Young Writers Society

Chapter One

Ness’s bed bounced up and down as if she had just fallen on to it. She sat bolt upright, her heart pounding and body drenched in sweat. A digital clock sat on a cardboard box next to where she slept and its agonizing alarm screamed raucously at her.

She reached an arm over and swatted it off, annoyed at the sound. The loud beep had pushed all memory of a disturbing dream out of her head, and all she cared about was rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. She could barely make out the shape of anything in the dark room, but she knew without even looking that it was all falling apart.

“Hey, you’re up,” Ness’s mother, Cassandra, said from the doorway of her bedroom. Cassandra flicked on the fluorescent overhead lights and blinded Ness.

“Geeze, Mum, I just got up. Turn ‘em off.”

“We have to get moving if we’re going to make it to the airport, hun.”

Suddenly, grim reality struck: today was the day she was leaving Los Angeles forever.

The deteriorating room suddenly started to look like heaven to her despite the crumbling walls and creaky floorboards. Ness and Cassandra had lived just outside the city for as long as she could remember—until Cliff came along.

Ness tried to suppress the anger that began to surface in her gut when she thought about Cliff Horowitz, the wealthy businessman that robbed her of her mother.

Shut up, Ness told herself. She’s happy now, and that’s all that matters.

Yeah, a distant part of her mind added, and now you have to go and live with him and his bratty kids on the other side of the country.

As Ness lay in bed, she decided that if she hadn’t been forced to move to Pennsylvania, then Cassandra’s second marriage wouldn’t be so bad. Los Angeles was her city: sure, she didn’t have very many friends—in fact, most people treated her like dirt, but still—she didn’t want to leave what she thought was the best city in the world for some small, suburban town outside of Pittsburgh.

Slowly, she dragged herself off the mattresses—the wealthy Cliff made her dispose of her broken bed and allowed her to pick out brand new furniture for her room in Pennsylvania—and staggered off to her last shower in the Los Angeles apartment.

The walls in the hallway were cracking and the chipped toilet was always clogging. She hated it passionately every day of her life...but now she felt bad for hating it. Maybe she had always secretly loved the way the toilet annoyed her, and maybe the cracks in the wall were part of a giant mural to be painted there some day.

Ness looked at herself critically in the bathroom’s yellowing mirror. She used to look like a porcelain doll until her fourteenth birthday, always dying her odd red hair to blonde and dressing in the most stylish clothes she could afford.

But one day, all of that changed. She finally washed away all of the light yellow dye and let her true colors shine through—and as that happened, she saw how all of the girls that used to be her friends really were. She traded platform shoes for Etnies and Vans, creating a style separate from the popular crowd at her high school—and the popular girls traded her for some other girl that looked the part of Malibu Barbie much more than Ness did. That was when she found out that even in a place like Los Angeles—a city where the word strange doesn’t exist—people still reacted negatively to her.

Anyone who saw Ness’s hair—the hair that changed her high school experience from Heaven to Hell—thought it was an expensive dye job, but it was very natural. Towards the front, her hair was auburn, shining red. On the sides and in the back, the auburn was laced with blonde and strawberry highlights, making it a completely different red from the front. Her grandmother told Cassandra one year that Ness was marked by the Devil with all of that hair—that odd, unnatural hair—and Cassandra laughed.

Ness tore her eyes from the mirror and hopped in the shower, erasing the memory of her grandmother from her mind. She absolutely hated the woman until the day she died—she didn’t like being called the Child of Satan every day of her life.

Especially when she had such a secret to hide....

Everything about her would make a person think that Ness Parazzi was the spawn of the Devil. What with her red hair, skin like porcelain, and strange, violet eyes to add even more of a contrast...and the secret...such a horrible, unusual secret....

Stop it, she told herself, washing the shampoo out of her hair. You’re not weird, just...gifted.

One of her old friends gave her a key chain that said that once. They never found out how true it was.

It’s more of a curse than a gift, the distant, evil part of her mind whispered to her.

“Hurry up, Ness!” her mother called from outside the door. “The moving men are here!”

Ness quickly washed soap off of her pale, slim body and hopped out of the shower. She wrapped a fluffy towel around herself and dried off.

Five minutes later, she was carrying the few cardboard boxes filled with the rest of her possessions into the tiny living room. Everything else was already sitting in her room in Pennsylvania, waiting for her to come and unpack it.

“Are you excited?” Cassandra asked, a sickening smile covering her pretty, olive-skinned face.

“Oh, yeah, I’m just like a kid in a candy store,” Ness said sarcastically.

Cassandra rolled her eyes, unfazed by her daughter’s bitterness. “Give it some time, okay? Everything seems bad now, I know—but it will get better, I promise.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, I do.” Cassandra bent over to finish taping the top of a box closed. When she stood up straight again, her face was pulled into another bright grin. “Just wait until you see the house. It’s a palace compared to this place, with a nice in-ground pool in the backyard and a beautiful game room.”

Ness bit her lip and let her mother continue gushing about the house, half ignoring her and half paying attention. She watched the moving men take the rest of the boxes out the door to take to their truck, which would arrive in Pennsylvania a few hours after them.

When everything was out of the apartment, it was time for Cassandra and Ness to head to the airport. Ness grabbed her messenger bag—filled with books and whatever else she might have needed for a four-hour long plane trip—and then stood in the living room for a moment with her mother.

“Well, this is it,” Cassandra said, taking a deep breath. “Time to start a new life, right?”

“Sure.” Ness looked around one last time, then walked out the door with her mother.

She didn’t look back.

* * * * *

The airport was so full of people that Ness was overwhelmed. She had never been on a plane in her life and had only been in an airport once to see off her grandmother on the old hag’s final flight. Ness could remember being thirteen at the time, and she had been wishing beyond all hope that she’d never have to look at the woman again in her lifetime.

The plane crashed a few minutes after departure, and Ness always felt as if the accident had been her fault.

However, it seemed impossible—and even if it had been her fault, she almost didn’t care.

Though she considered herself to have a bad history with airports, Ness wasn’t scared. She walked through the crowds easily, following her mother over moving walkways, past neat-looking stores, and through customs.

“Oh, come on, you have to be excited,” Cassandra said. There was a wide smile on her tanned face, so unlike Ness’s paleness.

“I’m just surging with joy,” Ness replied sarcastically.

Cassandra, however, didn’t seem to notice her sarcasm—either that, or she ignored it completely. “Cliff is going to meet us at the airport when we get to Pittsburgh,” she said. “He might bring Claire and Charlie with him.”

Ness resisted the urge to stop dead in her tracks. “Mom,” she said, her voice firm. “I do not want to ride from the airport to the house with Claire and Charlie. Sitting through the wedding was bad enough. I don’t even know how I’m going to live with them.”

“But Charlie’s such a cute little boy!” Cassandra protested.

“Yeah, but he’s annoying. Didn’t you notice?”

“Ness, he’s an eleven-year-old boy. You have to have patience with him.”

“Okay; fine. I’ll try to be patient with him. But I can’t say the same for Claire.”

Ness’s mind didn’t even want to touch upon the subject of her new stepsister. Claire was just like all of her ex-best friends from school in Los Angeles—petite, thin, and ridiculously full of herself. Not to mention the filthy rich father who spoiled her rotten.

Cassandra paused. Ness could tell that her mother knew there would be tension as far as Claire was concerned. “Just try to get along. Please? For me?”

Ness didn’t say anything.

Finally, they arrived at their gate. “We still have awhile,” Cassandra told her daughter, checking her watch.

“I’m going to go to the bathroom then,” Ness decided. She heard bad things about airplane bathrooms and airplane food—she didn’t want to take her chances.

“Don’t get lost,” Cassandra told her, a worried look in her eye. “And be back soon.”

“Mom, I’m seventeen, not eight,” Ness reminded her.

Slipping out of the sight of her mother, she visited one of the many Starbucks littered throughout the place to buy a bottled vanilla Frappucino and a blueberry muffin.

On the way back, she stepped into the bathroom. It was fairly clean and fairly deserted, except for an old lady washing her hands at the sink.

“Wonderful day for flying, isn’t it?” the old woman said as she scrubbed at a fingernail.

“Yeah, beautiful,” Ness replied, trying to be polite—although she couldn’t tell a good day for flying from a good day for whaling. She checked her reflection in the mirror, brushing a stray eyelash off her cheek. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the woman watching her.

“All that hair,” she said, a dreamy look on her face. “When I was your age, I had hair like that.” The woman turned her eyes to the mirror and looked closely at her stark white locks. “Now, the color’s all gone and it can never be as beautiful again. Oh, I miss my hair.”

The old woman turned her eyes back to Ness and studied her. Ness couldn’t help but notice the woman’s strange eyes—a pale purple color, not quite blue. In fact, her eyes looked strangely like Ness’s.

“You know, if I’m not mistaken—” She abruptly stopped in the middle of her sentence and said, “Oh, but I’m just getting ahead of myself, you know. Still stuck in the past—back in the days when I was your age…hard times, but oh, do I ever miss them.”

Ness gave a forced smile, not being sure what else she could do, and slowly backed away into a stall—and held back a scream as a man walked through the wall that the toilet was connected to. She barely saw his glowing, yellow cat-eyes and snakelike smile before he grabbed her by the hair.
She didn’t hold back her scream that time.

I like it! The beginning is a bit cliche, as it's a scenario that happens a lot, but it certainly had me interested when we got to the air port. I think it will be a good story I can't wait till the next chapter!!!

Ok, I'm hooked on you're story. Some of the sarcasm seams forced, but apart from that its really captivating. Some parts do seam a little cliche, yes, but some of that is unavoidable.

Seems good - especially like the grandmother bit - but I agree with jenn, some of the sarcasm doesn't feel quite right.

Yeah...Some of the sarcasm didn't feel natural. There are some little things you might rephrase, etc...but that'll come later. Maybe it's not important to the story, but she said the second marriage might not be bad if she didn't have to move. We know her step-dad's rich and has two kids. Is he nice? Is that why it wouldn't be unbearable?

Nice cliffhanger ending for the chapter. Well done. You may try cutting out some syllables on the last sentence. It's a little long, I think, for what you want. Maybe cut "that time" to make it more succinct. We already know that she had suppressed a scream the first time. Or, you could say, "That time, she screamed." Just to keep the suspense crisp.

Very good. I want to read the rest!

Very Cool, I love what Ness's character. The purple eyes are extremly exotic and strange, adding to her coolness. The cliff-hanger is awsome. Good going.

Very nicely done! The sarcasm seemed kind of unnatural. I love some of the details you put in, like Ness' hair, and the history behind it. You have a good way of describing things.

So far so good, i'll read the other chapter tommorow, but it getting intresting keep it up.