Swipe of Fate

Chapter 1

I stood over his dead body. He was limp, cold, gone. And I was to blame.

I shook. This was not me. This was not who I imagined myself to be. This was not who I sought to become as a little girl. As a little girl in the middle of a raging parental war, I still remained steadfast in my ability to dream, to dream of a future without heartbreak.

But as I looked around Tucker's room, the walls coated with Star Wars posters, funny and intellectual sayings pasted to greet any visitor with his loud but commonplace personality, I realized the extent of what occurred tonight went past heartbreak. Tucker. That was the name of the boy who laid beside me, who was gone, who would not breathe again. Was it possible this was my creation?

Two crimes were committed that night. A rape and a murder. I cried. No sobs left my mouth, but I could tell from the never ending supply of water that welled from my eyes straight down my cheeks, my body was reacting in some way at least to what I had done. I could not articulate the emotions propelling the tears out of me. I still stood in shock.

How did this go so wrong? When I left the dorm for this first date, lips properly shined and an aroma of a sweet summer body spray upon me, I had two tasks. I was going to pick up some fentanyl, a secret I wasn't even sure I wanted to go through with, and I was going on a nice, most likely boring first date with Tucker, another sophomore I met off one of the countless dating apps I frequented. Somehow I fucked both of these tasks up.

I received the email that my package had arrived at the university package center 20 minutes before I was set to leave to meet Tucker. When I read the words, YOUR PACKAGE IS HERE, I panicked a bit. Because it made the plot I had created in my head tangible. It marked me as something dark, almost despicable for what I wanted and planned to do. But immediately I knew, whether I went through with the fentanyl or not, I had to pick it up immediately. I couldn't have the Package Center somehow discover the nefarious contents of my shipped order.

You really can buy anything online. Including, apparently, an order of a chaotic, unplanned murder.

I bought the fentanyl for Ethan Parke. It was sick. It was twisted, but my heart hurt in ways I didn't know it could. Anyways, it was all originally his idea. It was his own game. I was just playing him the same way he played everyone else. As he knew, karma's a bitch.

But this was not the karma I intended to inflict in the wildest revenge fantasies I had concocted about Ethan.

The fentanyl was packaged so inconspicuously I still looked like an innocent 19-year-old girl with simple blonde curls and trusting blue eyes, all fitting the naïve façade that I was just picking up a small care package from mom.

It was then I realized how late I was running. I wanted enough time to think through where to put the drugs so my roommate Liv wouldn't find it. And if I went back to the dorm to hide this away in my closet, Tucker might think I was flaking on our date. And as someone put in that position once, I wanted to avoid any emotional distress I could.

Ha. Look at me now. A picture-perfect representation of emotional distress.

So I went to a bathroom in a building adjacent to the package center and shoved the bag of fentanyl powder from the box in my purse. After all, I had never been frisked for drugs before, so why would I start tonight?

When I look back at my life and retell stories of epic dating misadventures or worse, the horror stories, the vexing emotional abuse and deception I endured, friends or strangers often find themselves perplexed, discounting my experiences as the result of bad decisions and poor judgment. 

That's always what we say when we want to distance ourselves from whatever horrible things happened to a person. Because if it wasn't a bad decision, if it wasn't some deficiency in good judgment they held within themselves, then it could happen to us. At any time.