Scratch- Chapter Three

Hello Dis. I haven't read the first two chapters, so I'm going to mainly be commenting on flow and style as opposed to plot.

He always promised that he would spend the weekend with me, but he always canceled because something came up, and sometimes I forgot that I even had a father.

Watch out for repetition of unimportant words, closely together.

My mind was on the feeling of agonizing pain building up in my stomach.

This is oddly sudden, but you don't treat it like it is. If he's suddenly struck by agonizing pain, he's going to gasp a little, bite his lip-- he's going to think about it. If it's building, like you said, he would've noticed it before it got the "agonizing" stage.

Her eyes seemed distant, as if she were daydreaming, and I thought I could see a small bit of black mist mixed in with the green colour, but she blinked and it disappeared.

It's not natural for someone's eyes to fill with black mist, and surely your MC knows this. Either he thinks he's imagining things, or he's going to wonder why on earth her eyes are going black.

I tried to ignore it, but something inside was telling me that I should go and investigate. It could have just been my curiosity, but either way I listened to it.

For a guy who rejected going out with Victoria, he's awfully fixated on her. Why is he following her? You say it's curiosity, but that's pretty strong curiosity; is he wondering what's making him so intrigued?

As far as nitpicks go, ultraviolet pointed out most of what I was going to say. Make sure you remember the little details-- that he can't see her rolling her eyes if she's in front of him, and the thing about blood under her nails if she backhanded him.

The main thing I'm missing is your narrator. His reactions seem a bit subdued, and he's not connecting things. Why isn't he scared of Victoria, or at least wary of her? She comes back and he hardly registers the change in her demeanor. He can only pass things off as a coincidence for so long. You have an intriguing plot and your prose is clean, but I don't feel like the narrator is very connected to the story, and the only character who seems three-dimensional at the moment is Victoria. It's early, though! Work on taking the MC (Charles?) and filtering the scene through his mind, complete with his reactions. Keep the personal touches-- the bit about Pythagorean Theorem was good. Add more of those fleeting glimpses into his mindset.

Overall, good job. ^_^ You have a good technique, very YA-Fiction-esque. Just work on characters.

~Evi

Hi! Here to review as requested, though I am a tad late.... My mind's been off track a lot lately and I can't seem to concentrate. Sorry it's taken a while. I will force my all into this review if it kills me... which it just might.

#FF0000 ">Red = Corrections
#0000BF ">Blue = Things I like
Bold = Comments

DisturbedDisorder wrote:Moving was tiring, but it had to get done. My dad continued to spend most of his life at work, as usual. He always promised that he would spend the weekend with me, but he always canceled because something came up, and sometimes I forgot that I even had a father. It wasn’t only him spending long hours at work- he also went on a lot of business trips. It was usually just my mom and I.

After I #FF0000 ">had You're using the passive voice here. Taking out "had" makes it active, which is almost always best. left the mall with James I #FF0000 ">came Again, active vs. passive. straight home and helped my mom again, and we finished getting my bedroom set up. It was late when we finished, so I went to bed and school continued the next day as per usual.

“Is Emily still sick?” I asked James during lunch.

“Yeah, but I was going to go and see her after school. She doesn’t know what she has exactly, but it’s probably nothing more than a flu or cold. She should be back soon.”

Victoria sat down beside James, avoiding my gaze. She pulled her food out right away and began eating. James started talking about how his favorite band was coming to the city in a month, but I wasn’t really paying attention. My mind was on the feeling of agonizing pain building up in my stomach. I looked up and noticed Victoria staring at me from across the table. Her eyes seemed distant, as if she were daydreaming, and I thought I could see a small bit of black mist mixed in with the green colour, but she blinked and it disappeared. A nauseating worry filled my mind, but I had no idea what was causing the weird feelings. All I knew was that I wanted to get away, and fast.

But then I looked back at Victoria, her absolute perfect beauty kept me from running. When I really looked at her, I was forced to ask myself why I had rejected going out with her. Once again, my nerves and senses were telling me to go, but my mind was dragging me closer to Victoria. Deciding I couldn’t take it any longer, I stood up abruptly.

“I’m really sorry, but I got to go and#0000BF ">...do something.” I hurried from the lunch room, throwing my un#BF0000 ">-touched food in the garbage beside the door. I made it to the washroom and locked myself in a stall. Only then did I collapse.

I sat on the disgusting bathroom floor, wondering why I had felt so horrible and sick. Maybe I’m getting sick with whatever Emily has, I thought, realizing that my stomach no longer hurt, and everything was back to normal. I wasn’t sure why, but I was eighty percent sure that the feeling had to do with Victoria. But why does she make me feel like that? I asked myself silently, the answer a complete mystery.

____________________________________________________________________

“...the Pythagorean Theorem, which is simply a² + b² = c², and can be used to find the hypotenuse of a right angle triangle...”

Math seemed to last forever. It had always been my worst subject, so class always seemed long, but it had seemed even longer that day. I didn’t plan on ever being anything that involved triangles, so I didn’t understand why I needed to know the Pythagorean Theorem. #0000BF ">Even if I ever needed the measurements of something triangular, I could just measure instead of using complicated math. Exactly!

I was sitting beside James, and Victoria was two rows ahead with her head resting in her folded arms, looking just as unhappy to be there as I felt. James and I had a notebook sitting between us, and we were drawing pictures and writing each other notes on it.

Just when I was sure that if nothing interesting happened soon I would die, Victoria suddenly straightened in her chair, #FF0000 ">her eyes growing wide Isn't she two rows ahead? How can he see her eyes? . She stood up very suddenly and bolted out the door. Miss Samson only paused her lecture for a second, #FF0000 ">but "But" isn't quite the right word here. I'd say "then." returned to writing on the board as if nothing had happened. Interested, I leaned closer to James so that I could whisper to him and quickly asked what that had been about. He leaned closer to answer. Don't they have a notebook between them? Wouldn't it be easier just to write it out?

“Victoria has a health issue that makes her have to go somewhere at random times. She doesn’t like to talk about it very much, so no one really knows what’s wrong with her. I don’t even think the teachers know exactly what the problem is, but she had a doctor’s note, so they have to let her go.”

I leaned back out when he was finished explaining and glanced at the open door. I tried to ignore it, but something inside was telling me that I should go and investigate. It could have just been my curiosity, but either way I listened to it.

“Miss Samson? May I go to the washroom?”

Miss Samson turned around. #0000BF ">“I would rather if you put up your hand first next time instead of blurting out the question, but yes, you may go.” Hehe....

I was out of the classroom seconds after she said it, closing the door behind me. I looked up and down the hall, unsure of where to go. I guessed left and started walking, trying to look as normal as possible. I made it to the nearest washroom and glanced under the door of the girl’s washroom. The lights in the bathrooms were motion-censored to save electricity, but there was no light coming from inside, meaning that Victoria wasn’t in there. I kept walking and made it pretty far from the math classroom, but decided to give up and go back to class. If I took too long, Miss Samson might get suspicious.

I was wandering back to math when I heard a noise from a classroom to my right. I would have normally ignored it, but the small sign on the wall beside the door only said the room number, not the teacher or subject, meaning it was an empty classroom. I stepped up to the door and listened. It was a scratching noise. I decided to test whether it was locked or not by turning the knob. The knob turned all the way around easily. I took a breath and pushed the door open.

The classroom inside was dim, the only light coming through the dust-covered windows. The classroom looked like it hadn’t been used for fifty years, which it probably hadn’t. The whole room had gone quiet as soon as I had entered, and I didn’t notice the girl sitting at one end of the classroom at first. I did notice her, however, when she began clawing at the ancient chalkboard.

I approached her. “Hello? Do you need some help?”

The girl stopped scratching and turned to face me. I stared into Victoria’s raven-black eyes. Her mouth was opened a slight bit, a soft moan escaping from between her pink lips.

“Victoria? What’s wrong?” I closed the door behind me so no one would walk in. I needed to find out what was wrong.

As I got closer to Victoria, my stomach twisted and my muscles started to tighten up. Victoria stared at me for another second before starting to scrape at the floor with her nails. When I was only feet away, my legs almost stopped responding. A numbness flooded my body, making it hard to get any closer, so I took a step back. As soon as I was further from Victoria, the feeling rushed back to my legs like a warm river flowing through my veins. I took several steps closer to Victoria, pushing through all the horrible feelings.

“Victoria.” I managed to gasp through the pain of my quickly tiring muscles. She didn’t react, just continued digging into the floor. I reached my hand out to her shoulder, my fingertips hesitating just above the fabric of her shirt before coming down.

She reacted to my touch immediately, suddenly spinning and hitting me across the face with the back of her hand. I stumbled backwards a few steps, but kept moving away from her, trying to get as far away as possible. When I was at the door, I gripped the knob tightly and looked back at Victoria, who was scratching at the floor again. #FF0000 ">My heart was still racing when I got back to class and sat down. This seems kind of rushed. Simply saying that he left the room and walked back to his class would fix this if worded right.

James leaned closer to me. “You didn’t go to the bathroom, did you?”

I didn’t reply, staring at the white board that was covered in numbers and letters and equations. I was thinking about the look that had been on Victoria’s face. Somehow her face had shown pain, fear, anger, and every other negative feeling possible, all at once.

About five minutes before class ended, Victoria returned, her eyes back to a nice forest green. Her hair was fixed, and she looked the complete opposite of how she had been in the old classroom.

“Dude, what happened?” James whispered to me. When I gave him a questioning look, he rolled his eyes and pointed to my face. I ran my hand across my cheek and looked down. There were four lines of blood smeared across my palm. Damn it, I thought, Victoria’s nails must have cut me... I thought she hit him with the back of her hand....

“I was trying to hurry to get back to class, and I didn’t notice that there was an open locker door, so I ran right into it. It must have scratched my face.” I threw the story together quickly, worried that it would be obvious that I was lying. Fortunately, James looked satisfied with the story. On my way out of class, Victoria approached me, her eyes going right to my bleeding cheek.

“Oh. My. Goodness! What happened?” She shrieked, hurrying right to my side. She grabbed a tissue from the box beside us and dabbed at the cuts. “#FF0000 ">But This word is unnecessary and breaks up the flow. seriously, what happened?”

I looked deep into Victoria’s eyes, but there was nothing that hinted that she was lying, or that she recognized the cuts, meaning that she didn’t remember what had happened. I quickly fed her the story about the locker door, but she seemed less convinced than James.

#FF0000 ">I You mean "A". A simple typo, easily fixed. look of understanding filled her eyes, and she held up her hand, inspecting her finger nails. Under four of her finger nails was a small bit of red, probably my blood. She saw this and dropped her hand quickly. Again, she hit him with the back of her hand, which means that there wouldn't be blood under her nails, at the very most on the face of them.

“Well, we better get going.” She forced a smile and hurried out of the classroom. I looked at the blood on my hand once again before bringing the tissue back up to my cheek and following her out off the room.

Characters

Charles:

He seems good. My only problem with him is that you described him as shy in the beginning. I'm shy--unless I'm around my friends. I wouldn't investigate a scratching sound coming from a classroom. And if I found someone seemingly demon-possessed that I barely knew and being around her made me nauseous, I probably wouldn't go after her when I'm told she has some kind of illness and has to go. That could just be me, though. He may be shy in other ways. Overall though he's really good.

Victoria:

What can I say? She just keeps getting better and better. 'Nuff said.

Grammar

Once again your grammar is near perfect. I don't think I found any spelling mistakes other than a typo, but that's not really spelling. Keep up the good work.

Plot

Hey, I'm taking the time to review this, aren't I? I'm actually really into this. It's really interesting and I want to read on, to find out more.

Overall

Good job!

And crap. You know, you're really making this hard to review. It's boring if I just gush about how I love it and the grammars good yadda yadda yadda the whole time. Yet that's the truth. There are a few little errors, but not much. Nice work.

loveness, ultraviolet