Whispers echo through the halls,
– Adriana Calloway
seeking where I hide.
I know that they will find me,
for I am his bride.
Adriana glared at the loose-leaf notebook paper, frayed edges forming a broken skeleton that once clung to a steel spool. Only a couple pages, just as Dr. Z requested. Well, she had stretched the definition quite badly, as the she'd managed to cover both sides of each—but technically, still only two. In a last ditch effort to follow the spirit of the assignment, she went to her father's study to use his typewriter; a newer model Remington Noiseless, a beastly hulk of "portable" ink and iron that never once left the house. She could impress the wry English teacher by typing her assignment, and he may not even notice its ponderous length.
Since she wrote the bulk of her tale at school, she'd already fixed the spelling, made a few corrections, and rephrased tricky wordings. The only part remaining, was the easiest: blind typing.
After a fashion. Her mother frequently chastised her for never learning proper form. Imagine! A girl your age relying on search and stab of all things! Her mother never said "hunt and peck." To her, anyone who didn't practice fluent touch-typing at a minimum of forty words-per-minute, was sadistically torturing a finely crafted piece of machinery. Adriana always wondered if her mother held such people in similar esteem as she considered rapists or folks who kick puppies for sport. There were other phrases too: skim and skewer, probe and pierce, and Adriana's personal favorite, rummage and shank. Shank, the lonely bastion of desperate criminals, and apparently slow typists.
Adriana had long since given up on convincing her mother fluid movements over clacking keys, stirring a steady drone of machine-gun tats, was not tantamount to divinity. Her mother always said the same thing, "I have my pride." Maybe, but she didn't have to belittle everyone to sustain her pedestal of achievement. Thankfully, her mother wasn't home on most school nights, usually attending a PTA meeting or homemaker soiree, busily spreading the gospel of refinement and standards to the heathen populace.
Her father would be home, but never in the study. That was his office, and he never "brought work home with him," so afternoons meant it was strictly off-limits. It really was the perfect setup for an overachieving daughter to type a manuscript before the next day. Two manuscripts, to be exact.
Two. One began with her character, Rabbit Rue fending off the devil for the sake of his lady love, only to ultimately lose badly enough God has to step in. The second takes a more subtle approach, and she hoped Dr. Z caught her trick—otherwise he might fail her for writing Deus Ex Machina twice! But that was patently ridiculous. Her English teacher was easily the most competent in the entire school faculty—possibly even the town of Tammond Dale itself—capable of anything vaguely academic. No, he'd catch her delicate twist, and reward her with yet another A+. Didn't he always?
But Adriana was still worried. Her truncated epic had all the requisite parts, yet diverged significantly from her usual style. Even while editing the story for various grammatical mishaps, she wanted to crawl away and hide from what transpired, as if someone else had penned the words. Rabbit Rue felt like something altogether sinister and distorted, a story of triumph shrouded by underlying defeat. She wasn't exactly a font of ponies and flowers, but had she been more explicit, less discriminating readers would misconstrue the tale as macabre.
What was it, then? An assignment of a few measly pages, scrawled furiously through lunch and between classes, or some darker part of her spirit, manifest by a wicked muse? It's both, child. Yeah, both.
But she didn't have time to think about that. Not really. She wasn't a touch-typist, and mistakes meant redoing the entire page, so she still had a long night of deciphering her handwriting and coercing the typewriter to produce two clean pages. Not clean. The words themselves... So maybe she'd consider deeper contemplations later. For now, she had to type.
To spite her mother, she spent extra effort expertly plunging her fingers into the unsuspecting keys, as if typing with honed knives. That this brought her a thrill of sick pleasure, bothered her not one bit.