Ch 2. High School Ritual: Tonight’s the Night (SepSceneWriMo)

~ Hetty Eliot

Four high school students encounter an evil spirit. Thoroughly cliched and hopelessly derivative.

Vanessa stared at the red nails on her right hand. Tonight was the football championship. Chad was already considered the MVP of the season and this game was going to seal the deal. She had four hours left to get ready.

“Will you watch what you’re doing?!” she shrieked at the manicurist. The silent woman bowed her head without looking Vanessa in the eye.

She still had to get her hair done and get dressed. Actually, she couldn’t care less about the game. It was the party—no, the after party, that she was looking forward to. Her parents were out of town and she was hosting the celebration. Chad was staying.

While Vanessa was getting ready, Chad and the other players were in the locker room shower, flexing their muscles and psyching themselves up for the big game.

Elsewhere in the town, Natalie was getting ready, too. She was washing out green dye from her hair which she had—poorly—bleached herself and was now trying to salvage. If she couldn’t look like Vanessa, at least she could look like she had a–personality.

“Ugggghhh!” she sighed. It looked like Kermit the Frog had been left out in the sun for days. She wrapped up her wet hair and turned up the emo music louder. She got dressed—black ripped jeans, black combat boots, black oversized sweatshirt, black nail polish, black lipstick, black eyeshadow. If her mom had let her, she would have pierced her whole face. But instead, she had to settle for the pearl earrings from her confirmation.

Mikhail wasn’t going to the stupid game. He told his brother to leave him alone, slammed and locked his bedroom door, and laid on his bed, clutching his usual Friday night date: his worn out copy of Dostoevsky’s short stories. But he was so absorbed in contemplating the ceiling that he didn’t notice when it slipped from his hand onto the floor.

26 thoughts on “Ch 2. High School Ritual: Tonight’s the Night (SepSceneWriMo)”

  3. Edits made in the gdoc. With a story that you intend to have evil, sinister overtones, you’ll want to assume that mind set from the get-go. As you tell the story, you’ll naturally want to add in nuance like the smell of sulfur, or the sound of sirens. Maybe the posters on Natalie’s walls of guillotines in motion.

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  5. All of you would-be editors need to STFU for September until at least one of you can hit the page with a first take keeper. She’s probably got more comp competence than the lot of us, so let the girl write her way out of being rusty, which is all she needs. Thank you.

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