I was singing before I even stepped into the shower. I couldn't help it. There was something about the imminent hum of the rushing water, the cool pattering against smooth tile that woke a beat within that only served to compliment my heart and spur on my voice.
I wasn't a bad singer, I guess. I was good at imitation and improvisation, at highs and lows, at singing, humming, pretending I had a set of drums with my teeth…oh yes, do I love the beat. And right now I felt as though I could overcome the discomfiture that usually accompanied any sort of audience and tell the world through song and dance just how damn good I felt.
However, unfortunately—or probably fortunately—the only people around who might have heard were doing the same as I: getting ready for an elegant night of wining and dining in celebration.
The reason was simple and not even mine. Well, sort of mine. Junior year was over, finally, and I could not have been happier to escape that particular hell. Three months were mine, all mine and they promised to be spectacular.
What with the money now flowing.
"So if you ever feel neglected
If you think that all is lost
I'll be counting up my demons…yeah…
I used the pause in the song, filled by the wonderful feel of warm H2O over my bare skin, to giggle. It was a righteous giggle and one of the things that I would remember. My father, a noted lawyer, had rightly put that bastard away for making the children scream and had made partner for it. We could pay off our beautiful white house and spend a glorious two-week vacation in Australia with just the beginning of the green rush.
Reluctantly, I realized that my 15 minutes were up and if I didn't vacate my warm retreat I would never be ready on time. I stepped into a gush of cold air and mist and looked at the mirror.
Another of the things I would remember so vividly. Too impatient to wait for the full-sized reflection to clear, I peered through the beaded water and studied myself in all the clarity of invisible air. I would remember thinking, like I did every so often, that I might just possibly be almost pretty. From certain angles, of course.
I was a study of the average. At 5'7", I was neither tall nor short and my 130 lbs made me not fat, but never skinny. My shoulder-length hair was a sleek black that would fade as it dried to a dark brown. My eyes matched my hair, though I preferred to think of them as the color of milk chocolate. I had long, black eyelashes and thick eyelids that gave me an almost solemn look, even when I smiled. Most people would take one look at me, with my long face and blood red lips and my too-big nose and not-quite-sunken eyes and automatically assume I was pissed off.
Even my friends did this, which, ironically, did piss me off and then I would yell at them and they'd smile like they had been right all the while.
Bastards.
But I digress. I smiled for myself, sucked in my stomach and pretended like I had a proportionate figure. It didn't work, but this was me and I wouldn't have changed a thing.
I would remember that too.
I dried my hair, gave it that "piec-y look" and quickly dressed before heading downstairs. I was determined not to be the last one ready. I usually wasn't, but the stereotype followed me anyway, especially with my family. My family, who I had the odd feeling was going to be okay from now on.
Everyone was downstairs already. Just my luck. My parents' door was open, as was my brother's. I sighed and started down towards the landing, though I paused on the second to last step, admiring the streaming photons that danced through a large window, watched one in particular as it tangled itself up with a bit of lace.
I laughed softly and a strangled sound answered me. I frowned. "Mom?" I called out tentatively, knowing that she would probably call back in an irritated voice like she always did when she was disturbed for no good reason.
No answer.
I edged slowly down the steps, knowing exactly where to go without making them creak. There was an ominous silence in the house, though it was probably my imagination. Of course it was. I was seventeen, my brother fourteen and we had never been loud kids anyway…
Soft light rebounded off glistening white walls and a glimmer of a green plant played with my peripheral vision. I rounded the corner to the kitchen and stopped dead.
Drowning in red. I remember blood creeping along the white tiles and thinking of Psycho and chocolate syrup. I remember wondering, as if a million miles from myself, if the blood belonged to my father—sprawled unconscious on the floor—or to the dead form of the puppy I had had since I was three. I remember wondering if my mother was thinking the same thing, worried about her husband, her children…all of the above to judge by the horror in her familiar chocolate gaze.
My brother whimpered. One of the men was holding him with a pistol in his neck and my brother…he just couldn't help himself. I watched, one eye on the boy who had looked up to me for all those years, the other recognizing the black form of death that the other man had in his hands.
A bomb, some cold part of my mind informed me. Better do what he says.
It was then that I realized the man with the bomb was yelling at me, yelling at me to join my brother and keep quiet. I hadn't moved. The man with my brother growled and his hand twitched.
And then he shot my brother.
He. Shot. My. Brother.
My mother's screams mingled with my own. I lunged forward—tripped, really—in blind rage but I was too far, across the great expanse that was, in that last second, still my kitchen.
The first man yelled that this was for Paul and the voices that couldn't be silenced, the voices of terror. There was a soft beep…
…and the world exploded.
The scene here this morning is one of confusion and chaos. It is said that suicidal friends of Paul DeMane, the terrorist recently sentenced to death in Chicago, decided to take out their anger on William Corelle, the accomplished lawyer that participated in DeMane's trial and ultimately won him his fate. It is confirmed that William, his wife Amber and son Brian are dead in the explosion that flattened the Corelle home and several of their neighbors'. Five others are confirmed dead and seven have been rushed to the hospital…there is some debate as to whether Corelle's daughter was at home at the time of the tragedy and a search has been organized. However, as you can see behind me, we may never know as all that remains of this once prosperous family is ashes…
This is Cindy Mendel, reporting…