1.
Fact preceding fiction, she was sweet seventeen and straight from the bottle ‘golden blonde’. Almond eyes, counterfeit complexion, lip gloss layered lips. Slender hips hidden beneath layers of celebrated labels, jagged edges instead of elbows, deep dimples caving into crimson cheeks.
Loved and loathed, notoriously known as a cosmopolitan cover queen.
She kept a book black as coal, a list miles long. Her presence broke a healthy heart in two. A poisonous laugh, a toxic touch. She was the new cancer, contagious and incurable. A mystery to her own mirror. Pretty pictures and painted words were her expertise.
2.
He was all the opposite. A dazzling delinquent, a dropout and a dealer. All high tops and hash, little talk, lots of money. A criminal capable and quick-witted, complex in a million mystic ways. Humorous and always high, living in a constant haze.
Had it been a different moment,
a different place,
a different fate,
he would have became another name on her list
no different than the rest.
It was predestined, a fairy tale gone faulty.
She stepped a bit too close, and found herself falling fast into a world so foreign from her own.
3.
(Insert tequila.)
Sweet seventeen, hard liquor soaked into her skin. A shot glass seated before her on the carpeted floor, a momentary ‘best friend forever’ to her right. A double date to nowhere but a dizzy hell, leading the cosmopolitan cover queen to a porcelain throne. One into which she spilled her stomach's contents, and silent tears she’d never show.
He held her hair back.
(Insert tequila) and bruiser boy was suddenly something new, ludicrous and off limits. He said he had a sort-of secret, “would she like to see it”?
Close to comatose, she wanted to lay down. She wanted a soft lullaby and innocent dreams. She wanted to stay seventeen so that nothing would hurt her: Not him, not this, not anything. She wanted out, she wanted home.
But she was good at keeping secrets.
4.
Secrets involved mouths, which led to a kiss of another kind. A kiss goodbye to the girl she was.
Hello strange sheets. Hello hasty hands. Hello terrifying touch.
It was over before it ever began. In her mind, it’d never happened. In his, she didn’t exist. She’d never remember and yet she couldn’t forget.
Fact preceding fiction, he was around for a few short weeks. He went as all the others had, good only for the time being. She was never a fan of forever. He was never a fan of anything but now.
He’d burned her book, blackened it to his own liking.
Goodbye sweet seventeen. Goodbye lullabies and innocent dreams. Goodbye cosmopolitan cover queen.
Gender:
Points: 1330
Reviews: 57