BLUE HAWAII sugawara koushi

six. HE'S KINDA HOT

          With each neon pulsation of pungent light, Aoki Daniel can feel the black ichor that infiltrated his insides being purged in a tide of glittering eye shadow and slick lip gloss. The hives of sin and humanity in conjunction do not exorcise the demons that remain within his shadows, but rather conceal the blemishes against his soul.

And, at the very least, they do more for himself that praying ever did.

People like him, they overlook that he's the pastor's boy and the class president forsake of the skinny idiot in the Hawaiian shirt. Typically they're hungry for more, for real names and for bordering fictional stories. Daniel's willing to provide. If he can sell his soul to the devil without blinking he can certainly sweep away a crowd of the radiant youth careening through life with impaired judgement in a riptide of deceit and malcontent.

          Frivolent things like parties are timeless, all he can see is rabid youth biting at one another in the dark to spread the infection of lackadaisical stupor (or an STD or two) when they return to a life of suburban normalcy. Their utopian paradise cannot compare to the travesty that creates a teenage party.

Daniel's just an attender, a bystander as he witnesses other sell their souls for a pretty ring. It's the price of glamour, to appear higher than one is without having to fix your posture or your gaze. The devil will do it all for you.

He's more notable as a partygoer, random cameos like he's a young starlet get his name skipped like a stone across a river and into a rumor mill (Daniel happens to be the poster child for those), with a circle of friends like his, it's hard to be out of the limelight. Daniel's made his mark, he's carved it into furniture and dug it into skin, yet he can't seem to abolish the repulsive need to see blood spilled.

          "Wanna hit some with me?" A girl stumbles over to his side of the kitchen island as he eyes her. Dyed platinum blonde hair and neon acrylics like claws Daniel smiles, wolfish and hungry. He could easily wreck her life.

          "Sorry, made a promise to a friend that I wouldn't hit anything." There was a promise that his best friend made him swear to, but it's all blurry under a macabre of dim lights as he cradles the line of her chin in his hand.

She looks up with heavy lidded eyes, smitten, drunk out of her mind. It's like she's a kitten that doesn't know she's brushing up against the devil contained within a boy. "It's okay. I can keep a secret." They laugh.

           "Let's play a game."

She agrees daintily, like she has nothing to lose, but Daniel can't help her see what she doesn't want to. He is not god for a boy with such a god complex.

So he tears off a piece of her soul to feed it to the monster within his heart with a handful of festive pills and a ouija board, blood dripping from her nose as she lays passed out on the ground.

Alive.

Shallow breaths like she's running out of oxygen.

Dead.

Convulsing, the seizures wracking her body are destroying her nervous system, tearing apart those delicate neuron connections faultlessly.

Alive.

Twitching, her body is ablaze with transparent fire faster than anyone semi-conscious to grasp.

Dead.

The whites of her eyes are fettered with broken arteries giving her the appearance of crimson sclera.

Trapped in between.