Monday, July 18, 2011

Spanner 8.3: Breaking Up the Girl

While working on the Second Revision, I got caught up with the launch of the Google+ social network, and my Chapter 8 got messed up. The Third Revision corrects this while expanding the story. (Oh, and I moved up some material here up to 8.2, and moved the old 8.1 up to 7.1, etc...)

...from previous

Chaos Angel Spanner — Chapter 8: Rip Her to Shreds
Part 3: Breaking Up the Girl (Revision 3)

17 september 2014.
before school.
Shira and Mr. Whitmer kiss in the dark empty classroom. She feels the bump on the back of his neck. He jumps and gasps. “What’s wrong?” she asks.

“Please don’t do that.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Yes it is.”

“No, it’s theirs. Don’t torture yourself over it. Let me torture them.”

Dave sighs. “I hope your jammer’s working.”

“If it’s not, you’ll be the first to know.”

“Do they know about us?”

“If they do, they won’t be able to do anything about it.”

“They can do something about it if they find out our plans for the Student Union.”

“We’ve got backup plans just in case, so don’t worry about that.”

“I hope so. I love you so much.” They kiss again.

Suddenly the light turns on. Kelly gasps from the open door. They turn to see her. Accusingly she says, “You’re having an affair, aren’t you.”

Shira gets out of Dave’s embrace, crosses her arms, and gives Kelly a look that accuses her of being an idiot. “No, I’m just comforting an old family friend.”

“But you were kissing!

“Obviously you still don’t know me. If you were my friend, I’d kiss you too. Or have you forgotten?”

Kelly looks at Shira strangely. Then she runs away and lets the door shut. Shira and Dave look at each other. “We need to be careful,” he warns.

Shira winks. “Don’t underestimate me.” She gives him one last kiss.

lunch. Leila doesn’t join the others. She’s not hungry. In fact, she hardly feels a thing.

She looks in the mirror in the girls’ restroom in the library. She does not see herself as beautiful. She can no longer see beauty at all.

She looks down at the antidepressant pill. If she takes it, it will make her a dull blur and she will want to kill herself again. If she doesn’t take it, she will descend into black despair so that she will want to kill herself again. She sees no way out of the hell that her life has become.

What’s the use? she thinks. She takes the pill.

period 6. As Shira takes off her gym clothes in the locker room, Charmian yells, “Stop that!” All the girls interrupt what they’re doing to stare at them.

Shira doesn’t stop. “Stop what?”

“Don’t you have any sense of decency?”

“Whatever that means.” Shira stands before her completely naked. “I say you’re chicken.” Charmian gasps. “If you can’t handle taking your clothes off in front of other girls who are taking theirs off, then you’re a coward and that brave face you put on is a lie.”

Charmian stares at her in shock. Then she narrows her eyes. “Very well.“ The other girls’ eyes and mouths go wide open as she removes all her clothes and puts them down next to Shira’s. Now completely nude, she puts her hands on her hips and faces Shira. “Satisfied now?”

Shira smiles. “Yes. Let’s go.” Charmian walks stoically beside Shira to the showers. Shira takes her usual stall; Charmian takes the one next to her. They turn the water on and start soaping themselves.

Charmian looks at Shira. “Are you going to be looking at me?”

“Why not? You’re beautiful, and you can look at me all you want.” Shira winks. Charmian blushes, but remains silent.

18 september 2014.
before school.
Leila finds herself surrounded by mean girls. Christian, Kelly, Debbie, and Lady get in her way and won’t let her move. Christian snarls, “What the hell are you trying to pull with those false charges of yours?”

Leila tries to protest. “What are—”

“Shut up, you dirty slut!” screams Debbie.

“No one believes anything a filthy Eurotrash whore spews,” says Lady in her Southern-belle lilt.

In her harsher Texas accent, Christian says, “[incomplete paragraph here]

Kelly yells, “We won’t let you get away with your lies!”

Debbie and Kelly grab Leila’s arms so she can’t move. Christian slaps her three times.

Rob arrives with Shira. “Hey you!” he yells. “Get away from my sister right now!”

“You want my lawyer to file charges against y’all?” Shira purrs. “Conspiracy to commit rape. Y’all ain’t gonna look so princessy after that.”

Leila runs away crying. On her way out, she does not notice Jennifer, Polly, and Mimi.

“What’s she so upset about?” asks Polly.

“Isn’t it obvious?” answers Jennifer grimly. “Our frenemies were blaming the victim for what her psycho gangster boyfriends did to her.”

“I don’t get it. Why would they treat her like she’s the criminal?”

“’Cos they’re predators, just like her rapists. Leila’s especially vulnerable ’cos she used to be a slave of the Fashion-Industrial Complex. We only got to see a taste of the humiliation they constantly inflicted on her. Like, they made her a rape victim and a dead serial-killer victim for fashion ads. I shudder to think what she went through. And that was before Friday night.”

“But Shira could handle that kind of stuff.”

“Shira can handle anything. If she had to take the kind of crap they piled on Leila, she’d tell the bastards to bugger off. But Leila and I aren’t Shira.”

“But can’t everybody be reasonable about it? It was just some stupid TV ads.”

Jennifer puts her arm around Polly. “Polly darling, you just don’t pick on a vulnerable girl for getting traumatized and still think you can get away with it, not with me around me and Shira. But this isn’t just the mean girls we’re talking about. It’s what they watch on the MSM, in this case The Fashion Reality Show. In Hollywood or in Pretty City, a TV show is never just a TV show, especially when they brand it ‘Reality™.’ We’re looking directly into the Corporate mind. The mind of a predator.”

“Jen, I still don’t get it. What’s wrong with some silly fashion shoot on TV?”

Jennifer puts her arms around both girls’s shoulders and grins. “Did you know these quote-unquote ‘reality’ shows have the elimination pattern of slasher movies? Speaking of which, we’re having a showing this weekend. We’re watching this uberdecadent European movie about this eighteenth-century peasant guy whose name is means ‘frog’ who becomes all the rage in Europe’s cultural élite by killing pretty women like us to turn them into Europe’s hottest perfume. This is no grade-Z slasher movie. You see, Our Hero murders pretty women like us for the sake of La Beauté, and it’s filmed exactly like a perfume advert. In Pretty City, they actually mass-produce clones just for that purpose. It started out as this German novel called Das Parfum that became a huge bestseller and a critical darling all over Europe and in the most quote-unquote ‘sophisticated’ circles in America. The fashion-industrial complex have been holding ‘Perfume parties’ ever since. That last episode of Top Model? You were looking at one. Come join us this weekend. You might end up grokking something important.”

“Like what?”

“What our frenemies and their gangster boyfriends are doing to girls they call Eurotrash whores, for one thing.”

Mimi shudders. “You mean, kill ’em and turn ’em into perfume?”

Jennifer’s sweet smile is bitter. “And sell it throughout the Empire to every bloodsucking Corpette who can afford the stuff, if they can get away with it. They like that kind of stuff, the Corpettes. So yes.”

“Shira, you think that’s the kind of stuff they’d pull in Pretty City?”

“Damn right,” Shira answers. “In fact, they do it all the time, like Jen said, America’s Next Dead Model and all that bull. As for that trendy novel she’re talking about? The Final Girl bit it, but her essence was enough to make our antihero’s perfume so strong that all the ladies of Europe ate him alive.”

on to the next...

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Copyright © 2011 Dennis Jernberg. Some rights reserved.
Creative Commons License

[Revision 2, 7/18/11.]
[Revision 3, 10/14/11: Material dated up to 9/16/14 moved up to 8.2; text errors corrected.]
[Revision 3.1, 10/22/11: One continuity correction to fit revised Third Revision continuity; text errors corrected.]

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