How to Be Cliche (A Novel)

(24) I Put the "I" in Stupid

It was six in the afternoon, five hours before I had set the alarm on my phone to go to Ronny's, about nineteen hours since I had encountered Smiley face-to-face and then came home to a smiley face mask on my bed,  and a mere seventeen hours since Smiley's latest killing spree.

                  Just hours after I saw Smiley at Crave, he had went out and killed three more victims, all three of which I labeled "random" in my investigation notebook, and no longer followed Smiley's pattern of killing people that went to Mortimer. One of the victims, I had quickly noticed, look a hell of a lot like me.

                  Trying to keep my nerves at a minimum, I had spent most of my morning beating on my punching back in my room and writing in my journal, looking back and forth between the magazine cut out of the "How to Be Cliché" writing contest and Smiley's mask.

                  Now, at six in the afternoon, I was shuffling around the kitchen and discretely dumping steak knives into my gym bag as weapons. I was beyond nervous. Nervous that if I saw Smiley again, I would freeze up like I had the night before, and that I wouldn't have Sin to save my ass again.

                  Suddenly, I heard my mother let out a loud gasp. Heart in my throat, I rushed into the room to see what was going on.

                  "...And here's the exclusive surveillance footage of last night's events at Joseph's Advertising Corp. one last time!" George Smiley said, grinning at the camera.

                  On the television screen was now a tall brunette walking down a narrow hallway of some sort of business place. The camera showed her back as she pressed the button of an elevator. Just from looking at her from behind, she resembled me greatly. The girl clutched her Coach purse fairly tightly to her side and tucked her blouse and skirt neatly in place. As the elevator came to her floor and the doors opened, the footage zoomed in on  a man in a brown trench coat that stood in the middle of the elevator. He had a knife  in his hand, not a stake, and two decapitated bodies were curled up at his feet. His mask had a large, painted on grin, identical to the mask I had found on my bed, and two endless holes for eyes.

                  As the woman turned to run, Smiley lunged at her, gripped her around the waist with one arm, picked her up as if she weighed nothing, and then slammed the back of her head against the wall until she stopped flailing out and blood splattered  and coated the walls. Smiley then held her limp body in his arms, pushed aside the hair from her face, and appeared to analyze her face for a good twenty seconds, before angrily sticking his knife into the wall, gripping the girls neck with one hand, bringing his head towards her neck, and--

                  The television went blank as my mother finally found the remote. "Mom! Turn it back on! I want to see what he did to her neck!"

                  "It's graphic, darling! Hickey's are bad. Only when you're married. Plus, no graphic television when you're grounded! Only Dora!"

                  "Put it back on or I'll tell Dad about Manuel the good looking pool boy you hired for one day barely spoke English and who started humping the diving board because you accidently hired him off of a prostitute website!"

                  "Who told you that?! How was I supposed to know Manuel was an ex stripper?!" Mom covered her mouth, realizing what she had spilled. "The website said he was good at cleaning out filters with his bare hands! It sounded convincing!"

                  "You see things from bedrooms of white trash mansions, and I saw many things, but mostly the big thing in Manual's pantalones! Television! On!"