Heart of the Succubus

Heart of the Succubus (1)

I'm back ghoulies.

I would like to preface this chapter by saying that this is a completely rebooted and rewritten version of the story I posted 4 years ago. Same characters, basically same story line. It never really got the chance to grow, so this is me giving it that chance.

Thanks for reading <3

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"Someone once told me the defintion of Hell; the last day you have on earth, the person you became, will meet the person you could have become." - Anonymous

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ONE:

They say things get better after high school, but what I've come to learn is that high school is just a miniaturized version of what outside society is really like. For instance, both groups will react the same to tragedy. There's a face of sympathy and compassion, where the senior executives let everyone know that the victim is in their thoughts in prayers, roses and candles are left at pictures, websites are made about how remembered she will be, how great she was, how funny.

But none of them lifted a hand when she actually needed them. They're just trying to ease the gnarls of guilt in their stomachs. Maybe trying to remember what she actually looked like, besides a pasty face that blended in with the wall.

Sympathy is hard to trust because more often than not it's usually just because the person is trying to make them feel better about themselves. Other people's pain has an interesting way of making people obsessed with their own.

I suppose this was what I wanted: to be remembered whatever the context, to give them all some idea of the pain I was in. I just didn't think I'd be alive to see it. Now that I am, black heels echoing in the lonely white halls, staring at a portrait of my own face with the glow of a Mary candle reflecting in the glass, I can safely say it makes me feel nothing.

I needed more satisfaction than this, and I knew just the person I needed to see.

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ONE WEEK EARLIER

Locker rooms were the worst. It was where you exposed what you had to offer the world. The girls who did not fit the standards took their pants off behind towels, sucking in their stomachs with their heads down. If your belly was flat, your lips kissable and your vagina smelled like strawberries and unicorns, you flaunted it with the other swans. It was where we all showed what we had and all judged each other for.

It was the end of lacrosse practice; everyone was washing off their grass stains, the film of sweat, the damp fall air smell that clung to their hair. Girls were slapping each other's butts with wet towels, spraying deodorant, putting their hair up in snail snugs, talking about he said this, how they did that.

They stared, always stared at me. My skin burned where their gazes rooted; the acne on my back, the jiggle of my thighs, the swell of my stomach. I pretended I couldn't see them, but it was harder not to listen. Selina Bile, Selina Bile.

Selina Miles. That's the name the whole school had forgotten. At one point even Mrs. Porters had gotten as far as "Is Selina Bil--Miles present?". It had been three years of scrubbing words like 'Pizza Face' off of my Bug's front window, finding a week's worth of my Biology notes in muddy puddles, of people spreading the rumor that I collect Christian Snow's boogers in a mason jar. Most of them I had been eating dirt with in kindergarten.

I had one more year to get through and then I would be at Emerson. Even now I was checking to see if the Boston therapists accepted my health insurance.