I hate writing. And, unfortunately, I love writing, too. I've become tired of plots too many times to count, getting 150 pages into a story only to toss it aside when I lose hope. This has been a constant with me. A freaking constant. Mind you, this is going to be long, but here are a few scrapped manuscripts that I may or may not come back to:
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| Your Kiss, Forever |
Life is fleeting and death is forever — Kelly's just learned this as Scout wills it all away.
Kellyann Fort's been living her entire seventeen years like one, tiny
star in a big constellation — even if she twinkles and fades off,
burning, the constellation will still be there up in the sky to keep the
world bright. Between three overachieving siblings, fleeting friends,
and a boy that she shouldn't be so dangerously strung up on — even a
year after their heated breakup — she's at the end of her line, wishes
at dead balls of light in the night sky feeling more and more useless.
Then a mishap she really shouldn't have run into during an after school party-prowl sends the course of her life a whole other direction, the constellation and the stars in the sky hurled straight to the back burner. Mysterious and as fraud-and-tough-as-plastic Scout Marshall makes everything spin, everything turn into hazes and hues and murky blurs; suddenly all the wrong turns she's made seem so minimal, so worthless.
But there's still debate if it was a wish come true from nightly praying — or a nightmare risen from the dead.
Then a mishap she really shouldn't have run into during an after school party-prowl sends the course of her life a whole other direction, the constellation and the stars in the sky hurled straight to the back burner. Mysterious and as fraud-and-tough-as-plastic Scout Marshall makes everything spin, everything turn into hazes and hues and murky blurs; suddenly all the wrong turns she's made seem so minimal, so worthless.
But there's still debate if it was a wish come true from nightly praying — or a nightmare risen from the dead.
✰✰✰
✰ pre-night sky ✰
❝ It’s really fucking scary,” he’s telling me from the driver’s seat of his convertible, flickering with an unlit cigarette between his long, white fingers. With his glossy, dark hair in stringy knots, playing at protruding collar bones, his dead hazel eyes drift over to pierce my gaze in two. “ – to stand on that edge with that goddamn gun in my hand and know that I’m about to die. That I’m about to die and I’m not even going to stop myself.”
My lips are so dry they’re sticking together; my tongue feels heavy and loose in my mouth. He’s still looking at me, but, with wide, blown pupils, he’s not focusing in on my eyes – so gone in his own head that he can’t even touch the painful breath of reality. “I think I’m crazy. I don’t think I’m . . . that I’m me.” He takes a pause to ponder this. “I feel like . . . like there’s somebody else. Something more than who I am.”
“Then I love both of you.”
“You can’t, Ann. You can’t love the other thing when it’s trying to kill me.” He quickly looks away and stares dead ahead out the windshield, at the steep, sloping ditch that’s taken way too many lives to remain untouched, unruffled. Dropping back against his chair, a burdened sigh escapes him, his thick eyebrows furrowing, and he’s muttering, “How do you know you even love me if you can’t even differentiate between the two of us?” in this low gargle, like bile in the back of throat, as if the words are vomit and, no matter how revolting they are, keeps spewing out. “You have to go.”
And I know I’ve never been certain about many things – even now I’m teetering on two boundaries, two extremes, trying to find somewhat of a balance to appease both my heart and my mind – but I know, I just know, that I’m certain about this. About Scout, about my future, about our future, no matter how many Scouts there are.
Leaning over to kiss his smooth, shaving cream-scented jaw, I mumble, “I’m not going anywhere; I love you. I know it.”
He still remains unsure, but his gaze falters, crumbles. “How can you b –”
Another firm kiss, this time on those raspberry lips, tells him a secret that I can’t seem to gather into something coherent enough to convince him otherwise.
first star ✰
❝ Christ, Kelly — go any slower and we’ll probably miss the apocalypse!” Mom’s screeching in my ear, all the while jabbing the radio with one hand and stuffing thin, salted fries into her mouth with the other. My grip on our family SUV’s steering wheel tightens when she persists in her half-serious teasing with, “What — you wanna miss your sister’s volleyball match or something? Get a move on!”
“Mom,” I start, trying to be as calm as possible, but my voice sounds blatantly clipped and annoyed, like she stepped on my toes and forgot to apologize. “We won’t miss Oli’s match; the car clock is ten minutes ahead. Besides — that Honda is driving crazily in front of me and I don’t want a car crash to happen on such an important day.” I sound sarcastic and a bit rude, I know, especially considering that this is Oliver’s most important middle school volleyball match of the season, but I’d been shaken awake by my teenage brother (yes, teenage brother; he’ll be fifteen this upcoming June) at seven in the morning, him screaming his fucking head off because there was a fake roach in the shower that my other little sister, Penelope, placed there just to make him piss his pants. Needless to say, Hunter is deathly afraid of bugs —and I’m not much of a morning person.
Mom huffs, at an obvious loss of words. “Well,” she says slowly, through a mouthful of fries, “get a move on.” And that’s that. She turns up the radio, drowning the sloppy noises of her chewing and slurping, and sits back to listen to the music and have one of her weekly binges in peace. She’s been stuck on this diet craze for almost two years now, Dad’s mention of her weight gaining spiraling her into the cycle of restrict/exercise/binge/laze around/etc etc. In plain words, she’s been a nightmare, hiding empty pizza boxes and chip bags in her shoe boxes so Dad can’t find it; purchasing all kinds of diet pills and laxatives to hide in her drawers; purchasing all kinds of sportswear that she hardly even uses.
None of it's really been working.
“We’re finally here,” I say while turning into the parking lot of Daisy Road Middle, finding a spot in the visitors section off to the right of the school building. Mom hums her approval through another sip of a chocolate fudge milkshake when I squeeze the car in there, turning the keys in the ignition and pulling it out with a burdened sigh. Tucking a random strand of bed-wavy, dark brown hair from my face, I turn to look at her, nodding at her food. “Are you finished? We can’t eat in there.”
“I know, I know,” Mom mumbles, swallowing, and she drops the fast food bag on the passenger seat floor. She turns to open her door, hand on the handle, as do I, but she suddenly freezes, turning around to look at me. Hope in her dark blue eyes, she asks me, softly, “You won’t tell your father, will you?”
I blink carefully at her. “Tell’em what?”
Mom smiles. “Good. Thanks so much, Kells.” She gives my cheek a pat before slipping out of the car. “You’re a doll.”
After I lock the door, we cross the school campus along with a few other parents, me tucking my gray hoodie down to make sure no embarrassing strips of skin is showing on my lower belly. On any other circumstance, I wouldn’t have cared — middle schoolers are nothing to impress — but Yuri and Farah are here, cheering their own baby sisters on, so I feel I have to be somewhat presentable, given the short amount of time I had to get ready, just incase they’re in Tease Kelly For Her Embarrassing Hoodie From The 7th Grade That’s Too Small On Her mode.
The Daisy Road Middle principle greet us as we walk through the glass doors, and what looks like a gym coach — with her sweats and hair pulled tightly back and out of her face — hands us fliers about other upcoming events and this fundraiser they’re doing by selling chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin cookies after school. I thank her, and we’re pointed in the direction of the gymnasium, although Mom and I have been here so often that we know where everything is without batting an eyelash.
The gym is huge, with bright orange bleachers that lead up and up and up, and the floor is so wide and glossy that their school mascot, an eagle, is practically glistening and ready to spread its wings and fly out through the windows, free at last. The volleyball net is already up and ready, sitting perfectly in the middle of the gym, and on each side are the girls in their team uniforms and their coaches hissing to them as they huddle in close to hear every word. Oliver’s team’s uniforms are orange and gray, the school colors, while our opposing team, Ravens, are clad in purple and white uniforms.
I secretly like the Ravens' uniforms more, but I’ll never say that to super-prideful Oliver or her partner in crime, Mom.
We find a seat high up on our side of the bleachers, Mom waving her hand high above her head and whisper-shouting Oliver’s name until she looks up at us with her huge, blue-green eyes and waves back. I begin to sit, but from the corner of my eye I see Yuri and Farah, pressed close to one another as usual, shooting me looks with their heavily made-up gazes until I look back and return the expression. Yuri winks at me, curling a lock of obsidian hair around her index finger, seductively waving me over with her alluring eyes, and Farah is just smiling innocently, the less playful of the two.
“I’m gonna go sit with Yuri and Farah, Mom,” I turn to say to her, but she’s still too busy grinning like a proud soccer Mom at Oliver and slipping her newly-bought camera out of her Daisy Road Middle sweatshirt pocket, firing it on. “Okay, cool, thanks,” I mutter under my breath, and then get up and shuffle quickly through the bleachers and to my friends.
“Kellyann,” Yuri says coolly when I get there, slipping myself between the two and having them press up on both side of me instantly, like magnets that can’t get enough of one another. She presses her manicured nails into my jeans-covered knee, and her other hand points at a young Japanese girl standing next to Oliver, one of her hands wrapped around my sister’s shoulders. “Looks like our family’s meant to be besties,” her smooth, collected voice says sarcastically, making a cross-eyed face at me.
Farah laughs her snorty laugh at this, attracting attention from nearby visitors (not good attention, though). I give a short shrug — Yuri has this way of making me just as relaxed as she is at any moment she’s in close proximity — and reply, easily, “What can I say — the Fort family’s just a bunch of socialites.”
“Yeah,” Yuri snorts. “The Fort family’s social alright.” She jerks her body suddenly in my direction, bowing her head and looking up at me through her dark, long lashes, shooting daggers right in my face. “You promised you’d go to Grant’s party, and you were a complete no-show. You [promised, Kellyann.”
Suddenly Farah is also shooting daggers right in my face, and I break out in cold sweat, eyes erratic as I look between both of hers. Many thoughts start piling up in my head, but, as quickly as I can, I chose the easiest one that I can reach and blurt, voice quieter than I like, “My Mom had me run errands since she had to take Penny to some sleepover. It was urgent and super late notice — I know.”
Okay, fuck, yeah, this sounds like a blatant lie, and I can just feel that Yuri or Farah is not going to buy it, but suddenly, as the buzzer sounds noisily over our heads and the volleyball teams storm onto the court, her dagger-stare softens and softens until she has this guilty look on her face, like she just ripped a scab off of a touchy subject.
Sitting straight back up into her cold, hard seat, she curls more locks of hair around her fingers and says, as cool as ever, “Oh. Forgot you were the house slave.” Then she pauses, glancing over at my scared, but relieved, face. “But next time tell me; I was waiting for you and you never came.”
“Sorry.” I start to feel a little guilty, a little ashamed and mortified, and the way Yuri just buys into it so simply — since she knows how I take much responsibility for my three, very annoying younger siblings — makes me feel even more guilty and ashamed.
I should tell her the truth. I know I should, but even as close as we are I can’t admit it out loud that going to Grant’s party meant being in the same house, the same building, the same neighborhood as Jackson, the ex who cared more about himself and his needs than mine, obviously. But I was afraid, deathly afraid; I was afraid that, if I looked into those stormy green eyes again, I’d feel myself falling deep for his lies all over again.
I’ve learned from all my past mistakes: Jackson will blatantly lie to me, and I will blatantly accept it as truth, no matter how outrageous his coverups and excuses became. But I was already in too deep at that point; I loved Jackson — I love Jackson — and no matter how shitty he is at the present, I’ll always remember how just captivating and perfect he was in the past. That’s been the only hope that’s carried me along — even a year after our relationship was cut, lost, let go out of a moving train’s window and forever forgotten in the undergrowth of a vast land.
Though, when we still do come across each other, I can see his walk slowing, shoulders swaying, chin up high, and he’ll pass me this fleeting look, this stare that says I know you’ll still come back even if I choke you again[, and I’ll bow my head, bite my glossed bottom lip, and look up at him through my wavy sidebangs, a look that replies, I know. And those green eyes never lose; they never lose in tearing me apart, ripping me to shreds, chewing up the bones and burning the flesh until I’m left in ashes.
It’s all too pathetic to admit. It’s much too pathetic to admit that I’ll endure even the smacks and the punches and the you’re getting too fats and the you’re a stupid piece of shit, y’know thats just if I can say beautiful, endearing, athletic Jackson is mine again. And I’m sure there are plenty of other girls he’s fucked over that would quickly say the same, not even taking a pause as they stumble on their words.
Oliver starts off the game with a perfectly executed set, and, just as the referee blows the whistle, I blink back into reality.
✰ ✰ ✰
Yuri has this star that’s tattooed on her ribs, smack dab in the middle. She told me in middle school that a Chinese tradition is making one thousand paper stars and putting them in a jar. “And when you make all one thousand, you get to grant a wish that’ll definitely come true,” she told me, giddy as she shook the one hundred paper stars in her collection.
She’s never heard of anyone making all one thousand, but whenever I go into her room I see more and more different colored paper stars piling up in her jar. Yuri’s embarrassed about it now — she won’t tell me how many are in there, and she hates talking about it since her mom’s shown some distaste about her practicing Chinese traditions when she won’t even wear a kimono to embrace her Japanese roots. But I know she still believes deeply in it; I’ve wanted to ask her what she’ll wish for when she gets all one thousand, but I’ve never had the right opportunity to do so, given that she won’t mutter a single word in relations to it.
Yuri has the jar tucked underneath her queen-sized bed, hidden behind forgotten, size six shoes and a random array of books that she’d been obsessed with back in her freshman year of high school. It seems like such an insignificant thing, but I’ve always remembered the brief conversation we had about them back in the sixth grade. I’m not much of a believer of the impossible, but there’s still some small hope in me that maybe it is true; that you can make one thousand paper stars and your wishes will be granted.
I can’t make paper stars. I’ve looked up how to do it on the internet and even checked out books in our school library all about paper folding, but my fingers were like a bunch of left feet, fumbling and jerking and twisting in weird directions that I didn’t even know was possible until they started cramping up. Discovering this little tidbit about me was discouraging, admittedly, and I gave up on paper stars for good. Instead, I thought, that there are way more than one thousand stars gleaming at once up in the night sky. So, why not just wish on those? A wish a night and one just has to come true.
And, thus, this stupid practice became a habit. Just before bed, after dinner, homework, and a long, much-needed bath, I’d crouch down at my bedside and rest my elbows on the mattress, pressing the palms of my hands together. Eyes screwed shut, I’d make wishes about anything that presently pertained to how I was feeling. I wish I’ll make an A on that AP Calculus test tomorrow; I wish Mom will stop being a little bitch; I wish Jackson will stop being a little bitch, too, and admit he loves me back. Just simple, everyday things.
I didn’t want anything grand; I just wanted things better. Because being jammed in a packed family with three siblings that suck up all the oxygen and attention gets extremely tiring, and so does a social life, studying, homework, and overall school work. Let this work, please, I thought every night as I laid in bed, tossing the covers over me. Please let this work.
Of course, it never, ever came true — or, really, rarely came true. I failed that AP Calculus test, Mom was still being a little bitch, and Jackson will never admit he loves me back. Though, that stupid little ounce of hope keeps me on my feet, keeps me foolish and wishing and staring up at the stars with wet eyes, saying to any God out there that I just needed this. I did.
I came to terms with the fact that I’ll never get any of my wishes —
oh, and that God is dead.
✰✰✰
Mind you, there may still be some mistakes, since, y'know, I keep clicking on the file, staring at it until my vision blurs, and then get back out. Life is so hard, man. I'll probably be back to this. Just not this year.
