Prom Queen ｡ Michael Langdon

1 - BLOOD ON WHITE

     It was blood that changed Carrie Moore's life. Escaping and ozzing, crimson and copper. The blood, the bleeding, cracked her life open like a fragile egg, spilling out a life source more powerful than anyone suspected from the quiet and misfit of a girl.

     The first arrival of a menstruation cycle meant that she was blooming into a woman, and it should have been a normal event, for it was as natural as the moon pulling the tides of the ocean. But nothing for Carrie Moore was normal, even though she desperately wished it were, and her very first period was a catalyst for a great power that her mother deemed wicked and sinister. Oh, if Margaret Moore only knew just how wicked and sinister her daughter would be at the side of a handsome boy, crowned in blood and darkness, with fire and brimstone weaved into the lining of his flesh. 

     Carrie Moore was sixteen, on the edge of seventeen and a junior, when it happened at the end of gym class. The locker room was filled with steam tinted with soap and chlorine from the pool. Carrie had never excelled at sports; she was a bookish girl with a clever yet heavily sheltered mind. On top of sucking at sports—which typically ended with her embarrassing herself in front of her fellow classmates—she hated showering after gym.

     Modesty was valued in the Moore household, but in high school, not feeling comfortable dressing down made Carrie a prude. She often waited for the girls' showers to quieten down, when every stream of hot water had stopped. And today was no different.

     With the echoes of girlish laughter and gossip flittered from the showers to dress around the corner, Carrie slipped into the showering area, water sleek under her bare feet. She removed her towel and folded it neatly over the half-wall, her eyes flickering around to make sure no one was watching her.

     No one was, of course. No one care about Carrie Moore. Carrie Moore was no more than the butt of a joke or a stab of humiliation and mocking, and quickly always became nothing more than an echo, barely an afterthought. The water was hot against her pale skin and glided over her curveless figure and she closed her eyes. Carrie had always been a late bloomer and she still hadn't shaped into the body of a woman yet: An invitation and the vessel of sins, her mother would say. Rounded, soft hips and generous breasts only brought forth sin and damnation, Margaret Moore would utter with venom in her voice. But it was hard for Carrie to see every other girl around her bloom into womanhood, while she stayed shapeless and child-like with all sharp and straight edges and no softness to caress or want. The water drenched her tangles of peach blonde hair into ropes down her back, and when Carrie flashed her eyes open, droplets caught on her eyelashes, she looked down at the water making a bee-line towards the drain. 

     Redness eclipsed her vision and there was a sharp pain in her abdomen. Her eyes tracked the blood, all the way up her milky thighs to the warm spot between her legs. She reached down with one hand, water still moving over her naked shoulders in sheets. A curdled shriek squeezed passed Carrie's lips as she lifted her hand—blood coated her fingertips like a wet, second skin. And the teenage girl realised she was bleeding and panic tore through her body. She screamed again and again at all the blood on white. 

     "Help! Help!" Carrie yelled, clutching at her towel she skidded in the crimson-hued shower water, looking for someone to help her. For someone to call the ambulance because she must have been dying. "Please, someone help me!" She was still soaking wet when she around the corner, clocking the group of girls barely dressed in their lacey underwear. 

     "What the hell?" one of them questioned harshly, pausing from brushing out her damp curls. 

     "Crazy Carrie," another one muttered with a roll of her eyes.