The clouds hung low over the silent neighborhood, threatening the hard earth of rain and snow. But the gloomy downpour hadn't come yet, thus the prestorm wind continued to blow. One house seemed the gloomiest out of them all, the shutters locked tight and the doors barricaded in.
It almost looked as if no one was in the house, what with the lack of lights surrounding it. But, that is far from the truth. One person still lurked inside the small building, as sad and depressed as the weather outside.
Angel Stein, 17 year old Varsity fearleader for Monster High High School, sat alone in her bedroom, no light except for a small, pink candle, placed in a dish, which lie atop a small tarp she had uncovered in the basement. The bright fragrance emitted from the candle filled the room in an invisible fog, attempting and failing to hide the fears and depressions of Angel's life.
She felt like a heavy blanket of her doubts and worries were pressing onto her very well being and self confidence, causing them both to fall flat and nearly inexistent. She felt dry, no longer having the will to go on with her life. All the events of the night before the previous night were swirling around her mind, like an endless merry-go-round of fear. Each image, one after the other, passed in front of her eyes as quickly as they had happened in real life. She gasped at one particular image of two people, one of them being herself. She noticed the look of severe pain on her perfect face, and shut her eyes tight, trying to block that image out of her confused mind. Her brain sensed her reaction to this particular photo, and kept it coming on a repeat, appearing more and more vivid than the last. She snapped her eyes open, the flare of the small candle popping violently as though a huge wave of energy flew through the room at that very moment. Then, everything fell silent. She couldn't hear herself breathing, thinking, or even her heart beating. Though she was doing all those things, she could not sense the fact that they were there.
Suddenly, she felt like she was drifting off. Truthfully, she felt exhausted, having not slept for two days. She felt her mind shutting down slowly, and she decided not to fight it, letting her eyelids flutter closed.
What felt like literally seconds after she had fallen unconscious, she had been jolted awake by an alarmingly loud noise blaring from her backpack. She sighed, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. She pulled her bag toward her, surprised at how much heavier it seemed, and began searching for the small, familiar item making the unbearably loud ringing noise. Her iCoffin.
Reading the name on the screen, she sighed softly and pressed talk.
"…Hullo…?" her voice sounded monotoned and lifeless. She hated it.
"HEY!" shouted a familiar voice on the other end, causing Angel to jerk the phone away from her ear. She pulled the phone back to her ear, and waited patiently for her friend to finish shrieking.
"Omigawd, Angel! You missed, like, the best practice evaaaar!" exclaimed Cleo De Nile, captain of the Varsity fear squad and Angel's best friend.
"Yeah, sorry. I was, um…" at that moment, Angel didn't really know what she had been doing the past 12 hours. Moping? Sulking? She didn't like either answer very much. She was somewhat interrupted by her Egyptian friend on the other end, who cleared her throat softly.
"Angel… What's wrong? After the party, you just kinda…disappeared. You didn't answer anybodies texts yesterday, and you didn't come to school or practice today. What's up?"
Angel sighed, long and slow. "Well…" she wasn't quite sure how to tell her best friend in the whole world this classified information, or a better question was, should she even tell her altogether? Before she could choose a set answer, she felt her mouth move and contort to form words she hadn't thought through her head yet. When they left her mouth and were released out in the open was when she actually heard them.
"?" she heard her voice burst out rapidly, making it near impossible to figure out what the fuck she had just said. It took both her and Cleo by surprise, and they both sat in silence for a moment, before Cleo cleared her throat again.
"Um…what?" said Cleo, utterly confused. Angel took a deep breath and tried again.
"Do you remember when Holt told me he wanted to take me somewhere where we could be 'alone'?" she said, dragging the statement out so that it was more vivid. She heard a quick gasp on the other end, and a soft scratching noise. Cleo must've nearly dropped her own iCoffin, thus creating the scratching noise from her long, carefully manicured nails.
"Oh shit. You did NOT," whispered Cleo, jumping to conclusions. Angel sighed exasperatedly; she should've known Cleo would guess the answer, and worse, guess right.
"…Y-yeah, we did. If… that… if that is what you're thinking about…" Angel whispered. She didn't know why she was quaking with fear, or why she was whispering, or why she wasn't crying. All she knew was she had to tell someone, and fast.
"So… what happened? Did you… like it?" Cleo stammered. Angel wasn't quite sure why she too sounded scared.
"Uh, yeah. It was… it was good…" she said, letting out a stuttered breath of air. She could feel rather than hear Cleo falter, gripping the phone tighter than before.
"Is there…something else…?" the princess asked, holding the phone tightly with both hands, anxious for her friend's reply.
Angel let out what sound like a soft gasp combined with a loud sigh. What a strange sound it was, it alarmed Angel, and she placed a trembling hand beneath her rapidly beating collarbone.
"Y-yesterday, I f-felt weird. I kept getting headaches. It was as if my body was trying to tell me something. Like, as if there was something horribly wrong with my body, you know?" she whispered frantically into the phone. Cleo nodded, even though Angel couldn't see it. Angel continued.
"So I went to the bathroom and noticed my period hadn't started. I began to freak out. So I ran downstairs, and checked the calendar. It said I was supposed to start two days ago, well, three now. I didn't know what was going on."
Of course, as Cleo listened, she began jumping conclusions again. Was she…? A thousand scenarios ran through the girls mind as she listened to her friend talk. She decided to wait until her friend had enough courage to tell it to her herself, and stay quiet until she finished.
"So, I went into my mom's drawer, and found a box of…" for some reason, Angel now felt like it was difficult to find the right words to continue. But she couldn't. She was too afraid of being judged.
Cleo swallowed. "A box of…what?"
Angel paused, then cleared her throat, and sighed. "A box of…pregnancy tests…"
Cleo didn't say anything. She wanted her friend to continue, even if she already knew what she was going to say.
"So, um… I took one…and…a-and…" her breath began to quicken, and she felt a soft stinging behind her oddly colored eyes.
"Y-Yeah…?" urged Cleo, wanting her to finish, not for her sake, but for Angel's.
There was a moment of silence. Then, a wall broke. A twig snapped. A glass shattered. Everything came flooding out of Angel, all at once, as though a dam burst, the water flooding through the cracks by the kiloliters, or more. Her eyelids filled with salty liquid and, not able to hold any more, gave way, spilling the hot liquid down her cheeks and into the stitching on her right cheekbone. She felt the string come loose, the skin breaking apart from each other, leaving a gaping hole in her face. She let out gasping sobs in quick succession, one after the other, like bullets fired from a machine gun.
"I-i-it… w-w-w-…was… p-…p-…positive! It was p-positive, Cleo! POSITIVE!" she screamed into the shaking speaker as her endless tears dripped down her face and off her chin, onto the floor. One particularly large teardrop leapt off her face, and arched toward the floor. It landed square on the wick of the candle, snuffing the flame, leaving the room in pitch darkness. She stopped crying, as a horrible realization washed over her as calmly as a tsunami hitting the shores of a small town.
"Oh my god… what will my parents think? What will my sisters think? What will Holt think? I-"
"Whoa, whoa, WHOA. You haven't even told the dad yet?" exclaimed Cleo. A sudden, heavy wave of guilt blanketed Angel as she cowered from the phone selfishly.
"N-no…" she whimpered.
"Dude. You gottatell hi-!"
"But, he will dump me! Or hit me! Or…something!" interrupted Angel, sobbing again.
"If he really loves you, he won't leave." comforted Cleo. She leaned against the door of the stall, afraid of someone coming in and overhearing their conversation. Though someone listening from the outside won't be able to hear the person on the other end, they can pretty much have a general idea of what they're talking about by listening to the one actually in the same room. The tiled wall opposite her rumbled slightly as a toilet flushed in the men's restroom.
Angel paused. Cleo could tell she was thinking of something to contradict her. She waited for the comeback patiently, tapping a nail against the sticky lock of the stall door.
"B-but…h-h-he will leave… I j-just know it…" Angel stuttered quietly. She let out a rush of sobs before falling quiet again.
Cleo stood there, speechless. She had only ever seen her best friend strutting around, brimming with confidence. Her and Cleo loved to outright tell people what they were doing wrong, how to wear certain things, the sort. She had never, in all the years she's known Angel Stein, ever seen let alone heard her completely break down in fear or angst. She listened to her lifelong friend sniffle on the other end for a few minutes, for once in her life unsure of what to say next. She never once had to comfort someone, except maybe her sister a few times for reasons to long to tell in a short story.
"I don't know what to do, Cleo. I really don't," whispered Angel, finally speaking the truth. Cleo closed her eyes and sighed slowly, relieved that it had finally showed through her wall of worry.
"I do, ghoul friend. You need to hang up on me and call Holt and tell him. No, wait, better yet… call him and tell him to meet you somewhere so you can tell him in person." commanded Cleo, eyebrows furrowing.
Angel swallowed. "You sure that'll work? I mean, what if he-"
"He's NOT gonna leave you, Angel. He loves you too much."
"But-!"
"TRUST me on this one. Please."
Angel's eyes widened. Cleo had never said the word please, ever.
"…Fine. I'll do it."
"Good ghoul. Gotta go, ttyl, kk?" said Cleo, and without waiting for an answer, hung up. Angel sat there, utterly flabbergasted by what had just happened. She glanced at the screen of her iCoffin, showing that the call with Cleo had ended 15 seconds ago. The call lasted about 15 minutes. Did it really take that long? She flipped her phone facedown on the rug, still holding onto it, not sure of what to do next.
XxXxXxX
The front door slammed closed as a gust of wind and rain blew into the house, lowering the temperature a few degrees for a few seconds. A black messenger bag flew across the room and collided with a loud thud against the couch cushion. A pair of plaid heels followed the backpack, but landed on the floor instead, rolling and tumbling before stopping in a wet and muddy puddle at the foot of the couch.
Ice huffed loudly, sopping wet and incredibly annoyed. She swept her ruined hair out of her face and jolted again, feeling herself shorting out. She hated when that happened, it only made her angrier than she already was, and it almost always ended up with some fried roots, and not just her own.
"Stupid goddamn weatherman, predicting the wrong weather…" she hissed as she marched angrily upstairs. "And where was Angel today? I'll bet my best bolts she stayed home, for reasons I obviouslydo NOT care about… Well anyway, I'm gonna give her a piece of my undead mind…"
She turned the corner at the top of the staircase and walked down a hallway that led to the perpetrator's room. She stopped right at the door and raised a green fist, which was about to collide with the door with enough force to know out a rhinoceros, but it halted at the noises coming from behind the wood. Ice paused, listening closely. It sounded like…crying? Angel, theAngel, was…crying?
Now, Ice wasn't the one to eavesdrop, but this was important. She slowly but surely pressed her left ear against the door, making sure not to make any sudden movements as it would tip off Angel, surely. Inside, she heard the craziest, most insane conversation that, hopefully, she would never have to endure until much, muchlater in her life.
"Holt… is that you…?" Angel spoke with a dry, shaking voice. She decided to go halfway against Cleo's word and tell him over the phone. She had put the phone on speaker, as to be able to hug her knees close to her easier.
"Hey, babe… What's up? You sound upset, is everything okay?"
Ice suppressed herself from gagging. If she ever got herself a boyfriend, he would neverbe allowed to call her "babe".
"Holt, I…first of all, I need you to go in a room where it's quiet and you're alone, okay?"
Shuffling could be heard on the other end of the phone as Holt spoke. "Uhh, okay…Angel, what's going on?"
He sounded scared, and Angel immediately began to regret what she was about to tell him.
Thisisgettinggoodthought Ice as she pressed against the door harder.
"I'm in my room now. What is it? Are you hurt? Is everything okay over there?" asked Holt. Angel felt a feeling of emotion blossom in her chest as she heard her boyfriend be concerned over her. It gave her the reassurance that he would understand.
"Holt, I… I'm… I'm pregnant."
Holt felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. Good thing he was sitting down, or else he would've passed out right then and there.
Ice gasped, then slapped her hand over her mouth quickly, hoping Angel had not heard. Apparently she was too focused on the dad's reaction to pay attention to anything else.
"Is…is the dad me? Because if it's not, I'm gonna find the guy and beat the living shit outta him!" Little crackling noises could be heard on the other end.
Angel laughed for the first time in a long time. "No, it's you."
Holt sighed, relieved. "Thank God…"
Ice couldn't believe this. Her sister, her own littlesister might I add, was knocked up. She was furious at herself for letting this happen, furious at Angel for letting this happen, hell, she was furious at the world for letting this happen. But, deep down, she felt happy. Finally, something wrongwith her that she could take advantage of! Oh, she was in suchdeep shit with mom and dad!
She immediately felt horrible after thinking that. Why did she always compare herself to Angel? She did nothing to her. She was just… a whore. Ice let her anger take the better of her emotions as she thought of all the possible insults she could throw at Angel. Bitch, whore, slut, and soon-to-be, fat.
"Perfect…" hissed Ice through the crack of the door. She heard Angel falter inside. Oh, how she wished she could see the look of terror in her very eyes as Ice ran as fast as she could down the hall, down the stairs, and out the door.
XxXxXxX
To be continued…?