Idyllic small town Lakewood in the sunny state of California was where we first saw her...or at least a glimpse. Sidney Prescott sat in the living room of her house, contemplation prominently displayed within the lines of her aged face while she decided what the first words were going to be for her next book.
Her deadline was two weeks ago. She was supposed to submit her work in at least a week before then, but while normalcy was at its finest, the state of Sidney's writing inspiration was progressing as anything but. Chaos provoked the creativity within her, and now that she was seemingly sheltered, hers seemed to be at a stalemate.
The sound of a soft, groggy voice prompted Sidney to look up from her computer screen and toward its source: her daughter. The younger girl's arm was leaning lazily against the metal railing of their staircase, one of her slim dark eyebrows raised in impatience. She was pretty—sharp, regal features and looks that mirrored a younger version of her mother's. Perhaps the spitting image of her mother, an eerie replica—in more ways than one.
The teenaged girl, Vivian, began to walk down the staircase, all the while readjusting the backpack strap that rested across her shoulder. "I'm off to school."
Leaning her elbow on the arm of the couch where she rested her chin in the center of her palm, Sidney laughed. It was a stiff laugh, uttered to release the tension that was seemingly lingering in the air rather than to convey amusement. "You know, I kind of figured with the whole 'walking zombie' attitude."
Vivian nodded almost robotically, indicating just how right her mother was. She was too tired to actually pay attention to the conversation and respond with her typical chuckle. Instead, she waved a quick goodbye to and snatched her car keys from the marble kitchen counter, twirling them around her finger as she otherwise silently made her way out the door.
Once she heard it shut, Sidney sighed. Her hand hovered over her keyboard, trying to gain the courage to actually start writing. Nothing. She slammed her laptop shut with a grunt. She had nothing. Engulfed with frustration, Sidney quickly got up from the couch...only to stop at the shimmer of a mirrored picture frame.
A young brown-eyed, blonde-haired girl, sitting with her long legs crossed at the edge of a fountain. Tatum Riley. Her arm was wrapped tightly around a blue-eyed, dark-haired girl with a similarly youthful face. That girl was Sidney Prescott. A more innocent version, untainted by the horrors that were inevitably about to invade her life. Both girls seemed happy...at least at the time. Their faces were adorned with bright smiles and their eyes held a certain purity that would soon be gone—cruelly stolen from them.
Sidney quickly wiped her mouth with the back of her hand when she felt the bitter tang of her own tears on her tongue. It was hard to fathom that the photo was taken nearly twenty years earlier, snapped by Randy with his brand new Polaroid camera.
It was before everything happened.
Before all of the deaths. Before all of the lies. Before all of the betrayal. Before him.
Jaw clenched and eyes narrowed, Sidney was back on the couch and already typing away on her keyboard. No matter how much she wanted to postpone the matter, she knew it was only time before she had to revisit that place sooner or later—she just hoped it would be the latter.
"Woodsboro, California. The place where it all began..."
Vivian sat in the driver's seat of her car and glanced anxiously at the phone in her lap. Nina Patterson, one of her best friends, hadn't contacted her since the other day: no texts, no calls, nothing. Coming from someone else, she wouldn't have really thought about it much, but coming from Nina, it was bizarre.
Majorly bizarre.
Nina always had her phone with her. She couldn't survive without it. Literally. Vivian remembered one time when the red-head lost her phone, got so anxious to the point where her blood pressure rose, and had to be rushed to the nurse. That thing was her lifeline. It had everything of hers on it, everything that mattered. Wherever Nina went, her phone went with her. She would either be texting Vivian the next evil scheme she concocted in order to potentially destroy someone's life (for her own weirdly sadistic amusement, of course) or informing her of which boy on the basketball team she was screwing that week. And but of course, she would give her petite blue-eyed friend all the details as per usual and her boyfriend, Tyler, none.
So, the fact that Nina hadn't texted her since after school the previous day had Vivian, well, worried.
And when it came to her friends, she couldn't help but be worried.
Vivian gritted her teeth in frustration, trying to ignore the odd gnawing sensation that seemed to have manifested at the pit of her stomach, along with the paranoid thoughts that threatened to invade her mind—the same thoughts that always managed to drive her brain to the worst possible conclusions.
Running her hands through her hair, the dark-haired girl let out a sigh. Nina probably just caught up, she reassured herself. And as soon as she arrived at school, Vivian would see her strutting through the hallways, clad in the clothes that she bought from the mall earlier that weekend, her fiery red hair flowing through the sunny California breeze.
She would be there.
Vivian tapped her fingernails against the dashboard, her hands absentmindedly wandering over to the compartment in front of the passenger seat. No. She internally berated herself once she realized what she was doing, what she was looking for. Quickly moving her hand away from the compartment and shoving it into her purse, Vivian pulled out what she needed and watched in the rear-view mirror as the redness surrounding the whites of her eyes slowly faded away.
Not wanting to dwell on the fact that Nina was M.I.A, Vivian cranked up the radio to full blast. A generic pop song that always seemed to be playing emitted from the car's speakers. Pressing her foot down on the gas, the youngest Prescott sped through her neighborhood to school.
As she passed by the of blur palm trees, Vivian took a deep breath.
Everything would be fine.
Vivian and her friends were all seated at a table in the courtyard. Most of them were either scrolling on their phones to like whatever pictures they were still being tagged in on social media from over the weekend or sipping on their freshly brewed iced-coffees while they contemplated ditching the rest of the day to party like it was the weekend all over again. None of them hid the fact that the typicality of their routines had them utterly bored. It wasn't until blonde-haired "goody too-shoes" of their group, Emma Duval, spoke when everyone miraculously glanced up from their identical iPhones.
"I thought we all agreed to trash that video."
Vivian took a guess that her friend was referring to the video of Audrey Jensen, who was making out with someone—a female someone—in the back seat of a car. The Prescott girl had no doubt the release was Nina's doing. Considering that Emma was Lakewood's resident saint and how she and Audrey used to be friends before their falling out, it was safe to surmise that was the reason why she seemed to be so upset...and why the vein on her forehead was looking as noticeable as ever.
Feeling the tension grow thicker, Vivian decided to be the first one to speak up in an attempt to dispel the tragically awkward air that seemed to surround their friend group. "Well, I didn't send it to anyone." She clasped her hands together. "I'm also going to be brutally honest and admit that I would've...if I cared about it at all."
Emma frowned at that answer, but nodded otherwise.
From where she sat on top of the table, Brooke Maddox cleared her throat, deciding to throw in her thoughts on the matter. "Audrey was bound to come out someday," the slight-framed girl justified with a shrug of her shoulders. She nodded her head in the direction where aforementioned Lakewood viral sensation was walking with her equally dorky best friend, Noah Foster. "I mean, look at her." Oh, Brooke couldn't stop herself from cringing in sympathy.
Jake Fitzgerald blinked, not understanding the fuss about the whole situation. "What's the big deal if she's a lesbian?" The jock was already displaying his lack of care for the matter. Of course, he found any conversation that didn't include sex or The Walking Dead completely uninteresting.
Vivian rolled her eyes. "The big deal, Jake, is that she probably didn't want half of the town knowing about it. I mean, think about it—if you were gay, you wouldn't want to 'come out' by having a video of you twisting tongues with a guy in your car going viral, would you?"
"Yeah, but I'm not gay."
Vivian shared an amused glance with Brooke and resisted the urge to scoff in exasperation at the puzzled look on the boy's face. She then patted his leg that was beside her and whispered in his ear, "Feel fortunate that you still have the luxury to be endearing, even when you're being dumb."
Jake both smiled and glared at that.
However, Emma narrowed her eyes at the dark-haired boy. "Jake," she prodded, nowhere near done with her "Teen CSI" interrogation yet.
"What?" Jake barked out a laugh. "Really, guys? Come on! I wasn't the only one on that group thread, and I did delete that video!" Seeing the complete lake of belief on nearly everyone's faces, he smacked his hand down on the table...but his anger didn't last for long. "After I sent it to PJ."
Vivian rolled her eyes. Of course. P.J. was an absolute perv with a seemingly 24/7 hard-on, but he was a perv with connections of the medicinal kind.
"Oh, come on," Jake chastised at the sight of his on and off girlfriend's judgmental look. "You know that 'Girl-on-Girl' is his demographic."
Fed up with his juvenile antics, Vivian smacked him across the stomach—hard.
"What the hell? What'd you do that for?" He smiled. "Come on, Viv, you know that I'm way too pretty to be a punching bag."
Indenting a finger into the fabric of his shirt, Vivian hissed, "You're a prick."
He wrapped his arm around her shoulder, lowering his head to whisper in her ear, "Prick? Like a cactus. One that you love to poke, huh?"
Vivian scoffed, pushing him away playfully.
Emma shook her head at the disgustingly cute couple...or whatever the hell they were...before turning her attention to their other friend. "Riley?" the blonde probed.
Nervously, Riley Marra reached to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. "Sorry." No surprise there. "Zoey saw it on my phone," the dark-eyed girl sheepishly explained.
Brooke shook her head and rolled her eyes in exasperation, like Jake, not seeing why Emma was making a huge deal out of this. Audrey Jensen was just another name added to the long list of victims of Nina's wrath. It was a shame—for Audrey, that is. But eventually, another name would be added to the list, and the video of Audrey would be a thing of the past. It wasn't Emma's place to get involved. That would just result in Nina setting her eyes on Emma as her new target. Really, Brooke didn't see why her friend was worrying about it so much, especially considering there was nothing she could do about it. It didn't matter if the video got deleted, seeing as practically the whole town already saw it.
The damage was done.
Besides, it was Audrey, who Emma hadn't even had an actual conversation with in years. Why worry about her? Middle school was ages ago, and it's not like anyone wanted to think about it.
The Maddox girl let out a sigh, finding this whole situation utterly ridiculous. "Emma, sweetie, this is not worth a hissy fit," she muttered, sending her friend a tight-lipped smile.
Emma let out a sarcastic laugh, not taking much comfort in her friend's efforts to calm her down. "Do any of you understand the term 'viral'?"
"I don't see Nina anywhere," Riley announced, alerting everyone of the absence of their group leader's presence.
Vivian frowned. Again, so unlike Nina. That video release was her work, so why didn't she show up at school to see the damage?
Seeing the worried look that washed over Vivian's features, Jake ducked his head down again to her height. "She's fine, okay?" he whispered. "Don't worry about it."
Vivian nodded in appreciation of his attempt to calm her down, but that didn't ease the gnawing sensation in her gut.
Will Belmont, another member of their group, spoke for the first time this morning. "You know that she did the wide release." He shared a knowing look with his best friend, Jake, and put a comforting hand on Emma's shoulder.
Brooke let out a scoff. "Uh, way to bring up the obvious much, William. Of course, it was Nina." Duh! Who else would it be? "She's a spoiled sociopath with no impulse control. Not like anyone else would do it." Huffing, she turned her head toward Emma. "I mean, she's probably ditching right now to avoid your cringeworthy good-girl wrath."
Emma looked up from Will's side and rose her eyebrows in amusement.
"Your little friend will be fine," Brooke reassured with smirk.
Emma shook her head sadly. "We're not really friends anymore."
Vivian reached over to grab her friend's hand from across the table, giving it a quick squeeze in an attempt to comfort her. Over one too many beers after one of last year's basketball games, Emma told Vivian how she and Audrey used to be joined at the hip, but that was before Emma was recruited to be a part of Nina's group in freshman year and Audrey wasn't. Apparently, they were close...in a "seven minutes at a middle school party" way once upon a time.
Will turned his attention toward his girlfriend, sending her a small smile. "Just give it twenty-four hours, okay?" he told Emma. "Someone will text and drive their Hybrid into a tree, and we'll have a new headline."
"Yeah," Brooke said, surprisingly agreeing with Will. "And maybe Audrey will 'Taylor Swift' her anger into creative energy...for one of her little films."
Seeing Emma's anxiousness wasn't eased, Will wrapped an arm around his girlfriend. "She'll be fine, okay?"
Emma nodded, believing him that it would be. But Vivian and Jake both turned to look at each other, knowing that there was going to be a ton more drama, despite what everyone else wanted to believe. And, unsurprisingly, they were looking forward to it.
But soon they would find out that viral videos were just child's play compared to what was coming.