Crescent Cusp

Chapter 2, Part 1

     At home, Venus fell into a silence. She reflected on the day’s prior events and found her skin tingling with excitement for the coming day. Had accepting a mysterious proposition from complete strangers been an irresponsible choice? Yes, she understood that it had been, but Venus rarely had regard for her safety and consistently made hasty decisions, and so she spent little time dwelling on the pace at which the situation happened.

     Venus’s mother and father noticed her disconnected presence shortly after she entered the house.

     “You’re different,” her father said, lighting a cigarette as he sat down next to her.

     “Different?” Venus repeated distantly.

     “Yeah, like… what happened?” Her father took a long drag. “I mean, you never sit downstairs with us, and when you do, you’re usually reading that weird book or playing with knives or something.”

     “I don’t play with knives in the living room,” Venus said, dismissing his earlier question. The deep, thin marks along the kitchen walls, however, confirmed that knives were her favourite toy.

     “Well it’s creeping me out, so stop it,” he said, shaking his head as he puffed out a cloud of smoke.

     “I’m thinking.”

     “What do you possibly have to think about, Venus?”  He crushed his cigarette in an ashtray. “Goddamn, your grades are in the shitter and you’re about as deep as a puddle, so what could you possibly have to think about? Enlighten me, please.”

     “Don’t claim to know what goes on inside my head when you haven’t spent a goddamn second in the past eighteen years trying to actually figure it out.”

     “I’ve tried!” her father exclaimed angrily. “But you act like you’re too goddamn motherfucking good for this family—or as a matter of fact, this whole town.”

     “I can’t take the shallow rebellion this fucking community embodies, or this stupid religious cult the old people have!” Venus stood to move away from her father. “It disgusts me how empty their lives are and how the things they do are just a product of parental dismissal.”

     “You can’t say that, Venus, you can’t fucking do it,” her father said, slamming his fist down. “You’re exactly the same as all of them and we’ve never been dismissive towards you.”

     “Well you’ve certainly never been dismissive towards me,” Venus scoffed, hinting at their over-interest in her personal affairs. “But I’m not a goddamn thing like those scumbags in this town.”

     “What makes you think so?”

     “You don’t know what I’m fucking capable of,” she said, dashing up the stairs to her room.

     Once inside, Venus crouched in front of her closed door and held her head, gnawing viciously at her lip. “They don’t know what I’m capable of.”

~

     Locked inside the dreary white halls of her school, Venus shuddered with disgust at the sight of local self-proclaimed “rebels” approaching her.

     “Eaten any bugs lately, Fly?” Quinn, a boy in the back of the group, asked lazily as they sauntered by.

     “Haven’t been anywhere near your mum, Quinn,” Venus responded, staring at the group wearily.

     A girl known by the name Hershey laughed in the front. “Hey, at least she’s actually trying to respond now.”

     Quinn tore apart from the group and gripped Venus’s hand, shoving her against a row of lockers. Venus’s heart thumped rapidly with excitement.