Something Bad

Chapter Twenty-Three: You're Weird-With-No-Quotes

Chapter Twenty-Three: You're Weird-With-No-Quotes

As quietly as I could, I managed to creak the front door open, hoping to create as little sound as possible. With Luke close behind me, we slipped into the house, and then began to tiptoe as fast as we could over to the stairs. And that was when we heard it. It was the sound that the Grim Reaper made before hauling someone off to the realms of nonexistence for the rest of eternity. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t that “bad,” but it was definitely pretty scary.

      “Olivia Ross!” the shrill noise came, progressing nearer and nearer towards us by the millisecond.

      “Elle!” I said as cheerfully as I could, slapping a tight smile on my face just as my mother appeared before me. She was still fully dressed in her work clothes, and as her eyes shifted suspiciously from me to Luke, her expression grew even darker than it already was.

      “Where were you two?” she scoffed, her full attention set on me, as she came up with what she thought to be an outlandish suggestion to her question, though wasn’t. “Getting matching tattoos?”

      “Actually, Elle—” I began, the edge of lip turning up mischievously.

      “Mom,” she corrected as if on reflex, her tone cold and hard.

      “That’s exactly what we were doing!” I said, grinning devilishly at her.

      “Olivia Ross, you better be joking!” she cried in a threatening manner, not actually expecting me to retaliate how I had.

      I slowly lifted up the short sleeve of my ripped T-shirt to expose the fresh ink that had been applied just hours before on my shoulder. It was a simple black heart (the shape, that is—not the type found in one’s body) no bigger than my thumbnail. “Cute, right?” I said, my mother only being able to gape and stare incredulously in response to what I had shown her.

      “That had better be a fake tattoo!” Elle finally managed to sputter out, about ready to explode, much to my delight.

      “Sorry, Mom, it’s the real deal!” I said cheerfully. All the while Luke remained silent, just observing the mother-daughter pairing of Olivia and Elle Ross in their natural habitat.

      “Nick!” my mom yelled, taking deep breaths in and out to calm her emotions. By the way the vein in her neck was pulsating and how her eyes were fixated on the speck of darkness on my shoulder, I was pretty sure that I had done the impossible—I had broken Elle Ross. “Nick!”

      “What?” my dad called back, jogging into the front area before the stairs where we were situated. When he arrived, he took a moment to analyze the situation, swiftly assessing how bad it truly was.

      “Do you know what your daughter has been up to this afternoon?” Elle inquired gravely.

      “Nope,” my dad said, staring at me in a loving way that only a father ever could. That look always made me feel guilty, because I had never been the daughter that he wanted. I wasn’t athletic, smart, pretty, sociable, pleasant, or anything, really.

      “She and her friend got tattoos,” Elle exclaimed, almost crying.

      “Can I see?” my dad asked slowly. I shrugged, showing him where the heart was located. He poked my shoulder, his fingers brushing over the black, and then smirked knowingly at me. “Cute, Liv.”

      “Cute?” my mom raged. “Nick, it’s not ‘cute’! It’s a tattoo! Next she’ll be drinking alcohol, doing drugs! Stealing things!” I would’ve corrected her, expressing how two out of the list of three things I had already done, but I didn’t really feel like informing her at the moment.