Loudspeaker

11. Homecoming Queen (Red)

It was darker than normal, that night.
A mist hung over as I stepped out to the gates of the prom.
It was finally time, for the Homecoming Queen contest,
The height of the school year.
This was when I was going to take my revenge,
Against the idiots of the blues, an ocean of things they don't know.
I was going to crush them, those people who didn't know what they were talking about with their theories about how popularity didn't matter.
When it came down to reality, it did, it determined who respected you, whether you got your way,
And I knew I was going to further mine tonight.

The campaigns had lasted for months,
Just a bunch of unknowing sheep I could easily pull around for votes.
I weaponised the internet, spreading rumours around about the blues,
That they were gay, or that they were bullies in the past.
It was too easy, if I'm honest.
They spread far and wide, as I posed as the way out, and the sheep flocked to me,
Their new Shepard.
Forging was easy, it was all just social engineering,
As I laughed to myself, having pulled people around, endorphins high.
Now the people would finally believe me,
The chants of 'When we go one, we go all' filling the halls, filling the classes,
Red posters dominating the blue ones.
There was going to be red tonight.

I pulled out of the limo into the prom,
Smirking as I pulled on a smile and waved to the crowd,
My loyal fans, the red army of sorts, cheering before me.
However, inside I was hollow.
Something just didn't feel right anymore.
It felt almost empty, my soul, like I had nothing left apart from the endorphins that I got from bossing around people,
That was the only escape I got from the void inside my chest where my heart should be.
However, tonight was the most important night, and I couldn't show that side of me.
I had to be the perfect girl, the dominator,
Like I had been last year, when I became the 45th Homecoming Queen.

I made the speech I had rehearsed many times before,
Denouncing the blues, referring the rumours many times,
And the crowd bought it, just like that,
Or so it seemed when the voting finished and the announcer blared,
'Team Red is 2020's Homecoming Queen!'
With my position last year, I'd bought out all the voters,
Appointed them all personally in secret,
So they were all members of the Red Army,
And I forced them into rigging the votes,
So only mine were counted.
To be honest, it was the only way to get reappointed.
I had to pull dirty tactics if I wanted to win,
And who doesn't want to?
It's not worth being a loser,
If you can cheat your way to the crown.
And when this is the only thing distracting me from a gaping hole in my heart,
I'd go with it no problem.

However, not everything went to plan.
Even though I was crowned,
A coward from the team blew my cover a few days later on the return to school,
Showing me off as a tyrant who seeked to gain control of the school.
And that's when I realised what I had done wrong.
I went from loved to hated in a day,
When I realised that I had never been loved in the first place,
Just had seemed to be,
And that more people had actually voted for the blue.
Later, Team Blue were crowned,
As she then announced the end to the contest,
Saying it was too corrupt, that it was pointless judging people on popularity,
And that it might be right to see who they are rather than the amount of people they can pull on their side,
As she immediately resigned.
And to be honest,
I can see why, now in the aftermath.

In my attempts to secure the crown,
I had destroyed it in my failures.
Karma had backfired onto me,
My goals truly proving self destructive.
I sometimes wonder, all this time later,
Why I chased a pointless goal, a faraway star,
When it never existed in the first place, and was unreachable,
And when it had driven me to obsession and sacrificing people's hearts to souls,
When in truth it was souring mine,
Burning it away like acid.
I was Team Red, I was the 45th Homecoming Queen,
But it means nothing to me.
In truth, it did more harm then good, leaving me with one question.
Why did I do this in the first place?

KW ~ 24/8/20
by Clumpywoods