Blunder: Chapter One

"It's funny how you never think about the women you've had. It's always the ones who get away that you can't forget." -Chuck Palahniuk

1

Carolina, lying on her bed, cigarette in her hand, looking up at the navy blue ceiling, tells me some of her favorite childhood memories. She takes a long drag, lips covers with lip-gloss and blows the smoke out towards her closed bedroom window. “I was Little Miss Violet when I was twelve and now here I am, nothing,” she says, towards no one. Her arms are spread out wide with her hands hanging over the edges of her mattress.

Smoke fills the room and I’m praying the window will somehow open itself. Carolina, starring at me, mumbles something I can’t hear and after a few second she says again, “Did you get the butcher knife from the kitchen?” I nod and look over at the pillow beside her decorated with purple flowers on a white base. Each corner is the purest white possible but more and more towards the center white is replaced with lipstick and blood and gunk of mascara.

She turns over, away from me, and grabs a permanent black marker placed on the nightstand next to the bottle of meds by her bed. She bites onto the marker’s cap and pulls with her blemished teeth and carefully draws, with the hand still holding her cigarette, a solid crooked black line around her left ring finger. When she puts the cap, still clenched between her teeth, back on the marker she tells me, “Make sure you follow the line exact.” She shows her finger, the black line resembling the shape of an engagement ring. Pushing it right in front of my face, pointing to the navy blue ceiling, she’s making sure I see where to direct the knife. Again, I nod and say, no problem.

Carolina takes another Percocet from her nightstand. Her eyes start to fill with tears as she takes a drink to wash the pill down. “I mean Jesus Christ, I was prom queen our senior year in high school, I was f*****g infamous,” she says, going down the crooked path of memory lane that is her life. I just nod, agreeing with her.

I stand up and walk over to the window and try to open it but can’t. Hanging on Carolina’s walls are her letters of acceptance to the most prestige colleges. One by one trying to convince her to choose their way of life, but this of course was before Portland and the drugs and the pregnancy.

Carolina starts to turn blue and I begin to wonder how many of those pills she took. Her eye lids half open look up at me with her left cheek bone in an up position like she’s trying to smile but can’t.

This is the beginning of her legacy.

“My mother was a combination of Marilyn Monroe and Anna Nicole Smith,” Carolina says. She tells me how when she was young, being beautiful was important, in fact it was everything. “My life goal was to be Little Miss Violet, that’s what my mother and I both wanted.” She takes another drink to mix with another pill in her mouth. I just sit and listen, but not in great detail.

“But this,” she says. “This will be what I’m known for. Like Laci Peterson, but I’ll still be alive in the end.” She waves her cigarette around in her hand, making trails of smoke between us.

I think about lethal injection. The electric chair. The gas chamber.

“Oh, don’t you worry,” she says. “I’ll make sure your safe. I won’t say a word; this is after all my idea.” Carolina came to me with this idea for fame. Her plan was all written out. She would disappear from the public until she was considered kidnapped. This is where I came in all this, she needs somewhere to stay. We’re here at her apartment to stage an intruder coming to take her. That is where the finger comes in. Carolina says kidnap isn’t enough; the media needed something to show how serious this was.

I look toward the window making sure no one is watching through the dried dirt and bird s**t. The sounds from outside of children playing in the street and lawnmowers being pushed across the neighbor’s yard reminds me of growing up. I can hear sprinklers running and suddenly I am in Santa Cruz, watching the water of the pier. Growing up doing nothing, becoming older and more useless, trying to find a reason not to jump into the freezing water in the middle of December with no one around to save me.

Carolina snaps her fingers and I’m back to reality, back with my present self. Carolina looks at me trying to remember why I’m here, “You know the origin of beauty pageants?” she says. “It dates back to ancient Greece and the Judgment of Paris.” She takes another drag.  “When Paris was asked to choose between Greek Goddesses Venus, Minerva and Juno.” She smiles, “I could have been a Greek God, if I really wanted to.” There’s a slight pause, “You should go get the cutting board; I left it on the kitchen table,” she demands.

I nod and stand and walk through the hallway, watching the figure in each frame hanging on the wall grow older. I walk by moments in Carolina’s life she wants to remember for as long as she can and even beyond.

When I reach the cutting board a crashing sound comes from the room. I rush over to where Carolina is and find her standing over a broken lamp on her hardwood floor. She smiles, showing her stained teeth and falls backwards towards her mattress.

“It has to look like I put up a fight,” she says.

I’m not exactly sure how she got like this after we graduated high school. From what I know she moved to Portland and moved in with an aspiring young actor. She was going to school there for the first couple months but that quickly ended after she got pregnant. The baby never made it past two months being inside Carolina, not after all the drugs, and alcohol, and any other s**t Caroline was in at the time. I got word she had moved to San Francisco just a couple months ago. I don’t know how she got my number but that doesn’t change how she got a hold of me. I tried getting over her and one would think two years would be long enough, but here I am still, trying to gather up what might be left between us. She’s that bird you let free to fly away only to hope it came back one day. She never did comeback but now that has changed. This is my one last shot for true happiness, and it all comes down to this knife, cutting board, and the line drawn around her finger. This will seal our future.

I sit back down, placing the cutting board on top of the mattress. Carolina chokes and gags only to swallow whatever vomit her stomach can gather up. I grab her hand, now smeared with mascara and place it on my lap. Grabbing the cutting board I remember when we had first met, a total opposite of the destruction she is now. I place the board under her hand.

You sure about this? I say, looking down at her hand and the permanent line drawn across.

Carolina, not even being able to keep her eyes open anymore, just drools. Sweat soaking the bed creates an aura around her and I wish I could kiss her at this moment.

I place the knife gently on top of her finger, with each hand placed on each end.

Carolina tries to pick her head up from her bed and mumbles something I don’t understand. I ask, what was that?

Caroline drops her head back down and slowly says, “This is much better than a wedding ring.” I close my eyes and push down as hard as I can. For a split second there was total silence, and I swear time had slowed down, but after a moment, all that surrounded us were Carolina’s screams, followed by the sight of her blood.

Author's Note

all criticism is appreciated

Reviews

[CecilA]

This was a good read. Well done. Captivating. I'd like to read more.

I agree with Francesca. Just do a little TLC and you are well on your way.

Thank you for sharing this story with us.

[Francesca]

Wow! This had me captivated from the second I started reading it. You're a really great writer who knows how to describe settings and characters very well. This is the start to a really great book. The only criticisms I have are:
1. some grammar mistakes. you can read it aloud or have someone read it aloud for you and figure out what doesn't sound right, or what's a run-on, etc
2. I'd like to know a bit more about the character doing the cutting. What's his name, for example?
Otherwise, I really enjoyed reading this and I hope you continue :)