Of Toads, Peaches and Teenage Angst: Chapter 1

A break from all the seriousness of my novels. This one will only be around six chapters. Contains slightly suggestive themes and mildly strong language. Rated K-16 as it says up there. Anyhow, I hope you enjoy it and feedback would be great. Thanks in advance.
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It started out just like any other day. I took a long, scalding hot shower. Long enough to have my mom scream at me to hurry the hell up or else she'd – I stopped listening right about here. Afterwards, I ate the same old porridge in the same old accusing silence. The porridge was cold and lumpy and stuck to the insides of my cheeks. I forced it down anyway.

Next came the mandatory last-minute sprint to the bus-stop. I caught the old, rusty can just leaving; I flailed my arms wildly and thankfully the bus pulled over. As I stepped in breathlessly, the elderly man (with a goofy cowboy hat I might add) behind the wheel cast me an annoyed look. I glared at him until he looked away. I slumped down on the first seat from the front, where I was practically invisible to anyone in or out of the bus. You'll never guess what happened eight minutes, thirty-two seconds later. School. What? You guessed it? Well, that's just bloody genius of you; want a medal to go with that grin?

Yeah, school happened just like any other day of my life – discounting vacations and stuff of course. Actually... Not quite.

The history lesson might've been a tad more boring than usual. Smack dab in the middle of the lesson, a droning monotonous voice interrupted my sleep by declaring I was bound for detention. I didn't even bother to look up. You still reading? Wow, I'm genuinly amazed.

Anyhow, that was how I found myself trudging home with a red-and-gold sunset casting a long, shaky shadow in front of me. I intentionally dragged my feet, listening to my sneakers scrape against the dark concrete. The wind played with the fresh leaves on their stark branches and tossed around the ones on the ground, setting them all a-rustle. A distant bell tolled, declaring that it was seven o' clock. A small rock caught my eye and I unleashed my frustration on it. It sailed a good thirteen meters and clattered down the drain I had been aiming for. A grin ghosted its way onto my face. My back straightened and my stride lengthened. I let out a sigh; with it went my bundled-up anger, uncoiling out of my chest like a disturbed serpent.
~~~

I threw open our front door and stomped in, kicking my shoes into a corner.

”Anybody home?” I called into the silent apartment, just to make sure. I smiled slyly when no answer came my way; finally some time alone. I knew just how I'd abuse it.

Picking up my bag, which just happened to be devoid of any school books, I made my way up the oaken stairs. I instinctively skipped the fourth stair from the top, knowing it would creak under my weight. The door to my room was just to the left. The door stuck, as always, and I had to give it a good-natured full-body tackle to coax it open. I slung the bag onto my unmade bed, and instantly went to my drawer. I pulled out a shiny black object from a nifty secret compartment I made myself. Fine, it was under my socks. Happy? I placed said object in my pocket, its familiar weight was comforting as it pressed against my thigh. I exited my room and went through the non-sticking door opposite of mine.

The clinically gleaming bathroom was dazzlingly bright, the light shining through a frosted window. Not frosted as in snow, but the, ah, you know. The sort of blurred glass that is hard to see out of. The cool kind. And we have it. In your arrogant face.

I walked to the sink and turned the tap, watching the water cascade into the bowl. I waited for the luke-warm water to pool into my cupped hands, staring mirror-me in the eyes. I resented how that saggy caricature of my lustrous looks dared to resemble me. My handsome features were obscured in the crystal clean glass: my strong nose just looked too big, my meadow-green eyes were dull and supported by ample bags. The thin lips and pointed chin that dominated my lower face made mirror-me seem close to starvation. Even the beard I was growing was kin to a parched patch of weeds.

When I glanced down, my hands were full of water and overflowing as it was. Surprise, surprise genius, I thought to myself. I grinned ruefully and threw the liquid onto my face, attempting to rinse away the impurities. I looked back up at the reflective surface. Didn't work. Figures.

Shrugging, I turned around and shut the door, locking it with care. Pulling down my pants, I sat down on the toilet. I'll skip past the next part, to spare you the details of my adventure to stomach-related relief. Six minutes later, I was still seated on the white plastic ring. It was time.

I reached down, past the heavy fabric of my pants, to grasp the cherished possession. It felt slim and soft on the rough skin of my fingers. It felt perfect. I closed my eyes, preparing myself emotionally for the coming delight. The slow start, the sprint to the finish, and the sweet rush of pleasure once that end is achieved. I smiled in anticipation. And they said ths was bad. How can anything that brings so much joy be bad? They also said I should get help for my addiction. Hah. I should get help? For something I've no problem with? Hah.

No, now's not the time for bitter thoughts, I counciled myself. Relaxing once more, I finally opened my eyes. I let my hand go through the familiar motions by itself. The screen of my beloved DS lit up and the game started up. Super Mario 3. It doesn't get much better than this. A message flashed up, ordering me to 'Press the start button'. I happily obliged.

Nothing happened. I stared down at the screen, dumbstruck. It couldn't be lagging, not now! Surely not. I hit the start-button again. And again. And again. I sneered at the stupid machine, turning off the power – except, it didn't turn off.

I laughed out loud nervously. ”Alrighty then, this has been great fun, but now thou shallt work!”

Holding down, or up because of the retarded layout of the DS, the power button, I attempted to stall out the machine. I grew even more nervous, for a minute later, nothing was still happening.

”You have got to be kidding me,” I growled under my breath.

The screen kept on spewing out light, blinking softly. I let out a deep breath. Calm down, whatever happens, calm down. Calm down... I fought back the tears and closed my eyes half-calmly. My breathing slowed down and my chest fell and rose smoothly. Calm... A sudden light-headedness overtook me. The strange feeling slowly crept down from my cranium to engulf the rest of me; the weightlessness was oddly comforting, a mother's embrace. I felt safe. I dared not open my eyes, nothing to risk this state of well-being. Still, my eyes cracked open of their own accord.

A flawless blue void surrounded me. I blinked. The blueness stayed just where it was. Well, that's strange. My eyes started watering a moment later and I realized an insanely strong wind was smothering my face and whipping my hair about. How in the blazes could such a wind force exist in a bathroom?

Unless... A disturbing thought snaked its way into my mind. Unless I'm not in the bathroom anymore. No. This isn't a damn fairytale. Nevertheless, my curiosity won and I twisted my body 180 degrees, so that I was facing what I judged to be downwards. Unfortunately, I was right.

Staring up at me was a collage of primary colors that burned my eyes in their intensity. But that wasn't the reason why a scream built up in my lungs. No, the best part was that the colors were coming closer by the second. Rapidly. The scream bubbled past my lips and filled the empty space with its horror.

This can't be happening. It's a dream. Just a dream. I'll wake up any second now. A dream, nothing else. Any second now.

The scathingly vivid landscape kept on creeping closer. Creeping with damn huge strides. I clung to my belief of this being but a dream with the same attachment a toddler has for his favorite toy that's being snatched away. Clutching and screaming. Meanwhile, the mass of colors began to take vague shapes. Grassy hills dotted the otherwise flat scene; in the distance I think I saw a patch of desert. Round trees appeared to be littering flowing fields of multicolored flowers; baby-blue, teenage-girl pink, candy-green and piss-yellow mashed together in a cluster that severly affronted every single one of my senses. I swear the sheer intensity of the colors created a haze of fluctuating heat on their surface, obscuring their outlines.

And I was still plummeting down towards those pretty flowers.

Well, let's just hope I hit a soft patch, I thought, Maybe then I'll just break a few bones. Yeah. Right. And two-legged mushrooms inhabit this place.

Unfortunately, I never found out if I would have survived a crash landing into a bush. Good ol' Lady Fortune intervened again, in the form of a majestic castle. Right under me. Exactly where I was about to fall. That humorous bitch, her.

Mind you, I wasn't screaming anymore. I was practically howling. This was no dream; that much was evident. Ideas raced through my mind, unchecked. The world had ended. There'd been marijuana in the school lunch. I'd gone crazy. Aliens had zapped me into another dimension.

I settled on a compromise. I just kept on howling.

A tower loomed up under me. It was bright red. The roof was pointed like the ones in fairytales. The ones that housed fair maidens. The roof was sky-blue. I reflexively braced myself for the imminent impact, though deep down I knew it to be completely useless. The roof was made out of tiles. Curious, oval-shaped tiles. My arms flapped, trying to slow my descent. My voice had gone shrill from the stress to my throat. To anyone surveying, I must've resembled a yowling cat. Ironically enough, this little pussy-cat wasn't about to fall on its feet. The tiles were slightly cracked. Green shoots of grass shot out o--

My chest hit something hard. I guess I crashed. Funny.

Okay, I don't have time to give this a full review now, but hopefully I will tomorrow.

For now I will say:

First of all, great title. That's (obviously) what attracted me to this in the first place.

Second of all: Too many adverbs, especially at the beginning. They started to stand out.

Sadly, the rest will have to wait until tomorrow - I'm up at 6 a.m. for work, so for now I'd better enjoy the last hour or so I have before I force myself to go to sleep. *cries at the thought of having to wake up at 5 a.m.*

But you will see more at some point in the near future, I promise!

~Blue

I was laughing by the end of it. XD

Though it was a little...iffy? You were over-describing everything. Description is good, so we know what things look like, where they are, etc. but there's a limit. If you over-describe things, there's no flow.

Flow would be nice. Your sentences were clipped and halting. Think of driving down the road and the idiot in front of you keeps stepping on the breaks, making you do the same. When I was reading it, my mind kept going "whoa, stop! There's a period there!" Use commas ;P

Will be waiting somewhat impatiently for more ^_^

Blood

Thanks for the good feedback.

Ouch, Blue, you have my sympathy. No-one should wake up at 5 am. D: Other than that, thanks for the compliment on the title; I was proud of it myself. I'll check into that adverb thingy as well.

I'm glad it made you laugh, Blood, as that was what I was hoping to achieve with it. About the over-describing... I see your point. But I'm not sure if I want to change it. By the short sentences I assume you mostly mean the last paragraph. That was to make it seem more realistic, as no-one's gonna have long thoughts while about to die. As for the others, I tried to convey a sort of bitterness through clipped sentences. But I'll revise them as you pointed that out.

Okay. So, first what I'm going to do is, I'm going to quote the whole story and go through it. Anything I underline is something I think is unnecessary - mostly this will be adverbs, overdone description, and redundancies. You don't have to get rid of this, obviously, but I suggest deleting the stuff I underlined and reading through to see how you like it without all that stuff. Then if you don't like it, you can just put everything back the way it was. Things in italics are things I've reworded (usually in place of whatever I deleted), and things in bold and brackets are just my thoughts.

It started out just like any other day. I took a long, scalding hot shower, long enough to have my mom scream at me to hurry the hell up or else she'd – I stopped listening right about here. Afterwards, I ate the same old my porridge in the same old accusing silence. The porridge was cold and lumpy and stuck to the insides of my cheeks. I forced it down anyway.

Next Then came the mandatory last-minute sprint to the bus-stop. I caught the old, rusty rusty old [switching the order of "rusty" and "old" makes this sentence flow better, plus you can get rid of the comma] can just leaving; I flailed my arms wildly and thankfully the bus pulled over. As I stepped in breathlessly jumped in, the elderly man (with a goofy cowboy hat I might add) behind the wheel cast me an annoyed look. He wore a cowboy hat. I glared at him and his goofy hat until he looked away. I slumped down on in the first seat from the front, where I was practically invisible to anyone in or out of the bus. You'll never guess what happened eight minutes and thirty-two seconds later. School. What? You guessed it? Well, that's just bloody genius of you. Want a medal to go with that grin?

Yeah, school happened just like any other day of my life – discounting vacations and stuff of course. actually,not quite.

The history lesson might've been a tad was even more boring than usual. Smack dab in the middle of the lesson, a droning monotonous voice interrupted itself and my sleep nap by declaring I was bound for detention. I didn't even bother to look up. You still reading? Wow, I'm genuinly amazed.

Anyhow, That was how I found myself trudging home with a red-and-gold the sunset casting a long, shaky shadow in front of me. I intentionally dragged my feet, listening to my sneakers scrape against the dark concrete. The wind played with the fresh leaves on their stark branches and tossed around set the ones on the ground, setting them all a-rustle. A distant bell tolled, declaring that it was seven o' clock. A small rock caught my eye and I unleashed my frustration on it on a small rock. It sailed a good thirteen meters and clattered down the drain I had been aiming for. A grin ghosted its way onto across my face. My back straightened and my stride lengthened. I let out a sigh; with it went my bundled-up anger, uncoiling out of my chest like a disturbed serpent. [Good imagery, but "a disturbed serpent" sounds like an angry image, which you don't want if his anger is leaving him.]

~~~

I threw open our front door and stomped in, kicking my shoes into a corner.

”Anybody home?” I called into the silent apartment, just to make sure. I smiled slyly when no answer came my way. Finally, some time alone. I knew just how I'd abuse it. [haha]

Picking up my empty bag, which just happened to be devoid of any school books, I made my way up the oaken stairs. I instinctively skipped the fourth stair from the top, knowing it would creak under my weight. The door to my room was just to the left. The door It stuck, as always, and I had to give it a good-natured full-body tackle to coax force it open. I slung the bag onto my unmade bed, and instantly went to my drawer. I pulled out a shiny black object from a nifty the secret compartment I had made myself. Fine, it was under my socks. Happy? I placed said the object in my pocket. Its familiar weight was comforting as it pressed against my thigh. I exited my room and went through the non-sticking door opposite of mine left my room.

[Why is he so angsty? Yes, his mom yelled at him to hurry up in the shower, and yes, he got a detention, but so what? If his father died a month ago, or he has no friends, etc etc, there's real reason for him to be angry, but everyone gets yelled at by their mothers from time to time, and a lot of people also get detention. At this point in the story, he's kind of funny but also kind of annoying. If you want the reader to be sympathetic to his angst, you might want to do more to show us WHY he's angsty.]

The clinically gleaming bathroom was dazzlingly bright, the light shining through a frosted window. Not frosted as in snow, but the, ah, you know. The sort of blurred glass that is hard to see out of. The cool kind. And we have it. In your arrogant face. [This is kind of funny, and I kind of like it, but it's unnecessary. You could delete everything after "frosted window." Especially since I'm pretty sure a lot of people DO have frosted windows, so what exactly is he trying to throw in our faces here?]

I walked to the sink and turned the tap, watching the water cascade into the bowl. I waited for the luke-warm water to pool into my cupped hands, staring mirror-me in the eyes. I resented how that saggy caricature of my lustrous looks dared to resemble me. My handsome features were obscured in the crystal clean glass: my strong nose just looked too big, my meadow-green eyes were dull and supported by ample bags. The thin lips and pointed chin that dominated my lower face made mirror-me seem close to starvation. Even the beard I was growing was kin to a parched patch of weeds. [Is this paragraph supposed to show us what he looks like? I guess it is, but it's a bit obvious. I'm not too sure about this paragraph and the next, hence the minimal crossings-out and revision.]

When I glanced down, my hands were full of water and overflowing as it was. Surprise, surprise genius, I thought to myself. I grinned ruefully and threw the liquid onto my face, attempting to rinse away the impurities. [Like I said, not sure about this paragraph either, but the previous sentence and the next two are actually kind of nice.] I looked back up at the reflective surface. Didn't work. Figures.

Alas, it is time for me to leave... However, I do have comments for the story after this point, so as soon as I can I'll pop back in and finish my review. Okay?

In the meantime, I hope this has been helpful!

~Blue

Okay, here's the last one from me. I could go through and make more of the corrections like those I made earlier, but on this half of the story I have a more general comment to make.

Comments, rather. More general comments to make.

First off: The mysterious black object is....a Nintendo DS. Disappointment!!! I mean, it was kind of funny, but...you built it up as something SO BIG, and then it was...a DS. That's it. Nothing that is, as far as I can tell so far, important to the story, nothing that's magical or powerful or life-changing. It's a game. Maybe it's because I'm somewhat the stereotypical girl, not into video games, but.....yeah, I was disappointed. (Rather like "The Mousetrap." I mean, seriously? The COP is the killer? I had no emotional investment in him!!! *slaps Agatha Christie*) If you're going to build it up that much, it should be because it's somehow important to the story later on - which, I admit, maybe it is - after all, this is only the first chapter. I don't know where it's going.

But I do think it's overdoing it a little to have him practically just because his DS won't start up...although I should probably ask: How old is this kid? Still, he's obviously not a very young child...

The main problem you have, as far as I can see, is either figuring out what this story is about or else getting and staying to the point of the story. Your style is interesting and easy to read, and you definitely have a character here - while he is the "angsty teenager," he's not a stock character. The problem is, the story starts off too small and gets confusing when you try to make it big. Like, beginning: Ordinary day. Shower, breakfast, mom yelling at character, almost missing the bus, etc, right down to sitting on the toilet. (Reader: "Okay, big deal.") Then you bring in the mysterious black object ("Ooh, cool!") only to make it a DS ("Awww...") Then the character freaks out because the DS isn't working. ("Baby.") Then, suddenly, blue void, weird colors, flowers, falling, castle, tower. (At which point the reader starts thinking, "...drug trip?")

I mean, this is probably going somewhere cool, but I'm not sure it works to start off with such complete normality and then suddenly go into a random parallel world (or whatever) appearing in the bathroom.

So I hope this gave you something to think about. PM me if you have any questions.

~Blue

Hi!

I liked this, it was very ROFL inducing. I like your character's snark and the humour it evoked. Especially the bit about the DS; you were building up the tension and I was sure it was going to end up with something dirty and then it turns out to be a DS. LOL.

That said, although I did like the humour, it was choked by an excess of words. As someone above said, you over-described everything. Descriptions of the most simple things went on for far too long, so I didn't find it as funny as I could have. Sometimes in humour, sparse is good. Don't dress the jokes up too much, otherwise we can't look at them properly and we miss some of the funniest bits.

The falling-into-another-world thing went on for a bit too long, I thought. It's the same thing as the humour; you used so many words I found it difficult to concentrate on the action. And personally, I disagree with you on having short thoughts while dying. In times of crisis, I tend to think in huge long run-ons that don't make a lot of sense; and I think in fragments when I'm angry. Though that is just me.

All that sounds very harsh, but I did really love this. I like your character best. Their take on the situation is very amusing, and I am amused. And I love your title. When are the peaches going to appear, lol?

PM me if you have any questions!

-twit

Thanks for taking the time to comment. ^^

The over-describing could very well be the result of writing this only on lessons I'm extremely bored on. I'll be sure to calm down on that on the next chapter. The "drug trip" will be explained in the next chappy and the peaches will appear as well.

Hello, I'm just going to review this quickly from what I've read so far. As many people have said you over explained things. It took a while to get to the point, seems like you relied too much on wording than action. Which is a pity. What I did enjoy was the way the antagonist was almost in tears when the DS didn't work. It was extremely realistic, I'm sure that is how we'd all be if something like that happened to us (I sure as hell would).

So far the story seems good plotted and well thought out(a little too much though, hahha).

Keep it up

Hello, I'm just going to review this quickly from what I've read so far. As many people have said you over explained things. It took a while to get to the point, seems like you relied too much on wording than action. Which is a pity. What I did enjoy was the way the antagonist was almost in tears when the DS didn't work. It was extremely realistic, I'm sure that is how we'd all be if something like that happened to us (I sure as hell would).

So far the story seems good plotted and well thought out(a little too much though, hahha).

Keep it up