Chrissy Teigen's Culinary School for Wayward Models (Cravings fic) COMPLETE

Chapter 05: The Turning of LilMizKiki_321

Once there was a woman named Kristin.

Kristin lived in a suburb. Married, kids, house, job. Perfect and normal. Don't look for dirt, don't look for weird stories, because there aren't any. Her parents hadn't divorced when she was little. If anything, she thought her husband was too nice. She wouldn't have minded if he was a little rougher around the edges. She hadn't been a loser in high school and she also hadn't been a mean girl. Nothing like that. She simply grew up to be the person she had become and nothing that happened later was anyone's fault. There were no signs, no pieces of the puzzle that could be put together later for people to lean back and say Ahh it all makes sense now. She was just a person. She just lived her life, and one thing led to the next, same as it does for everyone.

Well, OK: Kristin could see ghosts. Mostly when she was little. But always, really, although she quickly learned to stop talking about it. Her Daddy told her about crazy people being locked up, taken away from their families. She did not want to get sent away, did not want people to think she was strange or weird. She learned to retrain her mind. She wasn't seeing ghosts, it was just her imagination. There was no reason to talk about it or mention it. Even though she wanted to, so badly. Because they weren't like you think, the ghosts. They weren't wispy apparitions in human form, lingering around and moaning for someone to help them with their unfinished business. Real ghosts were much stranger than that. They were not human. They came in impossibly twisted shapes, half nature, half nightmare. There was a ghost whose body looked like a chair with no back legs, and its elongated, jagged face was one of the arms. She saw it in her living room, late one night. There was another she saw waiting for her on her front porch sometimes, when she came home alone. Its body was that of a very old dog, covered in mud or blood, but its legs were the broken, uneven branches of a tree. She saw them often enough that she was able to convince herself that she wasn't really seeing them. They were just the weird little things your imagination puts in the corner of your eye when you turn your head too quickly. Everyone has them.

And later, in high school mostly, there were the voices. She was always hearing voices, sometimes so loud that they were crowding out her own thoughts. She thought it might be the ghosts again, at first but then one day during a test in Geometry she realized she could recognize some of the thoughts she was hearing. They were coming from inside other people's brains. She was hearing the thoughts of the other students around her, and no matter what she did she couldn't stop it from happening.

She started losing sleep. She could no longer focus on anything anyone was saying directly to her, especially not in school. She kept trying to find excuses to not go to school, so she could hide at home in her room where it was quieter. Her grades were suffering. Her parents were worried. They talked to her but what could she tell them? They talked to her teachers and doctors. First it was: Maybe she's not trying. Maybe she's just being lazy. And then later it was: Well maybe she's trying but she's not really applying herself. And then, later, maybe it was her attention, ADD, ADHD, something like that. Anyways there were probably some meds that would help. And there were. She saw a psychiatrist who spent 10 minutes with her, reading questions off a list. He scribbled out a prescription for something and hustled her out the door. Whatever it was it worked.The voices receded into the background. Her grades came back up. She graduated just fine.

She thought about community college. But to do what? And then her dad got sick and it made more sense to stay and help her mom with him. To be around. It was kind of relief, honestly. A clear sign that this was the path, this was what she was meant to be doing.

Kristin liked signs very much.

She got married not too long after her father died. To a nice guy named Jonathan. He bought her things. Complimented her. Did the things you expect a man to do. Maybe expected things from her more than she would have liked. There was never a conversation about her doing all the cooking and dishes, it just seemed to happen that way. But like who cared. She had friends who'd chosen far less wisely in their marriages, who had far more difficult roads to walk.

She got pregnant a little while later. Couldn't remember if they'd been trying or not, it just happened. It seemed like it was happening on the right schedule. Beautiful boy, Roger, after her father. Life did whatever it does. He was almost 3 now and they were talking about having another baby. Kristin hoped it would be a girl this time. She had the perfect name already picked out.

Sometimes it felt like things were just happening to her. She wondered what were the choices she was actually making and what were the choices being made for her. And then one day she made a choice that changed everything.

She was playing a game on her iPad while her husband watched some show that she did not care about on TV. She finished a level and the game said she could get 500 more coins if she tweeted about her progress. Did she want 500 more coins? Hell yeah she wanted 500 more coins. Those things were expensive and it seemed so ridiculous to spend real money on fake game coins.

Kristin decided: I am going to tweet about my progress in my iPad.

But then it was a whole hassle. You couldn't just press Tweet because she hadn't set up a Twitter account yet. So she did all that. She tried to fill out the fields and get through the sign-up as quickly as possible. She just wanted to get her coins and do the next level. She had heard about how identities get stolen on the internet so she knew not to use her real name. Lil' Miss Kiki her Daddy used to call her. So that. Although the thing said her name couldn't have spaces. And the one she wanted was already taken. How about LilMizKiki_321. Fine.

She got through those screens and then it was telling her that next she had to choose a bunch of people to follow. Why? She just wanted to send the dumb tweet. But fine, she scrolled down the page and jabbed at some news sites and celebrities at random. Who cared. She just needed to get past this, it was taking forever.

All done now? No. THEN, once she had her account set up she had to go back into her iPad settings? and link her iPad to her Twitter account? Or something? She didn't totally understand but if she wanted to send the tweet from the game to get the coins it was what was required, apparently. Very frustrating. So many steps. They sure don't make it easy, do they. Almost not worth it. But she had a sunk cost at this point. She'd been trying to set up her stupid Twitter for a half hour.

Finally! Success! Twitter all set up at long last, hallelujah. She went back into her game so she could send the tweet and announce her progress and get her coins. And...it was no longer giving her the option of tweeting her progress for coins? The thing was just gone? It wanted her to just play the next level?

What. The Actual. F*ck.

Kristin was seething now. She could barely see. Why are computers so terrible? Why do they make everything so confusing and difficult on purpose? She was trying to figure out what was doing wrong and the sound from her husband's TV show was super annoying. Her husband's breathing was super annoying. This stupid old uncomfortable chair that she was sitting in, one she'd inherited from her parents, had taken off their hands because they wanted to get rid of it, even though she'd never even liked it, was super, super annoying. She was so upset and frustrated she barely knew what to do with herself, where to direct this anger, how to make it better.

She decided to go back and do the previous game level again. Maybe it would give her the tweeting option again. She stabbed her way through the level, tapping furiously on her iPad. She finished the level and THANK F*CKING G*D the window popped up, asking her if she'd like to tweet about her progress for 500 coins.

Yes. She pressed the thing and the tweet sent and it took her away from her game and deposited her on Twitter, dropping her unbidden into a firehose timeline full of unending updates from news sites and celebrities that she did not ask for or care about, at all. Like what is any of this? And she clicked around trying to get OUT of Twitter, and finally she had to close the app and go back to her game, and she didn't know what had gone wrong but it didn't even give her the coins.

And that was LilMizKiki_321's first day on Twitter. She was born screaming and furious.

~*~*~*~

WHO is Kristin/LilMizKiki_321? What does this section have to do anything?!? IDK!! MAYBE IT'LL BE IMPORTANT LATER! WE'LL SEE!!!!