Vengeance is kind of like a drug.

Or I assume it is. I’ve never taken drugs. I haven’t even been drunk. But I am finding myself addicted to getting even.

If you had met me three weeks ago, you probably wouldn’t even remember me. Most people haven’t, for most of my life. That’s why I have been shoved around, talked down to, had my piece of cake stolen from right in front of me, and had all kinds of movies spoilered even though I begged for people to stop before they revealed a crucial plot point. I’ve been given the wrong change, on purpose, people have talked about me like I’m not there, and my mother has always given my brother his meals first. None of that stuff happens now.

Nineteen days ago, I woke up at 3:03AM to the sound of breathing.

I live alone.

To say I was terrified doesn’t begin to describe my emotion. I blasted past terror before my eyes were all the way open. I couldn’t even see terror in the rear-view mirror as I reached out toward the sound of the breathing and touched…you know I don’t know what I touched, but it felt like my hand was sunburned. The pain threw me so far off that I forgot to be scared and I shouted ‘What the hell?’

The breathing turned into laughter – a deep rattling laugh that would cause a doctor to break out her stethoscope.

‘Hell, indeed, dear girl.’

The heat in front of me began to glow, like the embers at the end of the bonefire, and I could make out the shape of what could only be Lucifer himself standing in my bedroom.

What do you say when the devil drops in on you in the middle of the night? I went with the every eloquent ‘I. I. Um.’

He laughed again.

‘I’ll save you the strain, dear girl. Don’t even try to figure out. Your number has come up! Your wish for vengeance against the parking cop drew my attention, and here I am. For the next 21 days, you don’t have to wish you could take revenge, you’ll just be inclined to do it. Whatever you think of, you’ll be able to do. Without conscience, without any ‘I don’t think I can.’, without any concern at all.’

As soon as he finished speaking, he just kind of winked out, like he had been doused. The room felt a lot colder with him gone, but I was so infused with the heat of righteous anger that I bolted out of bed and got right to work. I sent some emails that got people fired, I made some phone calls that put marriages on the rocks, I walked down the street shoving at people, and I punched a friend right in the face for ruining a movie.

And here I am, slashing the tires of my high school principal who said I would never amount to much. It’s been 10 years since high school, but you just never forget that stuff. The best part? I still have two whole days left to find the playground bullies from elementary school!

(I wrote this last Saturday and couldn’t post it right away. I just realized that I never posted it at all.)

         Why is it that you some kids do weird things and you know they are just fully embracing their own weirdness and other kids do weird things and you know they are just desperately seeking attention?

            Ellie could handle the first type of kids but the second ones made her classroom hell. It was easy to keep a lid on the ones who were content in their own oddness, their behaviour might make other people edgy but it didn’t spill all over them the way that the attention seekers’ actions did.

            The attention seekers got a bit too loud, they were a bit too in your face, their performance art lives required audience participation. It wasn’t enough for them to be weird; they needed to know that you knew that they were weird and that they were happy about it.

            They weren’t though. They weren’t at all happy about it. Ellie figured that was what made her so twitchy around them. They reminded her of every last one of her own teen angst insecurities and they took her back to that twisting mess with every shout, with every cry for connection.

            She knew she should just give to them, that if they needed the attention, that it would be a kindness to just shower them with it, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. There was some validation for her in it, in her refusal to play along, her standing steadfast against the foolishness that they were indulging in. Almost like she were feeling victorious about not being tricked into giving the response they wanted.

            But deep in that smug feeling was a sliver of pain, a splinter, that said that withholding her attention wasn’t serving anyone. It wasn’t helping her in any way and it certainly wasn’t helping the kids. There had to be a way to make it less painful all around, something a little less raw for everyone, but how did you indulge foolishness part way? You had to either fall fully into it, or dismiss it entirely.

            She had to figure it out though. If they were putting this much energy and effort into a cry for attention, their need must run deep.

         Allie turned the ring around with her thumb, she wasn’t used to it yet. Touching it still gave her a little jolt, in a good way, a quick flash memory of Jeremy sliding the opened velvet box across the table, the bottle of champagne. Her yes was never in question, but the thought of his nervous expression was endearing.

The nerves were all hers tonight though. They had flown to Halifax to meet Jeremy’s parents. She had talked to them on Skype before, had seen pictures, received their emails of congratulations, they were happy to finally have a daughter-in-law on the horizon. Jeremy was only 30 but they seemed to have figure that he would never properly settle down. Now that she was here, she wondered if Jeremy being with her was proper at all.

She knew that his family was wealthy. Everything that Jeremy did spoke of someone who didn’t worry about money. He didn’t do that few seconds of calculation before putting down his credit card to pay for something. His clothes were expensive, his car had all the extras, he knew about wine, some of her friends had some of those things, but he was the only one who had them all. He wasn’t flashy about it though, so she was never uncomfortable. At least she hadn’t been until she got to his parent’s place.

It wasn’t that they had a separate dining room, lots of people had that. It was that their table sat 30 people and that they had a drawing room for after dinner drinks. It wasn’t that the walls of their living room had beautiful paintings, it was that one of them appeared to be a Picasso. She was so far out of her league that she had no idea how to play this game.

So, she was one of 4 people at a table for 30, eating foods she had never heard of with utensils she had never seen before. She had no idea what to talk about, no idea what rich fancy people said to each other over dinner. She didn’t know anything about expensive cars, or art, and she had never hosted a charity ball. Movies were her only reference point for the conversations of wealthy people, and they didn’t seem to be much help to her at the moment. So she just sat, and ate with her right hand and while twirled her engagement ring around her finger with her left thumb.

She was sure her in-laws-to-be were thinking that Jeremy had made a poor choice, this woman who didn’t know how to dress, who had dropped the napkin she had tried to put on her lap. They were probably thinking that she was some sort of idiot who couldn’t even come up with appropriate dinner conversation. She felt her face redden as she realized how much she didn’t fit in.

“Allie?” Jeremy’s mother was speaking to her. What was she going to ask? Was this the question that would expose Allie as a fraud, as an outsider. Would this be the question that would show Jeremy that he had made a mistake?

She took a deep breath and bravely faced Mrs. Walters-Carr. “Yes?”

“Can you pass the salt, honey? I think I forgot to put some in the potatoes when I cooked them.”

        The whole place was like a horror movie or like something from Doctor Who. Furniture covered with sheets, streaky windows, tables furry with dust. Creaky sounds like something your over-enthusiastic neighbours would play on Hallowe’en. Mouse tracks. Wind whistling through the broken window upstairs.

The stairs.

The stairs were the worst. The whole house gave her the creeps but somehow the stairs were creepier than everything else. There was something so vulnerable about being in that space, like it would be easy to push someone down or to sneak behind them while they were going up. She even found stairs in her own house a bit off-putting so it was no wonder that the stairs here were even more distressing.

They were ordinary stairs, wooden, with a carpet trailing up the middle. In a different age, there would have been a runner of that knobbly plastic covering it, but instead, there were metal rods at the juncture where the riser met the step below. They rattled with each step she took and the sound did nothing to make her less creeped out. Neither did the cloud of dust that rose with each footfall. It had to have been years since anyone had taken a vacuum to the place, and she had no intention of being the one to do so.

If she had any sense she wouldn’t be here at all but she had to get her purse back. Of course, if she had any sense she wouldn’t have come out to the haunted house with Dana and the rest of the cheerleaders, and she probably would have left when Bill and the rest of the team showed up. And if she had any sense, she would never have given Bill a hard time about not wanting to go inside. And she definitely would not have clucked like a chicken when he refused.

If she had done any of those things, he might not have picked up her purse and flung it through the upstairs window. And if she hadn’t made such a big deal about him being a chicken, then he might have cut her some slack, but she hadn’t and he didn’t and now she was trudging up the dusty steps, eating her heart every time it shot up into her throat.

Every step took an eternity, she was a living example of slow motion, the sound of her own breath rattled in her ears, she worried about peeing in her new GAP jeans. She wasn’t backing down though, she wasn’t giving Bill the satisfaction of being able to call her a chicken. And if that wasn’t motivation enough, her car keys were in that purse and it was a long, long walk to her house. Especially if she had to walk it alone.

The room housing her purse was at the front of the house, to the right at the top of the stairs. Maybe 25 feet away. She could do this. She could totally do this.

*****

The purse was sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, light streaming in from moon outside highlighted the clear spot in the dust where it had landed. She bent down to pick it up. A shadow crossed in front of the window.

They could hear her scream from outside.

(I wrote this last night but forgot to post it. There will be two posts today. Also, the last line really doesn’t work so I have to let it simmer for a while until the right words bubble up.)

    At first, Joanna used her newfound magic for good. She didn’t know how long it was going to last, and she figured that she might as well spread as much fun as she could. So little old ladies had flowers appear in their hands, the writer-guy at Starbucks saw his coffee cup fill right back up, and the Mom at the grocery story discovered $30 in her pocket right after her card had been declined.

Joanna felt like someone from a fairytale. She kept checking behind her to see if she was leaving a trail of sparkles or rose petals, as would befit her magical status. She smiled so hard her face ached, there was a little hop in her step as she walked home.

She probably would have just gone on adding fun to the world around her if that guy sitting on his step hadn’t been rude. She could have handled a wolf-whistle, or even a ‘Hey, beautiful!’ – that would have been creepy but somewhat tolerable. His comment, however, was not the least bit tolerable and she wasn’t even sure anyone COULD do that, even if she had been interested. Her first thought was to wonder if his technique had worked on some hapless woman before so he was trying again. Her second thought was to wish that he’d come down with a dreadful itch in a tender spot so he’d stop dreaming up suggestions for passers-by.

It was only when he smacked at his crotch two or three times before jumping up to run into his house that she realized that she could apply her magic a lot more broadly.

She started making a list of what to wish next.