Monday, January 7, 2008

THE CATALYST, CHAPT 14: 3 KEYS AND A BELL
Cassie gave me another Cameo in her story. X3 EVERYBODY GO READ IT!!! URL: http://www.myotaku.com/redmoonchick
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(The following is an excerpt from http://www.myotaku.com/x_shadowme_x)

Title: Life is a bitch, then you die,
Post: Hey...Tis staying home from school today. It's closed. I guess they needed to give the police some more time to investigate the crime scene or something. Ya see, a lot happened on Monday. And none of it was exactly the epitome of fun. First off, my school was attacked by some gang of people in black leather robes/dresses with guns and black halos.
Second, somebody I know died in the attack.
Third, I was sold out by my best friend to the reincarnation of Freddie Mercury.
Fourth, my self-esteem was torn down by the very same Freddie Mercury incarnation.
Fifth, I met my "guardian angel."
Sixth, I was questioned by the police.
And seventh, history is repeating itself in the worst way possible. (Don't ask.)
In conclusion: Life sucks. Here's a poem about it. (Or, at least, it was supposed to be about it until I completely forgot how to be depressing for about 10 minutes.) Enjoy.

Exposed and exploited.
I can’t take one more “what if.”
They bled me of every last drop of my creativity, so you’ll have to excuse me if I’m more honest than usual.
I can’t lie.
But God knows I can exaggerate.
I can’t create.
But that never stopped me from taking all the credit. (I swear to Him, it’s always either His words or His doing.)
The only reason I go this fast is because the only possible way I could crash is if I run out of momentum before the jobs done.
The point is, there is none.
The point is, I’ve lost mine, and my grip on my edge is starting to slip.
So, here, let me just feign my way through one last refrain:
Virginia Woolf is still impersonating Mona Lisa. Jimi Hendrix still can’t quite find the right chord to get through to your core. And even though she tries to fake another “happily ever after,” Calypso is still the worst liar I know.
So, everybody, turn up the volume and turn on the subtitles and pretend that you can understand every word I’m slurring.
Because God knows I can’t.
Date: April 7th, 2009
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Stare. Stare. Stare. Stare.
It's been about 5 minutes since I wrote and posted that entry. And, yet, here I am, still
staring blankly at it, looking for the answers hidden somewhere in my questions. Like, for example, how the hell am I supposed to break it to Cassie that her best friend was murdered yesterday?
I mean, what went on between her and Danny wasn't just some stupid, meaningless, shallow teenage crush like mine. They were BEST FRIENDS! And Cassie was in love with him! What right do I, some stupid fan-girl of Danny's, have to inform Cassie of his death, to console her, to comfort her and tell her I understand? I don't understand. How could I? I barely knew Danny. To me, he was just some angst-filled, gorgeous, charismatic guitar-player in Michigan who always got the best of and brought out the worst in me. An obsession that shouldn't have existed.
So who the hell am I to play the part of the bereaved friend? It would be complete blasphemy.
However, I obviously can't just hide it from Cassie either. After all, if me being the informer is blasphemy than being the secret-keeping is utter sacrilege.
And so, here I am, stuck staring into the seizure-inducingly unchanging blue field on the computer screen, like a captivated 6-year-old questioning a Magic 8 Ball about whether or not she should fling her spoonful of mashed potatoes unto the wall.
But there's nothing. Nothing on the pages and nothing inside me.
I mean, I know after talking about how hard and guilt-inducing it's going to be to tell Cassie, it sounds weird to say I'm not in the least bit stressed out or anxious, but I'm not. I feel as if I'm stuck on autopilot.
Numb. Empty. Drained. Defeated. Automatic. Aimless.
If my dad was here, this would probably be right when he'd ask me "Belinda...? What'cha thinking about?" And I would softly reply: "Nothing, dad."
He probably always thinks I'm lying when I tell him this. He always seems to think that when I get all quiet and distant like this, I've got something on my mind; and that if I don't tell him about it, it's either because it's too complicated to explain or because I simply can't talk about it, as if I’m some troubled, ingenious child prodigy who never stops thinking.
But I'm just telling the truth. Right now, my thoughts are as scarce as my words. As scarce as my words and as scarce as my feelings. Probably because I got almost all the hysteria--and energy necessary to be hysterical-- out of my system last night.
It was absolute Bedlam.
I couldn't get to sleep until 3. And what sleep I did manage to get was almost as troubled as I was. I kept having night-mares and flash-backs about Kami and Danny and Nikki. But mostly about Danny and Nikki. Over and over again, the image of the fore-boding "1" twirling morbidly around Nikki's pulseless wrist and the more eminent "2"'s infesting Danny's ghastly pale body kept haunting my mind. "1" and "2." One and two. Nik-KEY and Danny KEY-th. "Two keys..." I murmured softly, reaching under my shirt to trace the words carved just below my chest. Nature had yet to completely sow the wound up with skin and so the bandages had yet to be removed. But it didn't matter. I already knew perfectly well what label I'd been marked with: ATTENTION WHORE. "One who prostitutes themselves endlessly and limitlessly for attention." An over-starry-eyed, ultra petty dreamer too obnoxious to be ignored.
No remorse, no empathy. Just solid, unshakeable ambition. Yeah, you know the type. You've seen them. They're the ones who "try too hard." The ones who shamelessly cut down anyone and everyone who get in the way of them hogging the spot-light.
And coincidently enough, right as those thoughts of working tirelessly for the limelight and felling any threat to me getting all the attention pass through my brain, it dawns on me that all day I've smelled like sweat and blood. (Of course, this is only because I'm not allowed to shower until the wound heals a little more, but due to my over-active imagination, I can't help feeling that the blood is somehow connected to that of my imaginary victims and the sweat somehow
related to my nonexistent tireless attempts at non-stop attention)
"So that's what I get for not believing you, eh, Ryu?" I said in response to this.
But Ryu remained silent. Which was odd, considering that she used to proclaim so proud and publicly that she was psychic that you'd think she'd at
least be able to send a telepathic response or something.
But I sappose she was more of a prophet than a telepath. Not a very good prophet, mind you, seeing as her prediction about
me was the only one to come true so far. Well, half-way true, anyway.
"You are the Bell," she had rasped in a voice that didn't belong to her, as she peered at me through eerie green, pupa-less eyes. If not for the whole "I'm channeling a message to you from the Other Side" effect of those details, I would've thought that this was just a stupid word-pun. You know, because my names BELL-inda, hence me being the "Bell." But evidently it was a lot more than that. "The Bell will be stolen when all three Keys are in the Locke," she continued, in the same stolen voice, tightening her grip on my wrist so her message was sure to be delivered. "The problem child and the child prodigy will be reunited. Loveless and Beloved will be torn apart. Scars will be revealed and guts will be spilled. And the angel you'll see on the 2nd day of the 16th year." And, oddly enough, the very next day, I discovered that there existed a cemetery known as Locke Memorial Gardens up in northern Maryland. And guess who's buried there: Nikki Burgham. (Meaning, Danny will be too, probably.) So, if this is a legitimate prophecy--and I'm assuming it is, because most of it either already has or is happening--then only one more person with a "ki/Key/Kee" in their name has to die and be buried in Locke cemetery before I'm "stolen." Hence the numbers all over Danny's corpse and Nikki's wrist. So, yeah, now you know about the 3 Keys and the Bell. Mystery solved.
Or, at lest, THAT mystery is. The question is, which "ki/key/kee" is the third Key?
And this is a question that's harder to answer than you think, because half the people I know have a "key" sound in their name.
For example, Jon SpadorsKI, the guy who lives in the house next to mine. Now, I haven't been close to Jon since I was about 6 or 7, but he's one of the most popular guys at my school, so it would still suck if he died. (Not to mention, he's one of the very few decent-looking guys there who doesn't think I'm a complete psychopath.) Of course, then again, Jon's entire family has the last name Spadorski, so for all I know, it could be anyone of his relatives.
And if that's the case, then that's just too wide of a range. Meaning, it's probably not going to be
anyone with a Ki/kee/key in their LAST name.
Which brings us to our second suspect. KEEley Scott, the positively Hell-spawned bitch who rides my bus. She's the drop-dead gorgeous patron saint of pheromones to all the boys and the manipulating demon of torment to all the girls. Now, I suspect most of the boys already know she's the spawn of Satin, but all of them except 2 are in denial. I suppose to them she's just too much of a goddess to be thought of as a demon. Which I can't really blame them for, considering I'm the same way with my Ali's. But, anyway, to be honest, I wouldn't be so devastated if she died. Oh, don't get me wrong, it's not like I'm her favorite victim or anything. Since most of the guys either hate me or are scared to death of me, she doesn't really waste her time attempting to play the role of the suicide note waiting to be written for a complete anti-threat to her popularity like me. But I have seen what she's done to other girls, many of my friends among them, and, well, put it this way: her funeral would most likely be as filled with bereavement as that of Paris Hilton's New Years party. But I’m not going to dwell on her anymore, otherwise the local rumor mill might have another excuse to start up those nasty bulimia lies about me again.
That said, here's the next suspect: Danniko "That Guy" Bennett. Well, okay, fine, so That Guy doesn't ACTUALLY have a "ki/kee/kei" anywhere in his name, I just wanted to have a chance to
write about him, okay?! Okay.
Remember in the paragraph about Keeley, how I said most of the guys at school either are terrified or are filled with disdain by me? Yeah, well, That Guy is the reason. Not the ENTIRE reason, mind you, but part of it. Most of it's actually my fault, though. You see, back in 9th grade, I had somewhat of a "stalker crush" on him and I wasn't all that good at hiding it. No, actually that's the understatement of the decade. Scratch that: I completely failed MISERABLY at any attempt at discretion I ever even bothered with. (In fact, my exact words upon seeing him the first day of school: “Um…. C-c-ca-can I touch your hair??? PLEASE?”) Hence me being labeled as "the creepiest, weirdest, most-likely-to-become-an-ax-murderer bitch you will ever avoid." However, luckily for me, it was a pretty over-populated school, so not everyone I met knew what had transpired between me and That Guy. Oh, don't get me wrong, most of the people on my bus, who had witnessed demonstrations of my semi-obsession, semi-infatuation themselves, occasionally warned their friends that I was "a rabid, possibly psychotic, ultra creepy basket-case" to be avoided at all costs, but for the most part my social half-life continued on unhindered. The only other side-effect of these events that I still sort of regret is that to this day any hope I had of a pleasant relationship with That Guy remains utterly obliterated. He still hates me.
But, anyway, back to the actual Key-suspects...
The actual third suspect is KEYra Miller, the girl who sits next to me in Biology class.
I've known since my fresh men year (I’m a junior now) and she's one of the nicest people I've met, so needless to say I'd be devastated if she died. Although, due to her being so nice and out-going, if her life was ever threatened by other people, as it was with Nikki and Danny, Keyra's attacker would probably be thoroughly massacred by an army of extremely protective friends before even coming close to so much as farting in her general direction. And Keyra is almost always surrounded by a cluster of friends, or at least fond acquaintances, so it's not likely she would be ambushed in any dark allies. And since all the other Keys died by murder, the third one probably won't die of natural causes or an unfortunate accident either. Meaning, Keyra‘s just too well-protected to be the third key. (Unless she runs into our super violent former Gym teacher…)
"Hm...." I hummed, as the silence I'd been radiating all day actually began to mean something.
"Ding," greeted a tiny window that barely tock up a 4th of my computer screen, as it popped up into existence. It was an IM. My stomach nearly burst open with contaminated love and betrayed fellowship when I saw the username. "VashouDashi_Yanki." Cori-la.

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