Snakes and Ladders - Falice

18

            We took a chance, God knows we tried. I have loved you since we were 18.

жжж

Everybody has a dark side. Though some wear it more blatantly than others. For women like Alice and Betty Cooper, their darkness was bottled up tightly. Like mother like daughter, or so they say. But while Alice had spent years learning how to keep that darkness safely hidden, her daughter was struggling just to keep it from boiling over.

жжж

If there was one thing to be said about Alice Cooper, it was that she was resilient. Once she set her mind to something, there would be hell to pay for anyone who tried to stand in her way. For as long as she could remember, she had been worshipped for this very reason. Of course, that wasn't how she had been feeling lately. She did what she had to do to get where she wanted, regardless of the bridges she had to burn or the people she had to hurt in the process. Collateral damage was something that had never bothered her. That was what she told herself.

It never bothered her until it caught up to her. And when it did, it stopped her in her tracks and forced her to face the life that she had superficially created as well as the reality she had left behind. And she never was the best at accepting things that she had no control over. With the intentions of keeping the past at bay, she didn't even let herself think about it let alone consider the fact that maybe she had followed her gut mindlessly all the while disregarding her persistent heart.

She never dreamed that her perfectly polished world would begin to crack. And once that initial crack had been implemented, it was as though the very floors gave out from under her and suddenly, she had been abandoned by everything that she had worked so hard to conjure. It wasn't just the leather jacket she used to wear and the insignia that permanently resides on her left hip, it was the man with the severely brown eyes that knew all too much about her. The man who she had pushed away and left behind. The only thing that she knew without a shadow of a doubt that she truly regretted, though she would never admit that even to herself. The one thing that would forever feel unfinished.

Letting herself wonder what could have been if she had done things differently only ever lead to a pain and sadness that she wished she didn't still feel. The lingering effects of the grand fallout should have dissipated by now, or at least minimized. But she could still be taken back to that very time and place as if it was the present. She didn't like to wonder what that meant.

One had to give her some credit for the sheer fact that Alice Cooper had morphed herself into exactly who she always wanted to be. Her lifelong desire and struggle had given way to the image that she had always planned and hoped for. Beginning as young as eighteen years old, when she made the change that would forever haunt her. She crossed the tracks and let the work began as she pawned away whichever pieces of herself that she no longer wanted. She traded black leather for pastel blue, brown eyes for green eyes, barbed wire for white picket, Southside for Northside.

Of course, the transition would have been much easier for her had the man that still gripped her heart in his rough hands not roam the same hallways as her day after day. Luckily for her sanity, they lived different lives thanks to her decisions. She no longer had anything to do with the people that he surrounded himself with, nor the places that he visited or the promises that he made. By the end of the year, he skipped class so often that she wondered if he had dropped out completely before reminding herself that she couldn't care anymore.

She worked her way to becoming so pristine and proper that people eventually forgot she ever pledged allegiance to a gang of reptile-worshipping Southsiders in the first place. But there was one thing that she couldn't ignore. Something that if she'd known about, she still doesn't know if she ever would have left any of it behind in the first place. Something that made her forever a part of that world. But it was also something that the others – those whose opinions she banked everything on – would soon begin to notice if action wasn't taken. She was a teenager, and certainly in no position to take on what had been bestowed upon her. It was something that would never let her be the person that she had been making changes in hopes of becoming, but that didn't mean that she wouldn't set aside any and all superficial notions to do what the universe had asked of her.