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I have a treat for you.
Remember a few weeks ago when I was telling you guys about my latest theory about paranormal phenomena and such? Well, I was grounded for “inciting a riot” at school last week, and my mom told me to go clean out the attic. I was shifting stuff about, knocking dust off of things, and I found the neatest thing ever, a diary. Okay, maybe that wasn't the find of the century, but it is pretty good. The handwriting is sort of big and loopy like a girl's. Let me tell you, girlie has an interesting story to tell. It makes the theories I have look like to Ms. What-ever-her-name-is, I know two things. Thing one: I'm closer to the truth than I thought as far as ESP and other abilities go. Thing Two: I forgot what thing two was, but it'll come back to me, I hope.
I'll be posting the contents of the diary here on my site. I thought about correcting the errors, but I think that takes away from the feeling the writer had. That and I'm too lazy. I'll fix the disgusting, in your face errors, the ones that make the story hard to read, but the rest are going to stay as a sign of respect for the orignal author.
Seraphine A. R.
It’s not.
You know how much I hate the use of clichés and redundant plots.
This memoir is being written more for me than anything else. I need a way to sort out the events that led to... I can't say it. I can't even bring myself to write it down.
I'm such a hopeless case.
Wow, that still sounds extremely common.
Whatever.
In order to put things into perspective, there are things you need to get straight. No, this isn't a life story retelling. If that's what you're looking for, you're retarded, as the bulk of that is inconsequential and rather boring until my sixteenth birthday. Only the important things are mentioned and most of them are extremely unpleasant. I reckon I should go ahead and get started. I'll try to include as much as I remember. You know me though, my memory sucks and I'm sure to forget a thing or two. I think I'm rambling, stalling for time: let's get started.
The immediate background.
Everything (as far as I'm aware) happened in Aislinn Falls, my hometown. We—Aaron, Jakyb, Theodore, and obviously me—had just had our first fight with the Elite. Elite? I know; I can visualize you scratching your head and wondering what the hell I’m talking about. I'll give a quick rundown.
There's this chick, Nefaria, who is bent on total reality domination. That sounds strange doesn't it? As weird as it sounds, I said that the way I meant to. Nefaria was the first person to rediscover 'Ascending' (Hey, that's what she called it!) since the Greeks of the BC era. Ascending—fusing, whatever you want to call it, allows a person to connect with their root spirit. It's really hard to explain. Someone should write a book about it. Anyway, she let her power overtake her common sense and humanity and she decided to go a Napoleon-Hitler route, meaning she wanted to conquer everything she could (and couldn't) see while exterminating people she decided weren't worthy of life. Somewhere down the line, Nefaria either enslaved or recruited followers, the Elite. Okay, back to what I had been saying...
We had just finished our fight with the Elite. I say they won, but Aaron would argue that it was a tie. Anyway, after getting back home that night, I went about business as usual. I did some homework, took a bath, and talked on the phone with a very distraught Vannapha. That's my girl, Vannapha. She had been used as bait by the Elite to lure us, the Indigis, out. They really didn't need to do that, they had killed one of our classmates, RJ Carol. It's kind of hard, knowing he's gone I mean. He was a bit of a pervert, but he meant well. RJ could make you laugh, cry, and just piss you right off all at once. He and I had been friends since kindergarten, so, needless to say, I was more than ready to crack some heads when I saw the five o'clock news that day. We knew right away that he had been taken by the Elite, so when his body turned up—
Writing this is a lot harder than I thought. I've had to stop twice so far. How am I ever going to get through writing about what happened? It gets so much worse. You don't even understand.
Anyway, the next morning, the morning after the fight, Aaron came over as he usually did. I knew something was wrong though because he came through the front door. He came up to my room with the saddest expression I had ever seen. It broke my heart to look at him and I had no idea what was wrong yet. Patted the mattress next to where he had sat down. I sat down and he held my hands in his. Tears were streaming down his face. The hazel of his eyes had become a thin outline around the blue that had taken over. I'd never seen his eyes like that in person.
Something was very, very wrong.
“Kay.” His voice came out broken and raspy. His cheeks were flush and his eyes were puffy. He had been crying. I vaguely wondered if he had been closer to RJ than I had realized. That was impossible; I knew Aaron better than he knew himself. I would have known if there was something more between him and RJ. “Mom and Dad--” My heart plunged into my stomach. He swallowed and I watched his Adam’s apple bob. “They died last night in a car wreck.”
I cannot explain the feeling that went through my body. My mind. My spirit. I just sat there, staring at Aaron. I felt my mouth open and I shook my head from side to side. Was it true? It couldn't be true. Ma and Pa couldn't be dead. Fresh tears skirted down Aaron's face as he watched me. I felt my mouth fall open and an unearthly sound came from somewhere deep inside of me. I truly believe that my soul cried out at that moment. Aaron's parents had been my parents too. I had my own, but it was like the four of them were a unit. TK, that's my little brother, came into my room with a concerned look on his face. Aaron and I collected ourselves and told him the horrible news. He ran from the room screaming at the top of his lungs. I heard the door to his room slam and things behind it made noises like they had been breaking. My parents came from their room and into mine. Aaron couldn't do it anymore. I don't blame him. He broke down and sobbed on my bed and I went to talk with my parents. Aaron, Jakyb, eventually TK, and I sat in my room. We mourned, remembered and mourned some more.
Sitting at home was driving me crazy. I had never been so depressed. I felt like I was scarred in a place that wouldn't heal. Honestly, I didn't want to heal. I felt guilty. Why couldn't it have been me? Why wasn't it some old person that was knocking at death's door?
Let me see... If I remember correctly, Ma and Pa passed during the first week of October. They were buried that weekend, and I got over my grief, or pretended to, and went back to school the following Monday; that week was the worst week of my life. Those five days—120 hours—7200 minutes, however you want to count the time, seemed like they would never come to an end.
I think that instead of going through each thing, I'll just list the bad things that happened on each day. Monday, ah Monday. It was one of those cliché filled Mondays. You know the type I mean. Nothing goes right and the world as you know it seems to be about to come to an end. I woke up late (Hey, 4:30 is early), nearly missed the bus to the competition (Cheerleading, best sport ever), I missed one of my landings when coming down from a pyramid, and to top it all off the bus got a flat tire on the way home. When have you ever heard of a school bus catching a flat tire? That stuff just doesn't happen. Luck was clearly not on my side. I didn't get home until 4 or so Tuesday morning. Had we had a normal coach, we could have been excused from classes on Tuesday, seeing as how things were out of our control, but we didn't have a normal coach. I swear the one we had was Satan's sister. Enough on that though, we're already into Tuesday.
Tuesday went badly because of Monday. As I got like zero hours of sleep, I fell asleep in Grammar and Vocabulary. It's such a useless class. It's not like we even have to show up. All we do in there is sit down and do the worksheets the old cow passed out. Ms. Patty, or Cow-face as I called her thereafter, gave me a detention. ME! I got a detention. I might have done a lot of things, Mashed Potato Incident notwithstanding, but I NEVER got detention for it. How I loathed Cow-Faced Hamburger Patty after that. It still annoys me a little. Anyway, detentions were held after classes and I had places to be, namely practice. When I got there, I was berated for both being late the day before, my missed landing, and then “having the gall to show up late after such a horrible display.” Yeah, whatever.
On Wednesday, I got my sociology paper back. Do you know how much work I had put into that stupid paper? If I wasn't out fighting with crazed elemental bad guys, I was in the library. We had just had our first fight with the Elite a week or two before, so that tells you I spent a LOT of time in the library. When I finally get up and put some effort into something, I pull out a D-. Not a regular D, but a D-. A D- is like peeing in someone's face but saying, “at least it didn't get into your mouth.” He should have just given me an F.
Thursday dragged in a fight and vomiting. I saw Aaron taking out the trash, and he tried to run back into the house before he thought I saw him. We yelled at each other a bit. I was telling him to stop being a whiny, moping bitch and go back to school and that no amount of tears was going to bring Ma and Pa back. He yelled about me being a cold, insensitive person that never really cared about him or his family and that we couldn't be friends anymore. Well, that was just fine with me—on to the vomiting.
I was crouching at my locker and my foot slipped from under me, kicking to baseboard underneath my locker. A plume of green and tan rose into the air and settled on my clothing. There was a lovely patch of mold growing under my locker. When Jarvis, a custodian, moved my locker, a sickeningly sweet smell filled the air and upon inspection, they found that a large area of the wall had been eaten away and filled with this evil, alien, moldy, mildewy (I don't think that's a word... maybe it is...) stuff that had been growing since forever. Pretty sick. Like I said though, I vomited. It was so gross. Like, you don't even understand how gross it was. I'm dry heaving and gagging now just thinking about it. Thanks to me, the entire school had to both shift lockers and share with someone else. I wound up sharing with Latasha; remember her from my earlier ramblings? The locker episode was what jump-started our friendship. Ah, the powers of moldy death.
Friday was the worst of the week. I got into a fight. A real fight. Me. Isn't that crazy? It gets crazier; I fought not one, but two boys. Again, I've gotten ahead of myself. Let me start over.
Friday was picture day. I picked out what had to be the cutest outfit anyone had ever seen. It was chic, classy, sophisticated, and sexy all at once. I clacked all the way to school in heels. Right when I was about to cross the street from the park, a car came whizzing by and splashed up the muddiest water anyone had ever seen. So there I was, cute as a button, but covered in mud—something like a pig. Needless to say, I was unhappy. I'll admit it; I despaired for a minute. What was I going to do? It was picture day. Picture day. Something had always happened, every year, right before I was supposed to take my picture. In sixth grade, there was a food fight and I somehow ended up with mashed potatoes and corn in my hair. Seventh grade I had tried a beet from the lunchroom. Turns out, I'm allergic to beets... Eighth grade was plagued by the unicorn nightmare; don't ask. Ninth grade promised to be a good picture day year. I sneezed, snot everywhere. Promise broken.
So, that brings us up to the year being written about. Mud. I wound up avoiding the photographer all day. He seemed to find my predicament funny every year. Loser. Clearly, he had no life and delighted in torturing children with horrendous school and yearbook photos. I was ahead of the game though; I had an emergency outfit stowed in my locker for just such an emergency. It was only a skirt and a blouse, but it was better than the mud covered getup I had on at the moment. I decided to sneak home at lunchtime so I could find a more suitable outfit. In your face, creepy photographer guy.
Anyway, after that, the day went rather smoothly. I got through all of my morning classes with no glitches on my part. Just when I thought things were looking up, Fate, Luck or some other obscure entity decided to take a crap in my bowl of proverbial cornflakes.
After a rushed lunch, which involved munching on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I showered and changed clothes while continuing to half-heartedly stew about another excellent picture day that still had the potential to be botched up by others. What happened to me being able to be lucky all the time? I thought that was supposed to be my innate ability. I decided that picture day happened to coincide with a rare cosmic flux and threw off my powers. That seemed to be a perfectly irrational answer to the perfectly irrational mess that my life had become since my birthday. As I was debating on whether or not the whole week happened to line up with an evil planet, I heard a whistle. Not a sport whistle, work whistle, or even someone whistling to a pet, the whistle I heard was a bit more on the stupid-hormonal-male-looking-to-get-his-head-cracked side of the whistle spectrum. I ignored it.
I raised my head slightly and sauntered on like I hadn't heard a thing. There were several derogatory catcalls yells, but I kept walking, temper flaring. My nostrils widened, my breathing became hurried and shallow, and my mouth turned into a scowl. There is only so much a girl can take, ya know? I turned on the fools behind me with a rage burning in the pit of my belly. The kind of anger I felt was out of place. Boys did this sort of thing all the time, but coupled with the stress of the weeks until that point, they brought something out of me that I hadn't known existed. I'd love to call it acute anger or some other rubbish, but I know what it was, and I knew what it was then. Hate.
I screamed at them.
I gave those boys such a dressing down that it was a miracle they didn't just vanish right then and there. Profanity like I'd never used colored my language as I raged at them. Hubert (a.k.a Huey) and his best friend Louis (a.k.a. Louie) were cowed, to say the least. They stood there speechless. I think I saw Louie's lip tremble a bit.
I turned on my heel, fully prepared to stalk home, but I never got that far. Huey reached out and smacked me on the butt. What had he been thinking? Had I not just given him a piece of my mind?
I snapped my body back around to face him and I slapped him with all the strength that I could muster. He stumbled back and Louie rushed forward and pushed me. I tripped over the bag I had dropped and landed hard on the ground. My legs were sprawled in a rather undignified and unladylike manner. I snapped my legs shut and caught the predatory look in Huey's eyes. Or did I? Maybe he was just shocked by what had happened. Being on the ground though, I was rather eager to accept it as mal-intent (I really don't think that's a word) and prepared to go to town on both of the boys. I popped up (that means I used my arms to push my body up and snapped my legs underneath me, effectively “popping” my body into a standing position from being on the ground), and went for blood.
Huey was standing on my right; he met my right elbow first, Louie meeting it right after he did. I spun and brought my left elbow to the same point my right elbow connected with Huey's jaw. He stumbled back and I reached out for Louie. I grabbed him by the shoulders and yanked him towards me, bringing my right knee into his stomach. I pushed him down and spun yet again, raising my left leg. I caught Huey in the neck with my heel. He crumpled to the ground. I turned yet again to look at Louie. He was crying and begging me to stop. I smirked and punched him as hard as I could in the mouth. I busted his lip and I might have knocked a tooth loose. I'm not really sure. I should have left them alone right there, but something in me told me to make sure that they would never, ever do anything like that to me again. I looked down at Huey and kicked him as hard as I could in the ribs. He deserved it, the jerk. He was definitely going to learn to keep his hands to himself. Louie shouldn't have ever pushed me. Huey deserved the initial slap. I leered down at the still crying Louie and used my foot to roll him onto his back. I bent my knees and jumped up, landing in his stomach. He deserved that, too. I spit on each boy and turned to walk into the school, smiling. I felt a little better, vindicated even.
I'm agreeing with Seraphine; errors this time around are intentional. Kayori has a lot on her plate at the moment and I don't think proper grammar in her diary is at the top of her list of stuff to worry about. If that makes the story impossible for you to read, then sorry. I'm sticking to my guns on this one. I'm writing through the eyes of a character who is emotionally unstable and that's just the way it is.
Part 3 of the series will return to the third-personnarrative format.
Mark-Anthony