Got Any Matches?

Secondary Author's Note (4-12-13): Yet another tame Pretty Maids excerpt that I can actually keep. Also one of my most popular (for the ending, according to my fans on Inkpop).  My husband said it would make a good showcase piece. I agree.

Original Author's Note: I wasn’t going to do another excerpt, but the thing with her outfit... non-conformist for the win! Anywho, yeah—that's how my somewhat infamous couple, Katie and Jack from Pretty Maids All in a Row, met. My husband said I should post this because it's fairly tame, well-written, and he likes the thing with the matches.

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Once upon a time, a very long time ago, there was the bottle, made of dark brown glass like crystallized dried blood, full of noxious poison.

Then, there was the belt, thick and leather and strapping, that had the dark gift of turning white flesh blood red, and then dark violet and storm black.

And after a princess spent many years of dancing a malevolent tango with these two deviant partners, a shy prince with scars on his face and a rictus grin introduced Kate to the third partner, the blade...

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. First thing's first—the beginning.

For a long time after the Donovans were murdered, there was nothing but sepia-toned grief.

Everything had a strange, old movie quality to it, as if heartache could only be shown properly in the light from a silver screen. Her life felt like a movie, like everything was scripted, everything rehearsed and fake. If you poked at it too hard, everything would fall apart at the seams, crumble like a sand castle in the surf. Everything would just dissolve. All gone.

Her parents were laid off. That's what started the spiral. With only David to take care of, it didn't make sense to keep the Madisons on as hired help. So they were "let go."

That's what you do when you let someone you were holding onto plummet from the edge of a cliff—let go. That's what you do when you want to forget everything about someone, forget they even existed and that they meant everything in the world to you, just because they broke your heart—let go. That's what you do when the people in your life become superfluous, despite how very much they need you and you need them—let go.

The Madisons had been let go, and her father hadn't been able to get work again. Because they'd worked for the Donovans. Because the Donovan family had made enemies with their war on poverty and crime, and those enemies were vindictive and spiteful. Those people weren't able to let go.

Matthew Madison had turned to the bottle. Alcoholic sedation, fermented tranquilizer to suppress the thoughts circling like sharks, murder the feelings of inadequacy, resentment, frustration, impotent rage, the blackest of hatreds for the family that had once been like blood.

Then Cambria Madison, Kate's mother, had found work as a maid. Not the lucrative, dignified work she'd enjoyed at Donovan House, but still, it kept the heat on in the winter and food on the table. They were only evicted once. Her parents refused to let on that they might need help from Ian and David.

Then her mother had gotten pregnant, and miscarried. Gotten pregnant again, and miscarried a second time. Managed to catch pregnant one more time, and carried to term. Twins. Both dead. Postpartum depression had set in. She'd been too sickly to go back to work.

Her father had started smoking again. Her mother had turned to the burning sweet smoke of whiskey in her mouth to chase away the ever present tang of amniotic fluid and prenatal blood that haunted her every waking, sober moment.

Drunkenness hauled both of the elder Madisons down into alcoholism—and slow, liquidated suicide—pulling the trigger on the bottle, millimeter by millimeter.

Her mother died. Easy as pie in the night. Slipped through the fingers of life with a drink and some aspirin, and a very deliberate slamming of her head on the concussive corner of her dresser.

Kate had been twelve.

First day of school at Asphodel Private Academy had been the day after her mother's funeral. Her father was brimming with burning alcohol in his blood, slowly poisoning himself to death. Kate was still soaked, water-logged with unshed salt water grief. She'd shivered and stared at everyone, hollow-eyed and skeleton-thin. Her gaze had been iced death.

I want to be the Grim Reaper, she thought sluggishly, trudging up the stairs towards the entryway doors of her new school. Ferrying the dead. My mother could be on my boat...

She tripped almost absently over her plum purple Vans. She'd get hell for wearing them instead of her uniform shoes, but her mother had bought them for her. Years ago, centuries ago, but still, they were her last gift from her mother. She'd wear them until they fell apart and dropped off her bleeding, blistered feet.

I want to deal death, she added as an afterthought as she went through the doors.

Kate saw the teachers eying her obvious disregard for dress code. Gray, pleated skirt was stiff with sewn-on patches, for Rainbow Brite and Spawn, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Faerie Tale Theatre, and Hello Kitty, the Care Bears and Marilyn Manson. Sleeves of her white button-down blouse rolled up punkette-esque, and the buttons weren't simple white circles. Each was different—a skull, a genie's magical lamp, a broken heart, a globe, a Tinkerbelle charm, a jack-o-lantern. She's slung a belt with silver studs around her bony waist. She actually wasn't sure about that one...if it broke the rules or not. It was very sedate.

I want to destroy the world, she thought recklessly, suddenly, and had to bite back a giggle. She'd had that thought before, at her mother's funeral. She wanted to destroy everything, watch it all burn, watch it turn to ash. She wanted so much...

And they knew it. Her nightmares told her that sick, obnoxious truth every night. They stared at her, eyes wary, like a prey animal watching a vicious predator. They knew what she wanted, knew that she longed to strike a match and watch it burn, light something up and give birth to dancing blazes all around, orange and crimson and vermilion and hot sparking electric blue kissing the world into pyrotic asphyxiation. The eyes of her teachers and all her classmates told her they knew it and only one person didn't look at her like she was a sick freak with a lust for charred society.

"What do you want?" She demanded, staring up at burning viridian eyes. Everything was so lucid and strange, dreamy mist and temporally fluid. Hadn't she been in front of her locker on the first day of school ten minutes ago? Now she was nowhere. Nowhere but in front of those eyes.

"Got any matches?"

"It's against school rules to carry matches," Kate replied to the strange boy with the blazing eyes. She wondered if he stared at the sun in his spare time. He looked almost blind.

"That's not what I asked you," the boy said, and walked away.

Kate thought she might've fallen a little in love just then.