It All Started with a Lie

Chapter 2

You laughed like
a metaphor I've
been trying to write down
for years.
~ Rudy Francisco

Chapter 2
Her pov
"This smells horrendous." My best friend, Richard, gagged as she desperately tried to scrub the pigs blood from my hair with copious amounts of shampoo.

I groaned, leaning back against the bathtub walls. "Try being the one coated in it."

Once I had taken a step back to examine how this mistake could have possibly happened, and after running a dozen senario, I knew exactly what happened...mostly. That man, the stranger, I'd watched him open the box, take a look inside, he must have seen the note, or placed the note. He knew the pen wasn't in there and he lied. This was all his fault, and I could kill him for it. I could tie him to a tree and hit him like a piñata. Richard and I should be out celebrating, but instead we're stuck inside trying to remove the rotting stench of pigs blood from my body.

"What even is it?" She grimaced.

I scrunched my nose. "I don't think you wanna know."

She frowned. "I was afraid of that." The smell alone gave it away, but I would let her live in denial.

This was all that man's fault. If it weren't for him, Richard and I would be out on the town, partying like there was no tomorrow; well, I would be partying, she would find a nice spot to sit and read while she waited for me.

Emma is my closest friend at school, but Richard, Richard is my platonic soulmate, my best friend, my other half. She is everything to me and the only person who knows me inside and out. She understands me on a level no one else has been able to; we have so many inside jokes I've lost count, including her name. I am the only one who calls Richard, and she is the only one who calls me Claudia.

And now my best friend is being forced to kneel at the bathtub floor and scrub away at pigs blood, all because of him. This is all his fault. I slammed my palm against the bath water, sending droplets flying. "I can't believe he tricked me like that!" What was the point? What did he get out of this besides my utter humiliation? "I don't even know him!"

Richard paused to think, as if trying to remember who he might be despite only have if a rough description to go of off: well dressed, tall, muscular, curly hair. I didn't get his name. "Did you sleep with him?" Richard asked innocently.

I shot her a teasing glare. "Are you calling me a whore?"

She laughed her infectious laugh, her smile beaming. Richard had the brightest smile of anyone I'd ever met, one of those wide, toothy grins that could turn any bad mood around. "No! I would never." She poured more shampoo into my hair. "I'm just saying, maybe you slept with him and never called him back, and this was his revenge. Why else would a random stranger attack you so cruelly."

Her point was valid, and I almost had to stop and question if perhaps I had slept with him and simply forgotten him. But there was no way I could ever forget a guy like him. I would surely remember, and I most certainly would have called a guy like him back. "Definitely not. I've never met him before."

"Maybe he wants to sleep with you." She sprayed my hair down with more water which only stained her tub and the back of my neck crimson.

"How does that work?"

"You know, how like little boys bully their crushes because they don't know how to deal with their emotions."