Published December 29, 2014
Warning: This work has been rated 16+ for language.
"Ohmigod, Daniel! Stop," Marlee whines, rolling her eyes. She's been doing this for weeks now and it's been driving me crazy. She draws out my name so it consists of about a billion syllables. Oh, and apparently the word 'stop' now has a 'uh' at the end. So it sounds like "stoooooooopuh." But I do what she tells me and quit ruffling her hair.
She opens the door to the next car, smiling and saying hello to her next friend with the same whiny enthusiasm. As if she hadn't just seen those same friends hours before in school.
"I hate Fridays," I mutter to myself, "And thirteen year old girls."
I sit down on the porch, not because I'm a porch sitting kind of guy, but because I'm required to. My parents are "out for the weekend on business" which means Dad's gotten a hotel to do his secretary and Mom's gotten a different hotel to sit at the bar and pretend Dad isn't doing his secretary. Which means I'm in charge of Marlee's birthday "gala" (slumber party) and have to "supervise" (babysit) she and her "baes" (whiny friends). If there is one pillow, vase or chair out of place, I'm dead meat. Marlee will whine her way out of it like she always does.
Most of the girls are wearing skinny jeans, uggs, and frilly shirts. Their hair is straight and they wear too much eyeliner. They're all around my sister's age, except for a few who are freshmen in high school. Those girls only got invited because they're older and "more mature" and Marlee met them at some football game or dance.
There's one girl, I can tell she's one of the older girls. She's different. Her hair is curly and not the perfect ringlets that are fashioned by whatever hair device there is. I can tell somehow that hers are natural. Kinda crazy, but natural. She's not wearing any makeup, or at least, not much. Her jeans are skinny but, like me, she sports black high tops and a t shirt to that band that nobody's ever heard of. She carries a purple sleeping bag and a small backpack. Not like the mini suitcases some of the other girls are lugging.
"Hey Marlee, do you need any help carrying in bags?" I ask, looking away from the girl.
Marlee chomps her gum and looks at the ten or so girls standing around. "Sure," she says, "Thanks." The girls all drop their bags unceremoniously on the porch and walk inside the house, presumably raiding the snacks Marlee laid out so carefully.
She doesn't. She stays behind.
"Do you need any help?" She asks quietly but firmly. Like she knows her place in the world but doesn't want to flaunt it.
"Uh no thanks, I think I got it." She nods and runs a hand through her hair, flashing red.
"Are you okay?" I ask. She scrunches her eyebrows together.
"Your hand," I say, "I thought I saw blood." She examines the side of her palm, giving me an amused chuckle.
"That's just paint. So yeah, I'm okay. Are you sure you don't need any help?"
"Yeah, I'm sure. No offense but you really don't seem like you belong with those girls." I nod my head at the closed door.
"I don't." She plops down on the porch, blowing a strand of dark brown hair out of her matching brown eyes. "My little sister has been begging to go to this thing, but my parents were nervous about the no adult supervision. So it was either I come, or she stays home. I didn't want to listen to her whining and besides, it's not like I have anything better to do."
I sit down next to her. The bags can wait. "That's cool, I guess. What's your name?" I ask.
"Emma. And you're Daniel, right?" I nod, resting my forearms on my knees.
"So you're into painting?" I ask.
"Yeah. I'm into everything involving art, really. I draw, mostly. Colored pencils. But once in a while I'll fool around with other mediums. What do you like to do?"
"I write," I say simply, standing up to get the bags moved in the house.
"Well all right then," she says, brushing her hands on her pants and moving to help me, despite the repeated times I said I didn't need help.
We put the bags in the living room where the girls would be sleeping and afterwards, she perches herself on one of the bar stools at the kitchen counter.
"Can I get you something to drink?" I ask, unsure of how to treat her. She's cool but she's one of my sister's friends. Sort of. She isn't part of the group but at the same time, she is. Honestly, I'm kind of relieved to have someone to spend some time with me.
"No thanks. But I can." She walks into the kitchen and opens one of the cabinets, but then closes it realizing the cups are somewhere else. I point to the cupboard she's looking for and she grabs a glass, filling it with water from the tap.
"We have filtered water," I say, raising my eyebrows.
"It's fine," she says, "I got over cooties a long time ago." She grins and takes a big gulp, wiping the water away from her lips with the back of her hand. I chuckle, but she shrugs and walks away.
I plug in my earbuds and blast my music and watch. It's kinda funny how the soundtrack can affect what's actually going on. It can make a slumber party seem sad or even twisted and messed up. But my eye always goes back to Emma. Her sister pulls her away from the group and whispers something to her angrily. Emma shrugs her shoulders before walking away and sitting with her back against a wall, away from the girls. She doesn't look annoyed or hurt, or anything but relaxed. I admire her for her patience.
"I'm bored," I say, pulling out my headphones and standing over her. "Want to go somewhere and watch a movie?" She nods and pushes herself up off the ground, so I lead her up the stairs and into the loft area.
"So what do you wanna watch?" I ask. She walks over to our rack of DVDs and purses her lips before grabbing one suddenly, pull it out with a finger and catching it in her hand. She holds it out for me to see. The Avengers. I laugh and shake my head.
"You're into superhero movies?" I ask incredulously.
"Yeah? So what? Black Widow kicks some serious ass." I shake my head, hissing out air as I stick the movie in the DVD player.
The girls downstairs drone on and on as we watch the movie. Eventually the noises mesh and blur together and my eyes shut, growing heavier and heavier until they refuse to open again.
Then I hear whimpering and crying and am stirred awake. The TV is turned off and I see Emma curled up on the other side of the couch, wearing a white t-shirt and sweats.
As I walk halfway down the steep set of stairs, I see it's her sister, tossing in the purple sleeping bag and crying in her sleep. A few of the girls stir but roll over and go back to sleep. I creep back up the stairs and gently lay a hand on Emma's shoulder.
Her eyes pop open, like she was only pretending. I put a finger to my lips. "Listen," I say quietly. She cocks her head and hears it too.
"She has nightmares when she sleeps away from home. Our parents are divorced and she has bad anxiety," she explains, quickly.
She runs down the steps, but her socked feet slip on the polished wood and she goes tumbling head first down the stairs, her body crumpling at the bottom and waking a few of the girls.
"Emma!" I run down the stairs, grabbing onto the railing as I go, panic shooting through my joints. But she sits up.
"Chill," she says, "I'm okay." The girls who wake up look over and see her getting up, then fall back asleep.
Emma pads over to where her sister sleeps.
"Lila," she whispers, gently shaking her. Lila's fair cheeks are wet with tears, but Emma gathers her into her arms and sits, pulling her younger sibling into her lap.
"It's okay," she whispers constantly and slowly, drawing out the syllables in a way that doesn't sound whiny, but comforting. Emma rocks Lila slowly, stroking her hair that is slowly beginning to curl. Lila is breathing, but it comes in gasps. Kinda like when I would cry when I was little and could only breathe in hiccups.
Emma gently removes Lila from her lap, tucking her into the sleeping bag and kissing her forehead. Then she slowly stands, smoothing her shirt and walking slowly toward me.
"Do you mind if I crash on your couch again?" I shrug and we walk back upstairs. Tossing her a blanket and a pillow, I set up my own bed on the floor next to her.
"Don't you have a room?" She jokes,
"Yes. I choose not to sleep in it."
"Ah. Well, to each his own." She rolls over with her back to me, before turning over again.
"Hey Daniel?"
"Yeah?"
"You won't say anything to Marlee, will you? This is honestly the real reason I came." Emma bites her lip, doubt sounding in her voice.
"No I won't say anything."
"Thanks," She says, smiling. Then she turns over again. I listen as her breathing evens out and I eventually fall asleep.
***
Light filters in the room and I can hear that some of the girls downstairs are waking up. I look over to where Emma is asleep on the couch. "Emma?"
"Emma," I say, shaking her, "Emma?"
Her arm flops over her body and her face is revealed to me, as is the massive blood stain by here head on the gray couch.
"Emma," I frantically shake her, "Emma, wake up. Wake up." I put my hand in front of her nose but don't feel any air.
"Emma!" I yell.
Emma is the girl with the natural brown curls. The curls that are now matted with blood. The lips that whispered soothing words to her sister in the night are pale, the person who held the sibling who showed nothing but resentment is now limp and unmoving. The eyes of a girl who actually saw what was important were shut, never to open again.
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139,642 Literary Works • 672,638 Reviews
PLEASE WRITE MORE! This is a torturous way to end the story.
Here's my thought; You could easily turn this into an amazing book entitled "Emma" about this young boy Daniel who slowly falls in love with her. The story is written in the future and he is writing it about the extraordinary life lived by Emma.
Make the readers fall in love with Daniel and Emma in a way that if you were to kill off Emma in the last few paragraphs it would almost seem peaceful.
If you do decide to take me up on all of my ideas please notify me because I would love to read the rest. Frankly I would buy that book.
Keep your amazingly creative juices flowing.
Hm.
Hi Gravity,
Aley here to review whatever this is.
hmm. Alright, so since this is one of the first times, if not the first time I've reviewed your work it's best to start with an introduction of sorts. Hi, I'm going to tell you what I thought about it as I was reading it, what was good, what was bad, and what you could potentially improve.
To start with I thought that the short story was going to be really boring. A bunch of teenagers dealing with each other, one from an older group, one from a younger, it seemed pretty typical and normal. I was hoping that you'd get into some of the finer details about the differences between the two generations as they clash and meld together in a slumber party situation, but you didn't go that rout. Instead, you kept introducing, and introducing, and introducing. To me, the writing was okay, it was too telly for my taste, I wanted more action, I kept seeing things you could have cut out; Why does it matter that the parents were away? Why does it matter that the "supervision" is double with the second person who didn't fit? Why this, why that, etc. The backstory just didn't feel necessary as I was reading it. Looking back on it, I can see why some of this could be important, like that the friend has nightmares, but that makes the lie unimportant really quickly because of how it ends.
Overall with reading it my thoughts are basically summed up into Hmm. The story left me wondering what direction it wanted to go, and because of that your message is very muddled. Is it a story about unfortunate circumstances? Is it a story that's trying to be a reality? A reality would be that she probably strained her arm grabbing the banister instead of falling head over heals down the stairs and getting a concussion. There were three stories in this one story, a discussion of the ages, a romance, and a series of unfortunate events. Short stories, as I understand them, need to be concise and collected, like a painting. What's in it is important, and everything else is what you infer from it. I feel like this story could have been shorter because of that, but that's from reading it through and as I was reading it.
Okay, now onto the things I liked and didn't like. I really lied how you explained the sounds the girls were making. I like how you named the main character Daniel because that could be "danyelle" or "Dan-yal" so it's kind of a duel name, which is sweet. I really liked how you gave a good solid reason for the older sister to be there and that they connected because they were both supervising the youth. I think that was a good move to include that in the story when the story was about that. As the story transitioned in the night because of the crying sister, I feel like you could have gone a whole new direction with it and aimed towards the problems of "broken homes" as both homes were not the traditional one father one mother families. The first had an affair going on, the second had a divorce. They were a good comparison to one another, but the teens never talked about that, which was kind of confusing.
I really like how the last section is written. It's very play by play and I can see what's going on. It's not telling me a backstory, it's finally into the plot of the story, which is great! I would love to see more of this style in the rest of the story. Comparing
to
we can see a difference in the style. In the second one, you have a lot of repeated words, "Slowly" being the key one. We're slowly doing this, and slowly doing that, and when you're describing things here, it is "in a way that doesn't sound" instead of "now matted with blood." We have repeated ideas in the first one too, but the ideas build on one another like further detail in a certain part whereas the second one, the new repeated use of the modifier just gets repetitive.
This is why I say I like the later style more than the earlier style. In this later style you're using more creativity to describe the scene such as how you describe the matted blood by starting out with just describing the color of the curls. The first style feels more sub-par with the use of repeated modifiers, and all of the information stuffed into small sections.
The main thing I would like to tell you to watch is your plot. The story starts out leading us on as if it is going to be about something completely different than the end. While shocking a reader can be a good way to end something, you didn't need to end it this way. Part of writing stories is writing them with a single running idea, in a sense. You can play into the tropes that people are used to, like horror, romance, coming of age, and then break their ideas of what this story should be about through radical means, but writing a story about everything ever is going to be too broad of a topic, especially for a short story.
More specifically if we look at the different sections of this short story we can see that there are different motivations behind each section, or at least, I can see the different motivations. At the start of the short story, the "supervision" is only interested doing what has to be done. This is the main idea for this character at the early point of this story. Later, this changes as all the girls aren't taking care of their own stuff leaving it all on the porch for the two "supervision" to take care of [if this was my little sister and her friends, I'd leave it out there and let them take care of their own stuff because that's just rude. I'm required to babysit, not required to host or be a butler/maid.] Then when it's clear that this one girl isn't a part of the party they lose their supervisor roles all together and leave the girls to their own devices. For all they know, the group could have snuck out and just left a recording of ambient girl-noise. For someone afraid of getting whipped for a cushion out of place, this is very easy-going. At this point the idea of the story has shifted from a comparison between the two generations, to a romance of sorts.
The way that the two characters hit it off reminds me heavily of how a romance would start in a story, but this is a short story, and things have to happen fast. In the end, things draw around and around as they fall asleep, wake up, and take care of the girls until the romantic interest dies?
That was not in the plot. I was blindsided by that and perhaps that's how you wanted it, perhaps that's how you wanted us to feel, blindsided and flabbergasted but the way it came about seems rather unrealistic because it is such a blindside. I can understand falling down the stairs, especially in a strange house, but I can't understand falling forward onto your head on the stairs in a strange house. There are so many ways to fall, and even with her forward momentum, I'd think she'd grab the banister or something.
The rest of the story doesn't mach up with a series of unfortunate events, it matches up with a series of calculated moves, two parties have broken families, they end up at a sleepover for their little siblings. One admires the other, they fall in love and this is how I met your mother. Another good one would be just that they never see each other again. A love lost situation about two begrudged people crossing paths for a moment in time. The problem comes in when you start to combine things and maybe this was intended to be a romance, or a series of unfortunate events, and things changed in the middle of writing it. Maybe you thought "Hey, wouldn't this be funny if she died?" and just went with that. Maybe it was a case where you had no idea what to do so it just came out.
The maybes and hows it happened are less important than what you do now. My suggestion to fix the congruency in the style and the focus of the short story is to edit it and rewrite the part that doesn't match what you wanted to happen. If you want to focus on the parent situation, take out the death and have more dialogue and examples of the differences. If you want to focus on the plot twist, add more of the romance and focus much Much less on the parents and backstory. If you want to focus on the romance, then perhaps take out the death because it way overshadows what they had as friends, and focus more on the admiration instead of the parents.
As it stands, the story has a really well written ending, but the ending doesn't really fit with the rest of the story in my opinion. It feels like there are at least three breaks so editing it with the knowledge of how it ends could help build in forshadowing, symbolism, character, and setting to better establish a "read it again" quality that books can aim for when they have a huge plot twist.
If you have any questions, feel free to hit me up on the chat bar or messages.
-Aley
Thanks Aley, this was a really good review.
You're right. This is not one of my best short stories. Not at all. This is the first short story I wrote after a long bout of writer's block, so I'm very, very rusty. I appreciate all your comments because honestly, they echoed mine. I think I'm going to leave it like this. That way later on when I'm more into the groove of things, I can compare this and think "this is where I started, here's where I am now."
So thank you very much! And thank you for being honest, I appreciate that you held nothing back but you were very respectful.
Hey, just wanted to say that I read this and really enjoyed it, so for criticism I'm going to have to go with annoying nitpicking. Sorry about that, but take it as a sign that everything else was great
This is a tiny little quibble, but I would consider changing one of the 'girls' to something else- to avoid repetition and improve the rhythm of the story
Again, tiny issue, but I feel this piece of dialogue is slightly clunky. The transition between the 'yeah I'm sure' and the 'No offense but' isn't really covered. I would suggest putting something in between those sentences- perhaps Daniel pausing or clearing his throat or wondering whether what he's about to say is too forward? Just to distance them a bit so it doesn't seem so sudden and unnatural.
Again, it's a tiny thing so feel free to completely ignore that
Just wanted to commend Emma's fine choice of film- bonus points for you
Again, another tiny thing. When it mentions the crying and then Emma, it gives the impression that it was Emma crying, and it took me a second to realise it wasn't. I suggest changing to something like:
Again, totally your choice whether you change it or not
I LOVE the ending. That sounds a little morbid, but the twist is phenomenal and completely unexpected. Was it when she fell down the stairs? Or did something else happen. . .
Overall, your characters seemed fleshed out and cool, Emma especially. I liked the dialogue between them, and the dynamic of the two older siblings babysitting their respective sister and friends.
Your general writing style as well I did like so I may be checking out some of your other works
As for a title. . . Perhaps something to do with curls? Because that's what Daniel notices about Emma first, and it's what marks her out as different? I'll let you know if I think of anything helpful. . .
Starry
lol it was when she fell down the stairs. I tried to make that clear when I mentioned the blood stains on the couch where her head had been.
Hello! I'm Flash, here for a short review.
I didn't see any grammar mistakes. That's awesome! But then again, I'm not the best at grammar, so someone else may find something that I've overlooked.
I love how this story takes a dark turn at the end. The scene itself is so average and BAM! Death. Totally unexpected plot twist. It makes me wonder... Did Marlee do that?
Anyway, there's what I think of this piece. Oh and by the way, I think you portrayed average teenage girls perfectly. Haha.
Keep up the good work!
~Flash