Kill the Cherry Page 12
Holly stood over her best friend Kirsten’s mutilated body. Her white ringer tank top now permanent red, as was her expensive fifty-dollar bra behind it, the one she got from Kohl’s. God, she always hated Kohl’s.
What she didn’t hate, however, was the feeling of energy and openness and the awareness of the world around her and how she somehow felt finally recognized her for the first time in her life. For the first time since she had been born, she was finally here!
I am here and I EXSIST!
Holly threw her head back and screamed, “Yeeeaaaaahhh!”
She looked back down at the corpse, breathing in delicious wisps of cool, refreshing air through a toothy grin. For some reason, this had made more sense than killing Spencer. How? She either had not the foggiest or just did not want to venture into that territory for reasons she feared to analyze.
There she was…there it was. Her very first, and it was the most overwhelming and most captivating rush of adrenaline and real feeling that charged through her bones like…like…like a drug. Who needed illegal contraband to torture yourself with a prolonging death with a needle or a razor or a pipe when there was this? Turn those tools away from your own body and use them on others! It's so easy!
Everyone should be doing this!
Holly chuckled at the thought as she continued to gaze lazily and dreamily down at Kirsten’s lifeless pupils—those enhancing ice-blue retinas now dead, paling and reddened with her own blood. It was supposed to be wrong, but to her it just looked too beautiful for words. She knew her like a sister—sometimes a conniving, controlling, manipulative bitch of an older-sister—and everywhere she went, regardless whether it was public or private, she always avoided doing anything that she felt made her look unattractive. When walked, she walked with an ass-shake, doubled the bounce whenever cute guys were around; when she sat, she made sure those bare appendages of hers were crossed and with the top one facing either another group of boys or another competitive skank with a mini-skirt trying to be the top eye-candy in the joint, relaying a message like “Yeah, look at that, eighteen years of gymnastics, bitch.” She made sure her cleavage was properly displayed, she made sure there hadn’t been a speck of food anywhere on her shirt or if it was, she’d pick another but then that wouldn’t have matched the skirt she was wearing, so she would have to pick something else for below.
Now look at her. A side that Holly had never seen before. Her limbs were splayed in every direction, she almost looked like she was impersonating a human-swastika. Her hair was in bloody tatters…and of course the face she made when it happened. That was exactly what Holly had been looking for, just like Spencer was. The face that is only seen when it happens; the face that nobody can even come close to acting out unless it is actually happening to them. And to have gotten it from a person of higher level…Holly was now the merciless galactic goddess and she had the entire universe under her control.
Holly jumped and nearly cried out at the sudden noise that emerged out of nowhere just underneath her, and along with it had been a nudge in the floorboards right under her bare feet. She looked down and saw the knife that she’d been holding stuck down into the ground. She didn’t even feel it slip out of her grip. That was unusual. The handle was the heavier part, shouldn’t that have landed first?
This night had been an evening of preternatural events—unplanned, unexplained, but in the end, everything mystically somehow fell into place…so to speak.
Holly took one last deep breath and stepped away from the bloody carnage and straight for the door, opening it and walking out into the hallway, leaning against the doorframe. She looked a few feet down and saw Spencer as he was just coming out from his room. He looked a bloody-terrible mess, his T-shirt and jeans splotched and stained in dark, heavy blood. They made eye contact. She smirked...and then smiled; a smile that wasn’t just a smile but one that had been just like his—a smile with real feeling. Not the same repetitious friendly smile given to him all night, but one with actual life, actual happiness.
“Was it as good for you as it was for me?” Spencer said.
Holly kept her grin intact, leaned her head forward so that a lock of her hair, dampened and straightened out from the sweat and blood, hung over her half-shadowed sinister look and answered him.
“Better.”