Murphy's Law

Chapter One

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1. First impressions are the most lasting.

My first memory of my life in Maine sprung from death.

I had been putting boxes away in our attic—yes, an actual attic, the kind with boxes of memories instead of air conditioning machinery and roof rats that had dominated them in Texas—when I found it. I was eleven at the time, so it was still a little bit confusing to me, but the memory was vivid enough that I was able to decipher it progressively through the next few years.

Even at eleven I had understood it was a suicide note, though it wasn’t very obvious that it was one. In fact, I couldn’t be sure that anyone had ever read it. It was folded with crisp edges, and while the paper was yellowed, the ink was sharp and clear. It had been shoved inside a box with a string of pearls, some movie tickets and a photograph. At a glance it looked like a love letter. I assure you it was not. I didn’t come to understand anything beyond what it was, however, until I was fifteen.

I had always assumed my mother had thrown the note away, but I guess the part of her that liked to read mystery novels found it interesting. I had found it, those four years later, in her sock drawer, under the Christmas socks her mother-in-law had given her that she hated for multiple reasons. The ones she never touched. Generally I was a good kid, but I figured taking the note wasn’t really a bad thing anyway. I had found it, after all, so I was sure to be entitled to looking at it.

It was then I understood the man who had written the note blew his head off because of his seemingly undying passion for some unrequited love. And if that wasn’t enough of a lesson in amore, a little less than a year later, long after I had misplaced that note, my best friend Alex’s parents got a divorce. It was messy. Her dad had been a nerdy science whiz, her mom a cheerleader, and I don’t know why they ever got married because they both ended up cheating on each other with people who were more similar to them.

Not that this was a big surprise to me. My mom had been married seven times. My dad was the fifth, and they still got along better than she did with any of the other ex husbands, but apparently not enough to live with each other. Neither my mother nor any of her husbands were particularly disagreeable—something just always seemed to go wrong.

I was seventeen when my Aunt Mandy told me the suicide note was written by my great grandfather.

I wasn’t allowed to tell my mother I knew, especially because she and my aunt didn’t get along very well. My aunt had had the success of being married to the same guy for twenty years—but that was about her only success. She lived in a trailer on a small, run down farm in central Texas. The kind of farm that made you forget that Texas had four of the largest cities in the entire country. She’d only attended one year at a small community college before she’d gotten pregnant with one of her two sons, neither of whom were the tallest cornstalks in the field, if you know what I mean. They barely had enough to get by every month, and their crops had a tendency to succumb to some freak disease every year.

I hadn’t really thought about it, but a lot of people in my family didn’t have much success.

“Do you know why everyone on this side of the family is stuck in shit straight up to their nostrils?” Aunt Mandy wanted to know. She was never the most eloquent of people.

“Um,” I said. I had a feeling anything I could have said she would have disagreed with, because she was not asking so I could answer, she was asking so she could tell a story. “No.”

“It’s ‘cos of my damned grandfather,” she informed me. I didn’t think that was a very sensitive way to talk about someone who was dead, especially if that someone had killed himself. “The old bastard should have known not to mess with fate. It’s a sin to kill yourself, you know.”

I was pretty sure a lot of things she did were supposed to be sins too, but I didn’t mention that. My Aunt Mandy was Catholic by culture, not by faith, and liked to say that she thought of the Bible as more of a book of suggestions than actual laws.

“And I’ll be damned if he didn’t leave a curse on our side of the family,” she concluded. While I’d felt a bit uneasy with the conversation before, my attention was now fully grasped. “I bet you’ve noticed you’ve never been able to get much done, eh?”

She sounded so ridiculous at that moment that my automatic reaction was to disagree with anything she said. But… she was right. There was one rule that dictated my life, and that was that if anything could go wrong in a situation, it did go wrong. And no matter how much I tried to prevent anything from foiling my plans, somehow they were always foiled. Such as the time Ricky Jamison showed up at my next door neighbor’s house on Homecoming night and decided to take her to the dance instead. Or the time I accidentally hit Rachel Kennedy with an overhead projector cart and broke her nose and got kicked out of National Honor Society. Or the time I broke the gas faucet during the lab safety lesson in Bio and everyone had to evacuate the building.

I would go on, but it would take too long.

I still didn’t believe her for quite some time after that. Not until my mom’s sixth husband, Ricky the air conditioner repair man, lost his business in a drunken game of Go Fish. That’s when we moved across town and Mom met husband number seven, James the History teacher.

That’s when I called my uncle Charlie to ask him about the curse.

“Oh Lord, you’ve been talking to your aunt, haven’t you?” he chuckled. Charlie was the most financially successful of his siblings, but he had never been married. Mom always said he was picky, which I think was a way of saying she thought he was gay, and Aunt Marcy said it was the curse.

“Well,” I said, excuses forming impulsively in my mind. “…Yes.”

“You don’t listen to that, you hear? Just between you and me,” although with his loud, booming CEO voice, nothing was ever just between him and me, “Marcy is just looking for a way to rationalize her problems without taking any of the blame for it. We’ve all got our hang-ups, kid, and nothing is going to magic that away. Just do the best you can with what you’ve got, and everything will fall into place.”

I took his words to heart. He certainly sounded right. But then on my graduation day, when I got to the end of the stage and the principal bumped the table with all of the diploma cases and they all spilled out beneath me, causing me to slide down the stairs and break my wrist, I was pretty sure my fate had not been left up to chance.

That’s when I called Uncle Bill.

Uncle Bill lived in a small mountain town in Switzerland, where he owned a toy shop. Uncle Bill lived in Switzerland because he was on the run from the IRS.

“Well,” Uncle Bill sighed. “I don’t like to admit it, your mom ignores it and Charlie thinks it’s nonsense, but I gotta tell you the truth. From everything I’ve seen, there’s no doubt in my mind that there’s some kind of a curse on this family, whether or not it’s from my grandfather.”

I wouldn’t have liked to admit it, but hearing that gave me a twinge of excitement. I think maybe I was just so relieved to think that all of the freak accidents that have happened to or around me had some kind of explanation that I would have believed just about anything.

“The trouble is,” Uncle Bill continued. “None of us have any idea how to break a curse. My grandfather didn’t exactly leave behind instructions. Hell, I don’t even know why he did it. Happily married for thirty years, successful financially, working in his dream job. Kinda makes me wonder if the curse can be broken. There ain’t nothing to avenge for him.”

I couldn’t talk to him too long because of the long distance, but I was only more confused than ever. That totally trumped the unrequited love theory that I hadn’t realized was a theory.

That day I became obsessed with it, more so than I ever should have. I constantly asked my mom and aunt about it until they ignored me, and looked for that lost letter until I was so exhausted I fell asleep on my floor on a pile of old papers.

After a while I began to think it was hopeless. The longer I looked for that letter, the more I thought it was probably completely ridiculous of me to even think about a curse and that it was more trouble than it was worth. I had enough trouble as it was.

Ironically, the first twinge of progress I found was when I met trouble in the flesh.

His name was Andy.

A/N: Surprise! So a lot has changed since I posted the last thing I wrote. I've been busy, and I've changed a lot, but what I found has remained the same was how much I love writing.

So here's my new story in this new era of my life :) I hope you all like, and I hope this prologue-introduction-thing is intruiging/entertaining/makes you want to read more. If it does, a nice pop of a review would be appreciated! (One word for all I care!) And if you think it sucks, which is entirely possible, I'd appreciate you letting me know that as well.

If you'd like to follow my random background thoughts in my writing adventures, check out the blog I've posted a link to on my profile. :)

And review!