YA Writing Sample

Don’t Call Me Fatal

Chapter One

Yesterday I feared choosing the wrong nail color. Ha.
Today we tour our new house, and I can’t imagine contemplating lavender or lime green, not when we haven’t even seen the new place. We drive together: depressed Mom, alcoholic Dad, favored big sister, forgotten me. I was supposed to be a boy, I guess, because in Dad’s delivery room denial about my gender, he insisted I be named Jacob. JACOB. Despite answering to Jake, I have embraced my gender, to the dismay of big sis who acts like my lip gloss single-wandedly subjects women like a fascist. It’s not politics, Gwen; it’s lip gloss.
We drive in our dysfunctionally comfortable silence from a green-lawned Luxana Drive rental to a tan-weeded Bruce Avenue purchase, sight unseen. That’s right. Dad bought it without even a walk-through. This dump is dropped onto the market at an impossibly low cost, and Donald Trump-in-training buys it on day one, full price.
I say for the hundredth time, “So nobody’s even seen the inside of this place?” No answer. Of course, it wasn’t purchased in Dad’s name, due to his habitual seven-year-itch to file bankruptcy, but his money (last year’s unfiled taxes, no doubt) paid the down. His fishing buddy, Bo, legally owns everything we have, so the IRS doesn’t sniff down my dad’s trail. No, Bo is not a golden retriever, just another hunter/fisherman with game guts on the brain.
We pull up to the late ‘60s Rambler with a wheat field growing porch-to-sidewalk. I make a joke about how many steps we could take through the wheat on Sunday without breaking the Law of Moses, but nobody laughs.
“It’s not wheat, you ditz,” Gwen says. She’s immune to sarcasm. Maybe they just don’t appreciate sacrilegious humor because we’re Christians. Or, sort of.
My dad jiggles the key in the door knob in a halting, dull-knife stab, but it’s clear the lock’s tumblers are mush. He pushes the key in deep and twists it hard, warping the key.
I exhale a “huh” sound, and he turns to shoot me a death-ray look, to which I smile. “Isn’t there supposed to be a real estate agent to lead the new palace tour?” I’m ignored. He saved a bundle not using an agent. “Look,” I say as I walk over to a front-room window, “the ragged screen over here makes this open window a perfect entryway.” I push the window open farther and pull myself up into what I guess is supposed to be the living room. In this case, the dying room.
I knock some beige knickknacks off the window sill as I heave my body up like climbing out of a pool. It stinks in here! Then I stand up just as shivery cold as you’d stand soaking poolside—those aren’t knickknacks. They are skulls.
“Aaaah! What the—animal skulls!”
“Quit the comedy, Jake. Open the front door,” Dad says.
I look around. Pentagrams, charcoal murals of naked, headless people, symbols I have never seen before—all etched into the walls. The wood floor is painted with a 9-foot circle around a star with a black center—burnt. The floor was burned there! The place smells like charred hair. I bend down—bits of fur. Animal skulls—cat, maybe? Squirrel? Rat?—in varying sizes line the windowsills and the room’s perimeter.
“Open this door!” My dad really wants in, and I suddenly want to grandstand his investment purchase, even if only to keep from crying.
I jiggle the door knob until I notice two screws a half-inch out, and I finger-turn them to disassemble the knob. I creak open the door and extend my arm outside with my index finger curling up in a grim-reaper’s “come hither” gesture.
“Would you quit?” Dad says, but once inside, they all stop breathing.
“This place,” I say, “it just speaks ‘Edgar Allan Poe’ to my soul. A Halloween enclave. Wait—what’s that sound?”
Mom lifts her eyebrows. “What sound?”
“That thud-thud sound.” I walk over to the dying room’s floor pentagram and lean my ear down a little. “It’s . . . a heartbeat!”
“You shut up,” Dad says in a growl. “This all gets cleaned out. No more jokes.”
We split up to venture through Satan’s lair and claim bedrooms, mine right off the kitchen, so only a level or two deep into Dante’ s vision of Hell. A pleasant charcoal depiction of a gargoyle getting strangled by a goat satyr runs along where I’ll put my day bed. Another burn marks a spot in my closet where the carpet has been pulled up and creatures have smoldered.
This is great. Classic. Way to provide, Dad.
I enter the bathroom, quickly leave it, and announce, “We know this much: they were men—men with poor aim.” I can’t help but laugh. It’s always my defense. Look at my life through the eyes of Seth Meyers; it’s hilarious.
I stroll through the house laughing, throwing back my head like each new occult mural or substantial skull is a punch line. I shuffle my foot to move a few skulls with five-inch-long nails rammed through them and say, “Voldemort lives!”
My mom passes me like a specter. The stench and the grime are driving her out to the porch, stoic, like a World War II veteran. That’s about what she is, a hollow Holocaust survivor, only Christian—well, sort of.
I stop laughing, then. I can tell she’s pondering her own death again, and I hate wondering if I’ve pushed her toward another suicide attempt. Moving into Hades isn’t going to improve her comedy act; she never had one. We’ve walked the hospital’s 11th floor psych-ward halls three times too many, visiting a mom who wanted to die enough to down sufficient pills to hospitalize, but not quite kill herself. That’s a lonely, cold walk for a kid when the patient is her mom.
So I quit joking around except for a smart-alec grin. What does this move mean to me, anyway, since I’ll be graduating in two years and moving away from my sitcom-gone-wrong family ASAP? We aren’t even switching schools because it’s Gwen’s senior year, and we would never uproot her.
The sarcasm just feels good, even if it does bulge my dad’s neck veins with a blood-pressure jump. He’ll light up a Marlboro to drop his stats on the drive home, anyway.
Still, when I take a last look at the dying room before shaking my head all the way to the car, it hurts. What a horrible place, my new home. A horrible place for a horrible life.
After Dad puts the door knob back together and locks up the mansion, he plops into the driver’s seat. He says, “Merry Maids are scheduled for tomorrow,”—(cue my laughter) — “and the carpet guys come Saturday. Jake, since this is so funny to you, I’m sure you won’t mind spending Saturday here while they do the carpet.”
“What? Why?” Losing Saturday hurts.
“Somebody has to be in the house while they work.”
“Right. Or they might vandalize the palace?” No answer. More like they might get possessed.

Chapter Two

 In 3rd grade I went through an Edgar Allen Poe phase. No, I wasn’t pre-goth or a wanna-be Wicca. My friends and I discovered literary horror in our elementary school library after having uncovered every risqué print in the fine arts section, every authentic African tribe photo in the National Geographic, and after looking up every curse word and body function in the library’s mega-dictionary. I know, nerdy. It was third grade.
We felt dangerous reading what we weren’t allowed to see on TV or in movies, like when a guy gauges out this black cat’s eye with a pen knife in a Poe book—grossly compelling, especially since our parents would object. When the librarian ambled through our camped-in aisle and discovered our morbid fascination, the Poe books found a new home behind the counter, and the librarian suddenly took interest in our library pursuits.
Our interest in Robert Ramirez—sixth grader—replaced our obsession with literary occult, and since then I’ve never been too hot on horror. Movies are so realistic that my imagination recalls them at inopportune times and turns a simple nighttime babysitting job into cardiac-arrest-nightmare because the house creaks or the dog barks. Somehow I always feel I’m about to get murdered—or worse. Imagination out of control.
You can guess how much my new house is eating away my nerves. Dread. Dread is like a depressed best friend—you can’t drop it, and it makes you look bad in public.
Since I don’t have much of a family and my two best friends moved last year, my guy friends are my life, even if they’re neurotic and perverted. There’s a difference between guy friends and boyfriends; guy friends wish you would sleep with them–boyfriends expect you to. I wish that weren’t true, but that’s been my boyfriend experience.
I go though boyfriends pretty fast. That’s not my fault. I’ve just not been a one-guy kind of girl, especially when they so quickly start asking, “Who was that guy you were talking to,” and, “Why do you have to eat lunch with the football team?”
No, I am not easy. In fact, I’ll proudly admit I’m totally pristine, thanks to my healthy fear of intimacy. I still hear my 6th grade bible-camp counselors, “Save yourselves for Mr. Right, not just for Mr. Right Now.” Truth is, when a guy gets too involved kissing me, I start feeling like he doesn’t even know who I am, like he doesn’t see me anymore, like he’s removed from present tense, and he’s suddenly living a movie scene. That’s when the date ends and we break up. Hence, my reputation as a tease.
Who cares? It hasn’t kept anyone away, and since my two best friends moved away (and moved on, except for Facebook posts), I hang out with the football team at lunch. Somehow I broke into the jock fraternity in a way no other girl has at West High. I don’t date meat-heads, but I’ll flirt with them, and because I understand PMS, I give good relationship advice. It’s symbiotic in a socially advantageous way.
Today, though, I’m contemplating my new home in Hades, so not on my best game. Rich boy, Alec, catches me in the hall with his arm around my waist. He whispers into my ear with his long, brown bangs in his eyes, “Kiss me. I just went to the dentist. Want to feel how clean my teeth are?”
“Tempting . . . but . . . no thanks,” I say. “I’m moving into the underworld on Sunday, so I was just thinking about drafting a will.”
“Leave me your purple suit,” he says, as he pulls a swim suit strap up from under my shirt at the shoulder. “This one.” Alec knows I resort to wearing bathing suits when I’m behind on laundry.
I wiggle out of his arm. “Look, you got me all . . . maladjusted.” I wriggle my clothes back in place.
“Just give me this one now and go without,” he says.
“Oh, you’d like that, perv.” I smile. “My dad just bought a devil-worshipper’s house.”
“Sit by me at lunch. I have to tell you about a new Betty.” He grins before cruising down another hall.
I see super-tall Dean and catch up with him on the way to Algebra II (my old concept of purgatory before touring our new Bruce Ave. haunt). I slink my right arm through his left, snuggle in, and look up. “Hey, Hottie,” I say.
“Jake, love of my life.” He’s usually short on speech due to his head’s altitude.
“Dean, take me away from all this. My Dad’s moving us into a haunted house.”
“Sure, after the game tonight.”
“Oh, the game. What’s more important to you, the game or my soul?”
He stops, looks down, takes my face in his hands (which actually hurts my craned-up neck) and says, “The game, of course.”
I laugh and fake-slap him.
“Now, if you’d said the game or your body—different story.”
“Funny.” We walk again. “You know of any good freeway overpasses I could live under—maybe a bridge or something?” What am I doing, hinting that I have a real problem? Do I think any jock at West would even throw a spiral at my personal crisis? They have way too much girlfriend drama to manage already. This is not like me at all.
“Not really,” he says. He’s sensing my underlying emotion. Awkward.
“I’ve got it. I’ll move into WalMart.”
“Good call. Kife me some of those peanut butter pretzels.”

     “No problem.”
As I turn into Algebra II, Dean yells, “Marry me, Jake Jergen!”
That would work as long as I never had a problem, huh? Typical. I clunk my end-of-the-world-packed backpack down, and slide into my seat, ready for more humiliation at the feet of mathematics, my nemesis.
My seat just feet from the black board keeps me poised at attention, but it is useless. I look sincerely stupid in math class, so I keep a low profile. Sitting up front and looking so mentally deficient, I wish I weren’t blonde. Today especially, I cannot focus on what X equals, with images of animal sacrifice in my bedroom closet swirling around me. Maybe the last renters left all that wall art as a joke. Yeah, maybe they got evicted and vandalized the house in revenge?
“Jen, how would you solve for Y in this equation?” Mr Coel, mathematics tormentor, says.
I want to explain that I’m contemplating my soul’s eternal damnation on Bruce Avenue, but decide against it. “Uh . . .” If I pause long enough, will he call on someone else? We’ve only been in Coel’s class for two weeks, and he’s new this year—a wild card teacher.
“You appear deep in thought, presumably solving this problem. Am I wrong?”
Katie Stringer giggles in the last row. Her old boyfriend told me she had to have laser surgery where no one wants to because of growths no one wants. Ew.
“Uh,” I say again, this time with a half-smile, hoping to elicit mercy.
“Let’s get our head out of the clouds, then, and pay attention.” Mr. Coel, math fascist.
Normally I would have looked back at Katie and smiled a knowing grin, but not today. I am messed up. My life is over.
When the rush of students pushes past me to leave, someone sets a graph paper note onto my desk when I’m stuffing my backpack, but I don’t see it until the masses leave. I might expect a cryptic threat, but the note says, “You’re cute when you’re lost.”
At lunch Alec tells me about an ugly girl with a hot body he met Saturday night who cornered him in a bathroom and took off her shirt.
“I could’ve done whatever I wanted,” he says.
“Romantic venue.”
“But she told me to kiss her. Like kissing a Rottweiler.”
“Shirtless Rottweiler.”
“I tried to keep my eyes shut and kiss her—“
“But you couldn’t keep your eyes closed.”
“So then I’d see her face and—“
“It killed the moment.” I feel like a psycho-therapist. They’re the most disturbed members of society, constantly immersed in everyone’s mental and emotional dysfunction, probably to mask their own.
“Right. What’s up with that?” Alec takes a bite of his meat-like hamburger and says with food-filled cheeks, “I’m losing my touch.”
“You think you should have used your ‘touch’ on her when you wouldn’t want to kiss her? A girl you can’t stand looking at? Keep your ‘touch’ away from me.”
“You don’t understand. It’s about opportunity lost.”
“Ew. If she was so hideous when you were drunk, what would you think when sober?”
His eyes widen. “I didn’t think of that.”
“Isn’t it better to just go for people you’d actually like to see again—or even look at? Like saving it for someone who counts? Otherwise–ew.”
Alec rolls his eyes. “Oh no—here it comes—Jake’s talking true love.”
Team members Stu, Nate, and Eric groan.
“No I’m not. I’m just saying you should only catch your STDs from people you actually like. Then you’ll share something really special with each other—Chlamydia, warts, Herpes . . .”
“Save it.” Alec is laughing.
Okay, my turn. “So what should I do about my dad moving us into a haunted house?”
Alec takes another bite but speaks through it, “What haunted house?”
“On Bruce Avenue. Devil-worshippers lived there.” Talking about this is making me want to cry—not what you do at the jock table.
“Get one of those garlic necklaces,” Alec says.
“That’s for vampires.”
“Right.” He grabs me and leans his mouth into my neck. “I can’t vesist. I vant you.”
“Ew, you smell like ketchup,” I say and wrestle out of his grip and push him. “Perv. You’re a big help.” I suddenly feel alone and abandoned, two emotions sure to shun me from this fraternity. Leave your baggage in fourth period; don’t bring it to lunch. I have to get out of here or risk the ultimate offense—tears.
I stand, and to cover my tracks, I run my finger along Alec’s chin line, tilting his head up. “I gotta go. See you in your dreams.”
“How’d you know?” He laughs. I know he’s kidding; I’m SO not his type.
Close one. I walk out to my James Bondo car to hide. Alec named it Bondo because it’s been crashed so many times that it’s got more Bondo repair stuff on it than metal, and he added the “James” part because of his forever obsession with 007 movies.
Whatever. I love Alec, and I love working with him at Baskin Robbins (my minimum wage career choice for now), but I’d never be in love with him. For one thing, he’s too sleazy, and for second, if we ever actually got together, it would downgrade me to the level of girlfriend—at West High’s jock table, outsider. Plus, their girlfriends smile to my face but slam me behind my back, so that would be a rocky transition for me. We’ve come a long way since junior high sleepovers.
I grab a Diet Mountain Dew from a twelve-pack in my trunk, get in the car, pop the top and down it. I’m no Dew lightweight. So the new house is getting cleaned out today by the Merry Maids. Mom was going to take her book (reading being her full-time job) on the road to sit there in Satan’s lair and read while they cleaned, so I figure I’ll skip fifth period and check in.
My ’97 Geo Prizm James Bondo mobile rattles like a rhythm-challenged guy with maracas, unlike Gwen’s Ford Focus. Hers is still pretty old, but cute enough that I constantly hope a monster truck will accidentally back over it. I know, we’re lucky Dad got us cars, or we’re lucky Dad and Mom got sick of driving us everywhere, and nobody wanted to make Gwen share hers. If my steering wheel actually controlled the wheels I wouldn’t have crashed it so many times, but that’s just a technicality to Dad. Sometimes I wonder if he’d like me to total it once and for all, with me smashed inside.
I pull up to 2013 Bruce Avenue behind three—yes, three—Merry Maids vans. Mom is sitting on the porch step engrossed in a book with a shirtless, long-haired guy on the cover. She looks up.
“What’d they do, call for backup?” I say.
“Why aren’t you in school?”
“I came to give you moral support in an immoral world.”
“Oh.” She smiles. “Yeah, the first ones in said they’d never seen anything like this     before.”
“Not even in a movie theater?”
She laughs. I love to see her laugh. In this sun her hair is as bronze as a Reese’s wrapper. She says, “This is hard for you, I know.”
“It’s hard for you, too.”
“It’s smarter to own than to rent.” She’s trying to convince herself.
“Even if Bo owns it?” She needs me to be optimistic, but how can I? “It’s like owning beach-front property on the River Styx. Do you think we could change Yum-Yum’s name to Cerberus?”
Yum-Yum is our ferocious Yorkie, a hefty four-pounder with a toddler’s top-knot ponytail—a little too cute to guard the gates of Hades, at least with her current name.
Mom opens her book. I blew it. Better say something positive. “I’ll go make sure they get the blood stains out of the grout.” Yeah, good one. I’m like a ray of light.
I open the door, and the smell of singed hair and Pine Sol strikes me. “Whew! Toxic.”
A grandma in a polo shirt walks up. “Can I help you?” She sounds angry.
“I wish you could. I’m supposed to live here when you’re done.”
“I wouldn’t live here for a million dollars.” Her hands are on her hips.
“Would you kill me for twenty-five?”
“Million?”
“No, just dollars.”
She smiles. “Your life is worth more than that, honey.” She wipes her forearm across her brow. “Living here seems like a fate worse than death, doesn’t it?”
Great. Tears on the rise. I nod.
“Yeah,” she says, “That’s about right. There’s a bad feeling here. This is a bad place.”
Another Merry Maid, mid-50s, walks up to us, “Rosa” on her name tag. Grandma-Maid says, “This poor dear’s going to live here.”
Rosa gives me the four-corners, north/south/east/west sign Catholics make. “I will pray for you,” she says, and I believe her. She heads back to work.
Other Merry Maids are scrubbing walls like mural artists in reverse, and I can only barely see the imprints of symbols and murals, not the charcoal-on-eggshell of last evening.
Grandma says, “It’ll smell better with time.” I want her to adopt me. “You’ll be getting new carpet and paint, right?”
I nod.
“Oh no. I’ve made you cry. Now you listen to me.” She pulls me over to a corner. I wipe my eyes on my hands, and she runs for a paper towel. Holding it out like a life preserver and then putting her arm around my shoulder, she says, “So this has been a bad place. Bad things happened here. If you are a good person living a good life, nothing here can harm you. God will protect you.”
I want to say, Right, like he has all along? but I can’t talk, and I don’t want sarcasm to drive her away. Could she move in?
“You’ll see,” she says, and smiles. “Now, I’ve got to get back to work, and, don’t you have school right now or are you home-schooled?”
I laugh pretty hard at that, and it comes out my nose with a load of snot, so I blow into the paper towel, give a weak smile, and nod.
“You’ll see,” she says again.
I wipe my face, clear my throat and walk out to the porch and Mom. She holds up a note for the office excusing my absence, but doesn’t look up from her romance.    Just as well; she can’t see me like this, crying. She can’t handle her own life crises. I take the note and give her hand a squeeze. “Thanks, Mom.” Good. Not too croaky.
The rest of the day passes away—school, skipped football game, insomnia all night—and with it, so passes my previous world. In the morning, I drive James Bondo like a zombie to the new house to meet the carpet guys.