The Garnet Earring - Ch. 2

Chapter 2: Speed Freak

-

I felt like a criminal the next morning, and I looked the part as I ate breakfast with my dad. I was sure that my eyes would screen my nasty dream like a B-movie, so I stared deeply into my cereal bowl, and despite having taken a caustic shower at dawn, I was equally sure that my pores reeked of vomit, sex and midnight cigarettes, so I kept far enough from my dad so that he wouldn't smell the stink of sin. He handled my strange behavior with excruciating awkwardness, aggravating my paranoid suspicion that he knew everything I was hiding and making me twice as antsy to bolt. I'd chosen bran flakes over chocolate puffs in a desperate attempt to salvage my righteousness, and I shoveled the cereal into my mouth quickly enough not to taste it, the tip of my nose nearly dipping in milk as I did. Suddenly I surprised myself by bursting into a messy coughing spasm, having gotten a large spoonful of cereal down my windpipe; this seemed to me like a good opportunity to end breakfast, so I grabbed my backpack and sputtered a frantic goodbye to my dad as I hurtled out the door.

As soon as I was out of the house, I dropped my things and stopped to catch my breath, gasping and spitting out the wretched bran flakes as I cleared them out of my lungs. When I finally took my first full breath of fresh morning air, I felt different. I felt light and powerful, and I realized that the yoke of malaise no longer hung on my shoulders. I straightened up, cracked my neck, stretched my arms, and smiled; I felt like I'd had the best workout of my life, and even felt a mysterious sense of pride. I tossed my keys in the air and caught them as I strode to the truck, and by the time I started the engine, I'd forgotten how to feel bad.

-

I couldn't imagine why I'd been blessed with the feeling of being superhuman that day, but the blessing was hardly worth questioning. I felt like I was being treated to something better than anything the miserable wraiths of Forks would ever know, and it was exhilarating to feel like something more than human sludge as I tracked my regular slime trails throughout the school. As soon as I dared to believe that I'd truly become an invincible demigoddess, I arrived at the door to the biology lab and instantly felt a searing sense of dread. Inside, the teacher flipped the light switch, and the soulless buzz of the white lights illustrated my feelings like a tattoo gun on the flesh of my brain: my nightmare had taken place here. I turned to bolt from the doorway and immediately collided with someone, who wordlessly shoved past me into the lab. The tardy bell rang and people started to stampede into the lab, so I let myself be swept into the herd and tried not to hyperventilate.

After a few claustrophobic moments in transit, I was pushed into my chair and instantly jumped back up. I looked around wildly and saw nothing beyond the tedium of the class setting. I warily sat back down and felt it again as soon as I settled: a freakish, strong vibration pulsing up through my chair. I sat up just slightly and looked around again; everyone looked just as bored and boring as usual, so I was probably the only one experiencing this school-day turbulence. As soon as I was able to convince myself that I was the only one in the room who wasn't crazy, I slowly breached the inch of air that separated me and the chair, and savored the feeling that awaited me. My blood danced in my veins as the deep bass surged through my flesh, tickling the nerves up my legs, and between them, too - I quickly remembered to pay attention to my face, and thankfully was able to tame my ecstatic expression before anyone noticed me, but was powerless against the fearsome force of my blushing. When the teacher began to lecture, I managed to keep my lucky pleasure in the background for most of the period, until, with one fateful turn of the head, my luck turned as well.

In retrospect the boy that sat in the desk ahead and to my left was barely extraordinary; he looked like little more than a standard addict, anxious and pallid with deep facial hollows, but when he turned around and caught my eye, I lost control of myself. The vibration I'd felt earlier roared out of idle and rocked me like thunder, and I gripped the desk fiercely, my blood speeding through my body so powerfully that it might have burst through my skin. I saw nothing, I thought nothing; I didn’t even know if I was still alive until I heard an impassioned gasp cut through the air. In the hush that followed, I prayed desperately that I had imagined the sound until I opened my eyes and realized with horror that I had earned the attention of the entire classroom. The teacher had paused in the middle of scratching something on the chalkboard and slowly turned around, addressing my presence with the vicious authority of an executioner.

“Miss Swan,” he enunciated scathingly, savoring the mounting tension with a deliberate silence. “I don’t know what you got away with at school in Phoenix," he said as he slowly approached my desk, "but in my classroom I demand your undivided attention…” I sunk in my seat and flushed a painful shade of vermilion as a few snickers sounded throughout the room.

“…However,” he continued with relish, planting his hands on my desk and looking me in the eye, “I’m delighted that you’re enjoying my lecture so much.”

Then the classroom exploded with noise like a chorus of hyenas, and I couldn't tell how long everyone insisted upon laughing at my expense, because I immediately started picking furiously at a scab on my hand and watched my blood ooze out of my body until the bell rang. When I got up to leave, the boy who'd started it all was nowhere to be seen.

-

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

In between classes, I’d found the boy in the hall and managed to corner him, employing perhaps a bit more muscle than was reasonable. I held him by his sweatshirt and stared him down, hoping to intimidate some sort of response out of him, but after one second too much of contact with his infuriatingly innocent-looking eyes, I shivered with rage and physical pleasure, and I looked away quickly.

“You know what I’m talking about," I growled. "You humiliated me, and you'd better not dare to do it again.” He didn't respond, and I sneaked a look back at his face, which wore the same terrorized expression that made me so angry. I pushed him against the lockers and got my nose right up against his, although I made sure to keep a hair's breadth of space between our skin, fearing the consequences of our touch.

“I'm going to live a normal life here, do you understand me?” I hissed, and he recoiled, looking so uncomfortable as to be physically ill. I mercilessly probed his fearful features for answers until the bell rang; I fumed, suddenly feeling unbearably self-conscious.

“I’m not crazy!” I loudly insisted in vain, pushing him away. He bolted and was instantaneously out of sight, and anyone who had been near followed suit before I could notice them. As soon as he was gone, I slumped against the lockers, feeling as though a powerful amphetamine had just been drained from my bloodstream.

Once I was capable of paying attention to the more mundane details of my life, I noticed a lingering taste in my mouth. I held my hand up to my mouth, exhaled and recoiled with the same revulsion that the boy had shown. The cafeteria hummus had been especially potent today, and I reeked of garlic; maybe I was repelling the citizens of Forks with bad breath.

The Garnet Earring - Ch. 1

[There's a long story about how I feel about vampires in pop culture, and there's a whole lot of apology I could spout to try to save face here, but here's the long story short: I'm trying to write Twilight the way I would have liked to read it.]

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Chapter 1: Needles and Pins

-

I’m cold-blooded, like a snake, and when I left fiery Phoenix for the soggy shade of the Northwest I was crippled. The muscles of my heart strained to pump my sludgy blood, and I could barely wake my numb flesh from its sleep. A strange mildew started to grow in the shadows of my spirit, never having had the chance in the Arizonan sunshine, and as foreign as it seemed, I knew that it had always been a part of me.

In the world of my estranged father, I'd been living dead for seventeen years, distant and foreign to him as the afterlife; now that I was with him in the flesh, my company was as spiritless as that of a zombie. I can hardly believe that I was alive, remembering how I spent my days fading away amongst all the other sun-starved creatures of Forks, Washington.

-

Two weeks after my birthday, my mother and I parted at Sky Harbor International Airport. Neither of us could manage tears, so we exchanged gifts; my gift to her was a scarf that I'd knitted with my trademark graceless verve, and her gift to me was a pair of garnet earrings. I'd never cared for jewelry and must have looked confused when I opened the tiny velvet box, because she quickly explained that the garnet was my birthstone.

"They're beautiful," I said, trying not to seem disenchanted by the plainness of the small red stones.

"But... Mom," I continued confusedly, "my ears aren't pierced." The appeal of pierced ears had escaped me throughout my adolescence, and I had refused many offers to have the procedure done, including several, oddly, from my mother herself.

"Someday they will be," she replied with a quick, nervous smile. We hugged, and then she left to tour the nation with the minor-league baseball player she had just married. My flight was unexpectedly delayed, and I waited alone at the gate for hours, feeling like the only girl in the world who’d never known her own birthstone.

-

Forks was bleak. The perennial gloom brought everyone closer, like they were trying to keep warm, but I was irrelevant to their community. So I lived aimlessly, and my days blended into a gray fog as I put them behind me, punctuated mostly by the monstrous rumble of the ancient truck my dad had bestowed upon me. He was the clueless type to feel that a good gift for a teenage girl would be a titanic truck, and I was the type to feel clueless at the wheel of such a truck, but he'd put a lot of work into restoring it to its murderous glory and I appreciated the gesture. After a while I even appreciated the incredible din it produced and its clownish orange paint job; at least its sensual overkill disrupted the undead anesthesia of my day-to-day life. When I ran out of excuses to haul the beast back and forth over the short town roads, I sank into a hopeless stupor, impervious to the attention of others and oblivious to pleasure.

After leaving Phoenix, I forgot how to feel until I drew blood for the first time, having gotten a papercut while flipping through my biology textbook. I relished the stinging of the little cut, and the few droplets of blood that it yielded were like a spotlight in the darkness of my day. Fresh bruises fascinated me similarly; I studied my blood as it bloomed darkly beneath my skin, and I'd poke the bruise when I was bored until its color cleared and it no longer registered pain. Every day my blood sank further away from my skin, and I was compelled to bring it back to the surface, falling privy to cuts and bruises that stood out gracefully on the canvas of my pallor. In between accidents, I'd pop zits, pick scabs, tweeze hairs - anything that paid off with a spot of blood or morsel of pain.

On the morning of one monotonous Monday, I cut my nails short enough so I could feel the ache of the raw flesh underneath, and I rapped them against the steering wheel as I drove home from school that afternoon, contemplating tedium. I couldn't recognize any sort of pleasure in my life, but just as I was about to turn onto my dad's street, I felt strangely as if I was forgetting something, so I kept driving to think about it.

Why would I feel this way? I mentally cycled through my daily routine, trying to discover where this slim ray of hope was shining from; the longer I thought about it, the clearer a rather disturbing notion became in my mind, and I focused on ignoring it until I abruptly registered that I was a half-second away from running a red light. I smashed the brake pedal, and the truck retaliated with a hideous noise of complaint, inelegantly lurching to a stop a few yards into the empty intersection.

As I recovered from the shock of the red light, I recognized that the notion was entirely true: for some perverse reason, I was enjoying my biology class. My pulse raced, and I felt vaguely nauseous. The concept of having fun in the class was unfathomable: I'd already learned all the material, I didn't have any friends, and there was no one I found attractive enough to ogle for the whole period. I started to think that I was actually psychotic, or maybe that I had a brain tumor.

When the light turned green, I drove straight to the park near my dad's house, parked, and headed to the rusty old jungle gym with one of my dad's Bics and a half-pack of Marlboros that I'd found in the bedside table of the guest room where I slept. By the time that dusk descended, all but two of the cigarettes were gone, and I'd decided that I probably just had a brain tumor.

-

When I dreamed that night I felt darkness on my skin. It hovered curiously, and then suddenly flooded into my pores; it possessed me, stretching my spirit, and I had a feeling so wonderful that my muscles screamed, my bones shivered, my skin froze.

Then it was gone, I was hollow, and there was a flash of light. Before I could be sure I had seen the light, the darkness was back, pumping through each of my nerves, swallowing my vision, filling my lungs - I was insane, I was in love, I was superhuman. In and out, through and through, it drove through me and I streaked between heaven and hell, I saw stars, my soul crashed into my body, my pores overflowed with feeling, my core was electrified, it was impossible, I couldn’t take it, my heart was going to explode - but I wanted it, I wanted as much of it as I could have, I gorged myself, I feasted, I gasped for air - and I was close, close to the end, close to the answer, so close I trembled and tasted it, close close close I hung on to the feeling – but I was breaking, so close I’d let it kill me, close close close I was so so close, this was it, the end, I split in half, I wept and laughed, I was God – and everything stopped, and when I blinked I was dead –

- then there was nothing – no!

- I was emptied, abandoned, brittle, sore, damn it, damn it, damn it –

- there was blinding light; I felt like it would shrivel me, I thought I was in a dream, but the aura faded and I saw bright fluorescent lights. I knew my eyes were open, and reluctantly I breathed.

Then I felt cold, strangely, from the inside out. I was being watched, suddenly I knew it, and I sat up – my stomach heaved and I almost fell back down.

Fetal pigs. Everywhere, little dead pigs. Cut open, dark entrails everywhere, all over the tables around me. Countless more in jars of yellow fluid, stacked on top of each other. My throat flooded with bile, and I swayed. When my hands went to my stomach I felt something slimy and squishy, something was wrong – I looked down and saw a long incision down my torso, my skin curling on either side, I was touching my organs, the stink of formaldehyde filled my nose, I was going to scream –

Then it was dark again and the scream stuck in my throat - I panted, my heart beat wildly, my eyes hurt from being open so wide. I slung my body over the side of the bed and threw up before I knew what was happening. Blankly I wiped my slack lips on my sleeve, then jolted with panic. I feverishly threw off my sheets and ripped my shirt off of my stomach, clutched it frantically, and nearly fainted with relief when I felt solid flesh.

As my pulse staggered back to a normal pace, I noticed that I was shivering rather violently, and subsequently noticed that my body and bedsheets were drenched in cold sweat. When I saw my legs, I was surprised to see that they were contorted, wrapped around each other so tightly that they were numb when I pried them apart. They had apparently squeezed the blood out of my right hand; I wiggled my fingers, blushed and grinned uncontrollably.

Tonight, I’d had a nightmare. I realized that also, for the first time, I’d had a sex dream.