Title: The Red Bead
\nAuthor: Harper Kingsley
\nChapter: 001
\nGenre: Alternate Universe
\nRating: teen+<\/p>\n
Summary: The story of the Lothams as seen through the eyes of their faithful lackey Lee. From beginning to bloody end.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
001–<\/p>\n
Every day of the week except Tuesday and Thursday, I hang around the living room with my brother getting high.<\/p>\n
How the hell did my life become this steaming pile of shit? I have no fucking idea. It’s just one of those things that happened to me, like having brown hair and an inescapable love of stupid cartoons.<\/p>\n
Which is what I was watching. My brother’s passed out on the couch and I’m watching stupid cartoons while a candle flickers in my left eye.<\/p>\n
It’s at times like this that my mind folds in on itself and I can’t help thinking of this boy I used to know, back when I was a girl and dinosaurs walked the Earth. It seems like forever ago, that time when I was fifteen.<\/p>\n
Everything seemed so much easier then, even though I wanted to throw my head back and scream every moment of every day. I hated the WORLD then, and I was about 100% sure that the world hated me back. I wanted to go out and burn everything down, to walk with thunder feet and send people tumbling down to their knees in my wake.<\/p>\n
Now I just feel tired. Tired and lonely and old.<\/p>\n
I cursed and tamped out the still burning weed with the end of the lighter. It’s a bright yellow Bic that belongs to my brother along with the weed I’m smoking up.<\/p>\n
I feel bad sometimes that I don’t have any money to pay for my share, but life’s been pretty much the suck for me and there’s nothing I can do about that. I’m fucking poor, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better no matter what I try to do.<\/p>\n
Holding my laptop onto my lap with my right hand, I leaned forward to put the pipe and lighter on the table next to Keith’s coffee mug. Then I went back to tooling around the Internet, visiting and revisiting the same websites and forums I always do.<\/p>\n
Sometimes it seems as though the voices of the Internet are controlling me. I’m trapped forever in my obsessions and my supreme inanities.<\/p>\n
The thought brings a smile to my lips.<\/p>\n
After an hour wasted on Cracked.com, I click the Thunderbird icon on the bottom of my screen and check my mail.<\/p>\n
Just the usual stuff–digests from mailing list that I immediately delete without looking at, advertisements from like Amazon and tech websites, then there it is. A header I hadn’t seen in a long time but that I’ve never forgotten.<\/p>\n