It may be surprising to hear that Sam Puckett found religion once.
The event didn't involve having to button up a pair of church-pants like Freddie's or teaching a self-defense class at synagogue like, "Judo for Judaism!" combat instructor Shelby Marx. She didn't loiter around the Temple of Krishna to try to pick up on cute Indian girls like Spencer or accompany Carly Shay to a meeting of the Muslim Club at school to welcome the new foreign exchange student. Neither did she, like Magic Malika, uncover her new spirituality by forging a relationship with the Earth Mother or the Moon Goddess. Until recently, she had been in Gibby's crowd, too involved with her own damn problems to contemplate on whether there was or was not an invisible man in the sky giving out free lottery tickets to happiness on Earth.
Sam was never looking find the blueprints to life, the universe and everything. Truthfully, she couldn't care less. But against her better judgment, understanding bowled her over in a place where all of her most deeply personal and soul-inspiring revelations had always been found.
She was in the Shay kitchen, stuffing her face with fried pastries.
Breakfast that day was easy and predictable. Freddie was be talking around a mouthful of omelet and waffles about a new star he discovered in the sky, what elements it was composed of and which of his favorite Galaxy Wars character he was going to name it after. Carly was painting her toenails a shimmery blue while sipping at her fruit smoothie and Sam was perched on the counter, holding a box of a dozen assorted krispy kreme doughnuts in her lap.
She was washing it down with a depleting half-gallon of skim milk.
It was mid-chew between filtering out Freddie's dork-speak and somewhat-interesting-speak did she spot the secondhand blender on the counter adjacent to her that her best friend had earlier formulated a smoothie with.
She wiped at the corner of her mouth with a sleeve and looked down at her doughnuts.
She glanced back to the blender.
Three seconds later, she was stuffing doughnuts down into the large Pyrex blender capsule: cinnamon, blueberry jelly, chocolate glazed, lemon crème, powdered, strawberry-filled, cruelered. Then she poured in as much milk as she could, secured the rubber lid and smashed down every button on that blender, mix, cleave, chop, mince, puree, mangle, congeal, whatever. She watched as all those doughnuts turned into a viscous and coagulated vomit-colored sludge and then lobbed off the lid, lifted the entire concoction to her mouth and took a swallow.
Needless to say, it was the most horrifying kick in the head of concentrated sugar she'd ever tasted. But as she spat the mud out into a sink full of dishes… she realized…
The doughnut smoothie was a perfect metaphor for what was clearly the chaos of human existence. Thinking over the circumstances of her life, her father's abandonment, her celebrity status in a hit web show, her stint in juvenile detention for the most trivial of offenses, her fledgling relationship with a mother more irresponsible and immature than she was… It all seemed to her to be a prevailing and daily cycle of misery and happiness and excitement and boredom. There's no order to anything, no reason for anything. It's all just one long list of absurd events with no payoff whatsoever. She could feel what she wanted, it didn't matter. She could do what she wanted, it didn't matter. There was no meaning to any of it.
No master plan for her life, no road to follow. She always seemed to get into trouble even while trying to behave as, "good," as possible. There were these catastrophes and these phenomenons that happened to her, around her, over her and under her that equated to her always playing a game of jump-rope evasion; hop, duck and run for cover.
She and everyone she knew could be boiled down to just a bunch of random doughnuts, crammed into this giant blender for no apparent reason, chopped at, spun around and blended together into a repulsive and utterly meaningless ooze.
So she decided, as far as she was concerned, she would just do and feel nothing and everything at the same time, in giant swirls and spins and stop and starts. No control over a stitch of it, no boundaries to what she could do. Let's just follow our impulses. If she was happy, great, let's go help an old lady cross the street. Angry? Okay, let's just break everything in sight.
It was the idea of control that was ridiculous. People were always trying to restrain themselves or else they were trying to manipulate someone else. She didn't understand why nobody could see past the illusion.
She was unbelievably pissed off right now that she had even bought into the idea that the world made sense whatsoever.
There she was, attempting to make things right with the people she cared about most. And here she is, arms bound behind her back, some blockhead in a suit shouting into her ear about something that didn't involve her at all. What omniscient wisdom of the cosmos justified that?
Orientation was becoming a problem for her. I need to focus. Thoughts were smeared like tar inside Sam's head. Shapeless ideas were flooding her mind, melting together too quickly and hardening into an impenetrable black sludge.
Where am I? What do I know for sure?
She was having flashbacks. It must've been the drugs rushing through her capillaries and veins. She was sure of it. Or it could be the fact that she dying. Her lungs were about to explode. That seemed like a reasonable explanation too.
"Pull her out," a deep voice commanded.
A lever was turned and Sam's tranquillized body was wrenched up from a pool of water. She gasped as oxygen was made available to her again. It burned through her throat and mixed in with the taste of copper. Something in her mouth was bleeding.
"Anti-gravity. Tell me how he's doing it, Sam. Is it a synthetic device? Did he invent it? How long has he had it for?"
Sam didn't bother struggling against the ropes binding her. It was futile. Screw this guy if he thought he'd get anything out of her. "Do you… like your right eye?" Sam spat out, exhaustion wearing her down. "'Cause I know I'm not the strongest or the fastest right now… but when I get out of here, I'm going to summon up all my strength into punching your right eye. Hard. Over and over and over again. You could shoot me or stab me or taze me… but I'm taking that baby out." She flashed him a grin, before slumping over in a daze.
"It's for you, sir." A man in a dark suit approached Cal and handed him a cell phone. Cal sighed and pressed it to his ear, talking into the mouthpiece. "What is it? Yes, we've got the girl. So she won't be giving you any problems. Begin part two of the operation, Nevel, and see that it is meticulous. If you can't find it, you know what to do." He snapped the phone shut and looked at the time displayed on the exterior LED display. This interrogation had been lasting hours.
"I forgot to tell you," Cal murmured darkly at the crumpled, unconscious form. "You get a phone call, Sam. Just one. Who'd you like for me to dial? Freddie? Carly? Spencer? Melanie? Your mother? Anyone else I can kill because of this insolent display of noncompliance?" His voice began to rise in rage.
He threw the phone into the pool behind her before addressing a subordinate, "Shake her awake and drown her until you get the answers we need."
Spencer had asked her to go home and bring him some clean clothes in the morning.
Carly blasted her shower as hot and strong as it could go and climbed in. Ahhhh. She gathered that what everyone said about sex could be pretty good, but she couldn't imagine that it felt much better than hot jets of water pounding across her flesh.
She needed to wash away the exhaustion of the day.
When Carly was very little, she and Spencer used to put together puzzles; huge challenging ones that would suck out your mind and soul if it was kept at for too long. Spencer's experience alongside his understanding of lines and color gave him the edge in assembling them together. Like a symphony composer, his hands would dodge left and right, his fingers vacuuming up stray pieces on the carpet and clicking them together forming a carpet of cardboard that grew inch by inch further dominating her room as a young Carly scrambled around it on all fours picking up her coloring books and stuffed animals to throw onto her bed, paving space for the completely underestimated size of the overwhelming mosaic.
Spencer would always let his little sister put the last piece in. And she would be satisfied.
As she grew a little older and thus entrusted with an allowance of her own, Carly would run to the supermarket to buy her own puzzles to piece together. And while Spencer would tackle portraits that were made up of thousands of pieces depicting famous works of arts spanning the globe, she would be perfectly content to complete her twenty-five puzzle of a puppy peeking its eyes and nose out of a wicker basket.
Except for the times that her up-to-no-good brother would steal one of her pieces and hide it in her hair, of course.
She eventually got a little better into junior high, but by then Spencer had up and left for college and she was less interested than before.
Healing was a little like that.
She closed her eyes and lathered her hair up with a sweet-smelling shampoo.
Once Spencer had fallen asleep with the aid of his morphine, she had asked Freddie to guard the door and make sure that any nurse making rounds would be chatted up with and distracted.
Carly unrolled the bandages on Spencer's hands, careful not to further injure them. She cupped her palms over her his and concentrated.
Healing a break in the skin or the veins was simple. These cells multiplied fast and they were malleable. As a mental exercise, it was the equivalent as rolling two separate balls of play dough in her hands and pinching them together.
When she had tried to heal Spencer's shattered bones however, she was immediately transported back to her old room, her young eyes glazing over as she tried to make sense of a thousand-piece puzzle. Though this time, she had no wry smile of her older brother to encourage her, every piece was the same grey color and the room had no semblance of lighting.
When her body felt warm and clean, her hair scrubbed and rinsed, she forced herself to turn off the water. She wrapped herself in a towel and hurried back. Waiting for her there was Sam's soft, clean, ribbed tank top, folded atop her stack of laundry. She slipped it on. It was just what she needed.
She had pulled away her hands from Spencer to find his fingers as damaged as before she had touched them. She had failed. She rewrapped his hands in bandages and walked out of his room, disappointed and weary. She only half-smiled when she exited the room to find Freddie in a beef jerky, "light saber," fight with a bald-headed little boy who escaped from pediatrics.
At the foot of her bed, she spied Sam's shoes, the scuffed up sneakers she'd been wearing yesterday. For some reason, the sight of them stole her breath. Though empty, the shoes sat in a pose strongly suggestive of Sam, of exactly how she stood and walked. It was so crazy that a pair of uninhabited shoes could carry so much subtle information about her. But they did. They brought Sam right into the room with her.
Why wasn't she answering any of her calls?
She pulled back her comforter and climbed under her covers thinking about how in the world her life went astray, when Freddie, lovable but always ill-timed Freddie barged into her room and announced, "My apartment was broken into."
Carly managed to squeak out, "What?"
Freddie made his best attempt to be taken seriously despite his Einstein-sticking-his-tongue-out t-shirt, "Nevel broke into my apartment and I'm pretty much going to cream him."
"Why do you assume it wa-"
Freddie squirmed.
"Um?" Carly was pretty sure there was something here she wasn't getting.
"He color-coordinated my underwear drawer and left a perfumed ransom and/or love letter on my desk."
She wanted to laugh and cry, all at once.
Author's Note: I was playing around with time sequence as a literary device in Carly's portion of the chapter, hope it was successful. :)
I won't let this story go unfinished. It will happen. I am just taken aback how a chronicle I planned to end in 9-12 chapters is being drawn to a good minimal of 16.
For a story that started off kinda light and airy, many dark times ahead, but plan for a satisfying ending.
Thank you to Lanternfan, Joe Chief, Kaika-sama and Stellar-Raven for being new reviewers. And my gratitude to the rest of you for being great fans.