How My Perfect Life Was Inverted II

Chapter Two: Lady Macbeth

I woke up screaming.

For a moment, I was unaware of where I actually was, or what I was doing there; in my mind's eye, the meadow was still as bright and uncompromising as it had been in my dream, and like Lady Macbeth, my hands were slick with the accusing stain of scarlet blood.

"Oh," I gasped in broken whispers. "Oh, oh, oh." And I put my clean white hands to my face as sobs of relief threatened to wrack my sweating body. "Oh God, oh God, oh God…"

"Ow…" a voice whined, and I turned to see a delicate hand reach up to grab at the mattress. The fingers grasped loosely at the sheets in inevitable futility before splaying wide in a sort of resigned support. Moments later, a sleepy, dishevelled blond head popped up from beyond the bed, violet eyes blinking in hurt confusion.

"You kicked me out of bed," Flavio whimpered, childish petulance colouring his tone. "You mean, mean, mean Flavio-hater!" And with this he released his hold on the rumpled sheets to cross his arms, deliberately turning away from me in a resentful huff.

I opened my mouth to apologise, but only a strangled sob sputtered forth. Flavio reached up to rub sleepily at a violet eye, and cautiously queried what was wrong. The bright, oddly colourful nightmare was still vivid in my mind, and, still speechless, I merely shook my head, carefully pushing the covers off of my body and pulling down the hem of my shift, which had ridden up to rest upon my hips. My toes reached hesitantly down to touch the hard, smooth floorboards, as though afraid that they would melt and crumble beneath my weight. The planks remained promisingly solid and unyielding, and with a sudden feeling of weariness, I allowed the soles of my feet to follow the path of my toes.

The dream had not yet faded from my memory; when I walked, I walked upon the soft, yielding caress of grass; the breeze that fluttered from the open balcony doors had a hint of English lavender and wildflower, and the sparrows' playful twittering echoed in my ears.

I could still feel the blood on my hands, scorching my skin in vengeance of my unpardonable sin.

Murderer.

I closed my eyes and continued my slow, dreamlike steps, walking to the balcony and into the white fire of the Caribbean sun. In that moment, the chains of my dream were shattered; gone was the imagined birdsong, the meadow's tender grass, the soft, fragile scent of English flowers.

But the weighty touch of blood still remained.

Out, damned spot; out, I say!
…Will these hands ne'er be clean?

Here's the smell of blood, still.

"Flavio," I said at long last, my fingers continuously clenching and unclenching as I stared out into the bay. "Prepare a bath for me. Lay some simple clothes out on the bed. Get me some breakfast."

"Say 'please,'" he sniffed, and I closed my eyes.

"You're my maid now, Flavio," I snapped, my voice quiet and harsh. "Do as I say."

There was only silence between us, and with a terrifying feeling of detachment, I turned to see him looking at me in curiosity.

"Flavio…" I reminded with an irritation that I did not in all honesty feel. He held my gaze for a moment longer before turning and scuttling away. I, for my own part, turned back to look out at the balcony, studying my new home whilst unconsciously wringing my hands.

Out, damned spot; out I say!

It suddenly seemed very ironic that, as a fourteen year old girl, I had been assigned the role of Lady Macbeth in a drama class.

"How now, what news?" Georgie concluded her exaggerated speech in such a way that it set the other girls in their group of six laughing.

Sierra, for her own part, took the role a little more seriously, and, with a straight back and supercilious stare, intoned softly, "He has almost supped; why have you left the chamber?"

Georgie blinked, thrown off guard as she was; Sierra's expression was on the mark, but surely her words should have been played with a little more… harshness?

"Oh hell, I've forgotten my lines," the girl announced, looking down at her book, and Sierra's face broke into a long-suffering grin.

"Someone else should play Macbeth," she said, abandoning the scene completely and moving to sit on the chair, crossing her legs in order to show off her slender calves and short skirt to whatever lesbians may be present. "Ally, why don't you have a go?"

"Oh no," the bottle blonde replied. "You know I can't act; I can't wait until next year, when I can finally give Drama the finger."

"Shakespeare's boring, anyway," Georgie agreed, making a show of throwing the text down and jumping manically on it before coming to sit with the other five. "And what's more, the exam's not for another three weeks."

"Two and two days," Sierra corrected automatically, glancing at their drama teacher before surreptitiously undoing the top three buttons of her blouse. "But I suppose we can always adlib, can't we? I mean, Bernhardt did say to reinterpret the text—What time is it?" she asked abruptly, and Harry checked her watch.

"Forty minutes left," she replied, and the other girls released a collective groan.

"Y'know…" Sierra began, glancing to see that the teacher was out of hearing, "It's not so bad out, and this is the last lesson of the day; we can always climb out of the window."

The other five tittered amidst exclamations of "What!" "You're kidding!" "In this skirt?"

"Look, it's easy," Sierra explained, shoving Macbeth into her bag and moving to one of the large windows. "We're on the ground floor, they haven't finished installing the cameras yet, and the gate's just there. We're obviously not going to be doing any acting, so how about a little shopping? Bond Street's only a Tube ride away…"

"I somehow think Mrs. Bernhardt will notice if six girls suddenly disappeared from her class," Frankie observed critically.

"Mrs. Bernhardt is senile," Sierra scoffed. "Look, I've done it before—" She fell silent as she saw the woman come towards them, and immediately set about opening the window.

"It's a little hot in here," she said matter-of-factly to the woman, who nodded and asked them to perform what they had achieved so far. Georgie forgot her lines again, prompting Sierra to abruptly switch roles, and with a short, analytical critique punctuated by exasperated sighs of "Oh, Georgiana," concluding in a weary "And for the last time, keep your blouse buttoned up, Sierra," the woman moved on to seek out her next prey.

"Okay," Sierra said after five minutes. "She's not going to come talk to us again; do what you want, but I'm going." And she abruptly dropped her bag out of the window before swinging her legs over the sill and ducking down moments before Mrs. Bernhardt's head turned towards their group.

"I'm dropping this lesson anyway," Ally shrugged, grabbing her own bag and following suit. She was rewarded with Sierra's grateful smile.

"My mother is a social climber, as you well know," Georgie said next, having already zipped up her own bag. "When she found out you attended my school, she turned to me and said, 'That de Victoire girl? Never leave her side!' So where Sierra goes, I am inextricably bound to follow," and with a slight puckering of her lips, she joined the other two.

The three remaining sycophants looked at one another, and then at the window, where the other three girls waited expectantly. Sierra quirked an elegant eyebrow, and with a misleadingly civil but unmistakably commanding "Well?" they followed.

Two hours later, and Sierra and Georgie were picking their way through the London throng, having long since shaken off the other four girls thanks in no small part to Georgiana's stroke of genius. The darker of the pair was busy pulling and tugging at her light coat, attempting to force her purse into the pocket, whilst Georgie nattered incessantly about a miscellany of events that Sierra had deemed unimportant to hear.

"…but I suppose you'll be spending the weekend with Julian, huh?" she mentioned casually, and Sierra started at the mention of her boyfriend's name.

"I… I don't know," she stuttered, caught off guard. "Probably. Why?"

The girl shrugged. "Oh, nothing," she said. "It's just that Angie—you know Angie, don't you? My cousin; the one who ran off with her girlfriend to join the circus a couple of years back?"

"The lesbian contortionist, right?"

"Yeah, her; anyway, Angie's having a Halloween party, but I guess you'd rather curl up on your couch and cling tightly to Julian's arm all night, wouldn't you?" she said with a grin.

Sierra made a noncommittal shrug. "It'll be my birthday soon, won't it?" she asked. "I don't know; I might have something else planned instead; Julian's parents said something about wanting to take me skiing, but because they've made a fuss of not letting us sleep in the same room—which of course was more than mortifying—I might just stay and—" She was cut off with a slight yelp as someone actually fell on top of her, causing Georgie to let out a yelp of surprise as she watched the pair fall to the floor.

"Sorry," the boy said, pushing himself up and offering her friend a hand. "You alright?"

"Yes, I'm fine," she responded automatically, ignoring the outstretched fingers and pulling herself up. Ever the gallant, the boy reached down to pick up her schoolbag, and with yet another rushed apology, dashed off on his way.

"How rude," Sierra huffed, dusting off her coat. "God, I hate walking home."

Georgie was silent, looking after the male navigating his way through the crowd, a frown on her face. "I think I know him," she muttered, her words slow and measured. "I'm sure I know him…"

"Good for you," Sierra commented, shrugging her bag onto her shoulder and linking her arm through her friend's. "C'mon, before it starts to rain. Your dad knows you're coming back to my house, right?"

"I'll call him when I get there," she assured the girl, still glancing tellingly over her shoulder, but the boy had all but disappeared.

The next day, at some point between French and History, Georgie was abruptly pulled aside.

"What are you doing?" she hissed as she was pulled into an empty hall, but her innocent query went unanswered.

"That boy," Sierra snapped, shoulders trembling in annoyance. "You said you knew him!"

The girl blinked her greenish eyes and shook her coppery hair from out of her face.

"Who?"

"That boy!" she repeated, clearly agitated.

"What boy?"

"The one from yesterday!" she railed, as though these small simple words would immediately clarify matters.

"There were a lot of boys from yesterday."

"The one that—that pushed himself onto me."

"There were a lot of those too."

"George!"

"Alright, alright. What about him?"

"You know who he is, don't you?"

"Yeah, but why would you—oh, Sierra," she sighed, exasperated.

"What?"

"Don't do this," she pleaded. "Please; you and Julian have been together for so long, it'll kill him if—"

"Wha—Oh, please! I don't fancy him, Georgie; I can do better than that," she corrected, so distracted by the absurdity of her friend's assumptions to have momentarily forgotten her anger. "Actually, I already have, but that's not why I wanted to talk you."

"It isn't?"

"Of course not."

"Are you sure? I mean, he was quite the—"

"Georgie!"

"Sorry," she apologised with a gesture of surrender. "I'm just stating the obvious here."

Sierra proceeded to scowl in distaste, her friend's gentle teasing doing little to improve her dark mood.

"You do know him, don't you?"

"Oh, sure; his name's Sam or Stan or… Stuart or something. S-T something or other. Why do you ask?"

There was a pause as the darker girl inhaled deeply.

"He stole my purse."

"What?" Georgie exclaimed, agog.

"He did; after you went home, I was going through my things and…"

"And?"

"Well my purse wasn't there, was it?"

"Have you gone to the police?" she questioned, and Sierra snorted.

"How could I? We were truanting."

"So… So what do you want to do about it?"

"I want to confront him; I want to see if I can… persuade him to give it back."

"They call that prostitution, you know."

"George!"

"Why are you so upset about this, anyway?" Georgie questioned. "You have more money."

"It had my debit card in it, George," Sierra explained, leaning against a wall, her pleated black skirt fluttering about her legs. "And it was a gift from my uncle from when he was elephant trekking in India. I have to get it back; I don't care about the money, just the purse and the card."

"And Julian's picture," Georgiana ostensibly reminded.

"Yeah, that too," she agreed, sounding more than vaguely dismissive. "Listen, when can I see him? This Stuart or Stan or whatever he's called—And how do you know him, anyway?"

"He's Angie's ex."

"Angie? Your cousin, Angie? Angie the amazing contorting lesbian?"

"Well, after Angie came back from the circus, she tried to live a, you know, normal life, so she started dating this boy. But it obviously didn't last, 'cause she's irrevocably Sapphic, and now they're just 'friends.'"

"And I suppose Sam doesn't—"

"I don't think his name's Sam, actually."

"Then what is it?"

"I don't know."

"Okay then; as I was saying, I don't think the boyfriend minded that much, because let's face it, he did pull a lesbian for… How long were they going out for?"

"Three months."

"God, she was in denial."

"Actually, she dumped him when she found out he was cheating on her."

"Ouch. Sworn off men for life, then—Or did he actually convert her to lesbianism? You know, she was borderline and he just—sort of—pushed her over?"

"I don't know; the only thing I know about Angie is that she's my cousin, she ran off to join the circus, and that she's a lesbian. Our family isn't very close."

"We're getting off topic," Sierra pointed out before abruptly exclaiming, "Your lesbian cousin's ex-boyfriend stole my purse!"

"So what do you want me to do about it?"

"Help me get it back!"

"I'm trying, I'm trying! And I want you to bear in mind that I'm missing History for you."

"I really, really need to get it back from him, Georgie—have you any idea when I can meet him? Where I can meet him? How I can meet him?"

"Remember when I told you about that party?"

"No…"

"Well, Angie's having a party for Halloween—he's her friend, so I'm sure he'll be there."

"Are you going?"

"I was invited, but—"

"No buts," Sierra interrupted, her voice firm. "You are going, and you're taking me as a guest."

"You can't just order me around! I'm not like Frankie or Ally or any of the others who hang on to your every—"

"Georgie, please; consider it a birthday gift."

"You do realise that I have better things to do than—Steve!"

"What?"

"I just remembered—Angie's ex-boyfriend, the one who practically ran you over—his name's Steve."

"So you are going to introduce us, then?"

"My parents won't like it if they know I've been socialising with… Well, you know. I mean, the fact that they're poor is bad enough, but she's also gay…"

"Neither would mine, so why don't we let it be our own little secret?"

"Sierra, I really don't think—"

"I'll let you sleep with Julian," she offered bluntly.

"What?"

"Julian; you like him, don't you? I'll let you have him."

"But Sierra—" Georgie gasped, trying and failing to sound disgusted. "I mean, we're only fourteen… You're not even fourteen yet, you'll be fourteen in two weeks!"

"So?"

"So? That's all you can say?" All Georgie could do was stare at her friend; she'd always known that Sierra had had a little more experience with boys than the rest of her peers—which, in an all-girls' school, was that rare a thing, an achievement both effortless and prestigious—but to think of her—actually—with Julian…

Julian, who was in fact sixteen…

"Sierra… You didn't… Did you?"

The girl paused, narrowing her blue eyes.

"What sort of girl do you take me for, Georgiana?"

-x!x-

AN: As promised in the author's note of the prologue, this is the beginning of the new storyline, but I'd like to unequivocally establish that this storyline is not gratuitous. You need to understand Sierra's back story with Steve to understand her current relationship with him, which is relevant to her relationship with Jack, which is necessary to the plot. Do not dare to question me, for I know all, and am a knowledge-coveting bitch.

On two separate notes, I've a) posted the first chapter chronicling the misadventures of Pearl in purgatory entitled Spawn of Satan, and b) have developed a sudden craving for subtitles; any ideas to distinguish How My Perfect Life Was Inverted I from How My Perfect Life Was Inverted II?