A series of fucked-up events led Piper Kinsley to face that sunset of September once again, the day Indie Vega, her crush, stopped her from jumping off the riverbank bridge. That very day, seven women would be dead, and for some reason, everybody be...
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CHAPTER ONE
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I can talk about her for hours; but not in a weird way. I just know a few things about her, like her favorite color wasn’t indigo despite my firm belief that, at least once in her life, it was, that she’d always drawn mushrooms with fairy wings and pinkish eyes, that she liked taking photos of unfinished things, and that when she was fifteen, she was shot dead with a gun in a massacre shooting in a public bathroom.
Yeah.
Pretty sick.
I wish I could change that last bit, though. I wish I could write about Indie Vega being the Indie Vega without writing the words gun and dead beside her name. I believe in multiverse, and the only thing that can comfort me is that there is a universe out there where no one died and no one had a gun. It does not take away the fact that I live in the universe where everything went wrong, like the bad ending in a visual novel game, and it sucks, but after years and years of living, I’d learned enough to understand that life won’t always be gentle and warm, no matter how much we wish it is.
I wonder if during Indie’s last moments, she wondered why life was so unkind to her to put her in a shithole of a life she was tragically born to have. Because I have. Lots of times.
Especially during the mornings where Mrs. Noor didn’t know how to mind her own business.
“You’re early.”
She was a Literature teacher who was handling the journalism club. I used to belong in there but after Indie died, I just kind of left. Anyway, that morning, Mrs. Noor was glaring at me through her rectangular glasses while standing in the middle of the hall, thinking she looked intimidating doing that.
“What is it now?”
She was wearing a wrinkled plaid skirt with a brown blouse that’s probably twice as old as her, and I didn’t know why she thought pairing that outfit with gold pearls was going to work out.
“Three things, Kinsley,” she said, playing with her necklace. Her graying hair was tied up in a bun. “One. Your hair.”
The way she said hair infuriated me—she’s giving so much unnecessary emphasis to the i sound. “I still don’t understand what’s supposed to be wrong with my hair.”
“It’s blue.”
“If that’s such a problem, then I’d dye it red.”
“You are not going to talk to me like that, Piper,” she said firmly, her knuckles turning white. She looked really angry and it was just 10 AM. I had quite the talent for making adults mad before noon.
