulance rattled down the road, and I curled against the side panel, too tired to sit up.
The pill slowly started pulling the heat out of my skin, and the coat, heavy, smelling like cigarettes and old road dust, was the warmest thing I'd felt in ten years.
I pulled the collar up around my face and called toward the front, where the driver was humming softly to himself. “Hey, wherever we're going, does it cost points to sleep there?”
The humming stopped.
“What the hell?” He caught my eye in the rearview mirror. “Cost what?”
In the passenger seat, a man named Rook let out a slow curl of smoke that drifted past the scar on his cheek.
He flicked his cigarette out the window and looked at me with something quiet and careful in his eyes. “She means points. What kind of points?”
“Everything,” I said, and my voice came out smaller than I meant it to. “Food, clothes, a bed for the night, it all had a price. You earned them by doing chores. Mopping earned five. A perfect test score earned a hundred. But a bed cost ten, and a shower cost twenty...”
My voice trailed off when I saw the look on their faces.
Something had shifted in the cab, and the silence that settled over it felt heavy enough to press against my ears. The only sound left in the ambulance was the hum of tires against the asphalt.
Slim, the driver, let out a slow breath. “What the hell kind of business are your parents running?”
“Dad owned a company. Mom stayed home.” I picked at the hem of the coat. “She gave Leo ten thousand points once just for sweet-talking her, enough for a sports car I could never have dreamed of owning.”
Slim jerked the wheel and turned onto a road with no streetlights. “We don't do points here. Food, drinks, the coat on your back, none of it costs a thing here.”
I almost laughed. I hadn't known the world could work like that.
Back home, if I breathed too loudly and disturbed Leo, Mom would open the black ledger and dock me five points. Five points meant going a full day without eating.
I gripped the hem of the coat tighter. “So this coat, I'm not renting it? I don't owe anything for it?”
“It's yours,” Slim said, his voice cracking at the edges. “We don't want a damn thing from you.”
He was quiet for a moment. “What kind of life have you been living?”
My eyes burned. I pressed my face into the coat and didn't answer.
I couldn't believe people like this existed outside those walls. As long as nobody handed me a ledger and told me to settle up, I didn't need anything else.
Meanwhile, at the Sterling estate in Southgate.
Mom was handing Leo snacks while he played games on his phone. He didn't look up when he spoke.
“She’s still not back?”
“I don't even have anyone to rub my feet now,” Mom said, frowning. “I was thinking about using points to hire someone.”
“Don't bother.” Dad had the black ledger open in his lap, his pen moving steadily across the page. “She's throwing a fit, thinks disappearing for a few hours will guilt me into giving her more points.”
He worked his way down the page. “Left without turning off the lights, two points. Didn't take out the trash, three. Gone over six hours without permission, fifty points for insubordination.”
He closed the ledger with a soft snap. “She's at negative one-twenty. When she drags herself back, she’s spending a month in the basement, scrubbing every toilet in the house until she's worked off the debt.”
Leo clapped. “I'm posting this online.”
“Go ahead,” Mom said, smoothing his hair. “She’s always been a disappointment. Her grades were never even close to yours.”
The truth was, I had never once failed an exam.
Leo was the one who shredded my test papers and wrote his name where mine had been, and when I tried to say so, Mom called me a liar. That got me docked a hundred points and three days without food.
I had thought about going back. Part of me still did.
But I knew what was waiting for me inside that house, debt I could never work off and points I could never earn back, no matter how many floors I scrubbed or how many nights I spent sick and alone on the cold floor.

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