• “C’mon, Aeris, it’s really not as bad as they say it is.” He tried handing me the joint again, and once again I pushed it away. I wrinkled my nose at the smell. How disgusting, people actually smoked this? It smelled like burnt socks.

    “No, Jimmy. That s**t’s gross.” Jimmy sighed at me and took another hit, he watched me for a long time as the smoke slowly escaped from his mouth. He spoke from a cloud of white. “I thought you were cool, Aeris. Everyone in school said you were.” I laughed loudly at this and shortly after found myself choking on the smoke.

    “School? D-dude, we’re gr-graduated. B-been graduated for m-months. Like any of th-that matters now?” I spoke through sputters while his eyes never left me. No, those eyes were staring at something other than me. I could have been imagining it; Jimmy was getting high after all. He blinked and took another hit slowly, turning his head away from me. Just as slowly he moved his left hand so it clasped my shoulder.
    He looked back at me while his grip got tighter. I winced, but his grip kept getting tighter and tighter. His gaze was intense, almost burning into me.

    “Aeris…”

    “Ow, Jimmy… let go, you’re starting to hurt me!”

    “Don’t scream.” He clenched his right hand into a fist and hit me in the face, while his left hand held me still. I couldn’t move and I was too shocked to scream.

    I never screamed, but I cried.
    ---
    My name is Joanne Kerstin. That was the name given to me at my birth by my father, at least. The name given to me by the Gods is Aeris Roseblood. I’m nineteen, and one of the unluckiest girls in the world. My parents split up when I was young; I think I was only four. My father took off to Hawaii with some model. My mother raised me herself, a good woman with just as much bad luck as me. She couldn’t keep a good guy for more than a month; I think I scared them off. The bad guys seemed to stick around longer. But, when she would go out with them, she would always come home with a black eye. I stopped asking after a while.

    I never had luck with boys, or anything really. The only good thing to happen to me was my best friend Kimmy Gardner. I always call her Scarlet, though. Scarlet Roseblood was the name given to her by the Gods. We’re blood sisters, you see. We do everything together. We even got a job at the same McDonald’s and work the same shifts. You can’t have one of us without the other.

    The thing is, the other day she got a pretty little letter in the mail saying she got accepted into college. As her best friend I should be excited. But, the college is a good college half-way across the country and I just received my rejection letter from there.

    How unfair, but that’s just my luck. That's also how my story starts; with one terrible streak of bad luck.
    ---
    I stumbled home from Jimmy’s, clutching my blackened eye and split lip. I muttered incoherently, trying to reassure myself. This really couldn’t look as bad as it felt, could it? Mom was going to kill me. Well, she would probably try to kill Jimmy first. If only I didn’t go there. I don’t even remember why I went in the first place. How was I supposed to know he got violent when he got high? Next time, I’ll go to a real dealer if I ever needed drugs that badly. Or maybe I’ll take up drinking instead, at least that didn’t smell as bad and everyone who was into it didn’t try to kill you over it.

    I take that back, bars are pretty bad and beer smells like piss.

    I stopped and spat blood on the ground and looked up at my house. That little white piece of crap never looked as foreboding as it did now. I walked up onto the front porch and turned the doorknob on the door, only to sigh with relief to find it locked. That meant mom wasn’t home and I should have enough time to get cleaned up. I lifted up a loose board on the porch and retrieved the spare key. I unlocked the door and quickly put the key back in its place.

    I quietly went inside and into the bathroom. One glance at my face in the mirror told me it was as bad as it felt. My left eye was swollen and slowly turning black and blue, my bottom lip was busted and bleeding quite a bit, and there was another cut on my left cheek that I don’t even know how it got there. I sighed and quickly went to work washing all the blood off my face, finding a band aid for the cut on my cheek, and putting makeup on my eye. When I was done I didn’t look quite as bad, but my eye was still pretty swollen and my lip wouldn’t stop bleeding. So I sighed quietly, put a tissue on my lip, and slipped into my room shutting the door behind me. I was so used to trying not to bother my mother, it never even occurred to me that I didn't have to be so quiet and shut my door so I wouldn't disturb her.

    Once my door was shut I turned on my computer, it was an old thing, but it still ran pretty well if you ignored the whining sounds it made. This computer got me through some hard times. I love writing, you see, it’s a hobby of mine. Better than doing drugs or joining gangs, I'd say. This computer has everything I ever wrote stored on it. I write poetry, stories, and songs. But I'm better at writing stories; fantasy, horror, romance, science fiction, you name it I probably wrote it.

    My favorite thing to write about is Aeris Roseblood, my alter ego, my alias, my other self. In my mind she was a confident warrior in another world even though she looked like a much more beautiful version of myself with red hair and eyes. She is also very cunning and wise, which is something I could never be in this life. In a way I looked up to her to spite the fact that she is a figment of my imagination. Aeris is my way of escaping from the world.

    The computer finally started up and went to its painful main screen. The desktop background was an enlarged picture of Scarlet and I at graduation. Her long, dark brown hair was thrown up in a pony tail and her equally dark brown eyes were alight with happiness. My hair was short and choppy, and also dark brown along with my eyes like Scarlet. I didn’t look quite as happy as she did, but people always said she was the brighter side of me. That never made sense, I’m plenty cheerful when I want to be, I just never want to be. They also said we looked like sisters. Well, that made sense seeing as we are blood sisters. In the picture, our arms were thrown around each other and we were both holding our newly acquired diplomas.

    I cringed; tempted to turn off the monitor so I didn’t have to stare at the painfully happy image. But routine quickly took over and I clicked furiously at the large blue ‘W’ on the screen so that Microsoft Word would slowly load. I was so impatient for another screen to take over the picture, I clicked the symbol many more times than necessary. It was so bogged down by the hundreds of documents, I was actually surprised it even let me go into Word anymore. I wondered briefly if the computer was tired of my writing and taking up all it's memory.

    “C’mon…” I muttered to the ancient machine. My thoughts were answered as a blank white sheet of paper appeared on the screen. Maybe it wasn't sick of me writing just yet. I sighed with relief and sat down in the familiar curves of my chair and began typing. The words appeared on the screen and I had no idea of how they were getting there, I wasn’t even thinking about it. I didn't have to think about it anymore.

    This was a familiar routine, the same thing I’ve been doing for years when things got hard. Whenever my mother cried, whenever someone threw rocks at me, whenever I had a bad day at work, this is what I did. I never wrote about my life, instead I wrote about Aeris. She was much more interesting than me; she always knew what to do.

    I paused in my writing; something that never happened, not even when I was sick. But this felt different. I was dizzy, and the screen was blurring in front of me. I put a hand on my face and closed my eyes, trying to get it to stop. A sickly moan escaped my lips and I could feel my entire body pulse. My insides squirmed and my joints ached. This was different than being sick. This felt like dying.

    I think I fell from my chair. Actually, I’m not sure what happened. All I know is I felt my body hit something and the ground felt cool and hard beneath me, not like my bedroom floor. I didn’t dare open my eyes. My body started to feel normal again, though hotter than usual. Kind of like an over-worked computer with a bad fan. I panted for a bit, trying to catch my breath. And then I breathed in and out slowly like I did when I was afraid of ghosts and monsters in my room at night, trying to pretend I wasn’t there.

    I lay on this strange ground for what seemed like hours without opening my eyes. I breathed in the strange scents of the outdoors; it smelled wet and musty like it had rained recently. In fact the ground I was on was slightly damp, I could feel the cool wetness on the side of my face. I heard fluttering all around me like someone was rustling in bushes. I still didn’t dare to open my eyes.

    Something prodded me in the back. It was sharp and hard, I jumped.

    “Hey…”

    Again, the sharp thing prodded me in the back. There was someone here. In my room? I didn’t know anymore. I whimpered.

    “If you’re not dead, you had better get up. Or you’ll be dead soon.” The voice was female, and even though it was threatening me it was oddly familiar and soothing. I was curious, yet frightened to see the face that spoke.

    Well, I better get up, I thought sarcastically to myself. I almost laughed aloud at the thought; was I going crazy? Slowly, I removed my hands clutching my face, blood rushed back into it making me a little dizzy. I glanced upwards, ignoring the fact I could only see out of one eye.

    The girl… no, girl was the wrong word for her; she was a woman even though she looked just as young as me. A tall, lean, beautiful woman clad in thin silver armor and a vacant sheath at her side. The sword from the sheath was poised and ready to stab me through my back and into my heart. The woman had short blood red hair and vivid eyes in the same red color. She watched me carefully with those beautiful, crimson eyes. She was ready to kill me at any sudden movement. She looked so familiar to me though I had never seen any person like her before.

    I took this time too look at my surroundings, also. I was in the middle of a clearing in a dense forest. It was dark, either indicating that it was night or that the trees were so thick they blotted out the sun. The strange thing was that there was grass under me. I moved one of my hands in the grass, amazed that it could grow with so little sun. Or maybe there was sun reaching this place and it was night like I thought the first time. Around the clearing there were several bushes which explained the earlier rustling sounds. A cat was sitting beside one watching me with human intelligence and bright crimson eyes. I stared at the cat for a long time; it took me a while to realize that its fur was red, also.

    Where in the world was I?

    There was a harder poke in my back this time. I gasped in pain as I knew the sword pierced my skin.

    “Up, stranger.” The woman demanded, keeping the sword in my back. I could tell she was itching to kill me and get it over with, but something was stopping her. Was it the cat? No, that was crazy. But I obeyed and I stood up slowly and shakily, putting my hands in the air. I was almost tempted to say ‘I come in peace’ like I was some kind of space alien. But I sensed this woman wasn't the joking type and I didn't want to die yet. I swallowed hard, coming to a terrible realization.

    I was going to die.

    When I was finally fully upright, she removed the sword and placed it artfully back into its sheath. She walked around me, almost like she was sizing me up. She examined me carefully, glancing back at the cat every once in a while like they were having a silent conversation. To spite my fear, I was angry they were leaving me out of it. This was a new way to talk behind someone’s back.

    “Excuse me?” I tried to say it spitefully, but it came out a timid squeak. The woman and the cat both looked at me with annoyed expressions. The woman reached for her sword. Stupid! I shook even more and my knees felt like jello. No, no! I didn't want to die here!

    “D-do you mind ex-explaining wh-what’s going on here?” And now I was stuttering, could I look any more like a loser? The woman now wore an amused expression, raising one eyebrow. She didn't remove her hand from the sword's handle.

    “We were hoping you could tell us.” I blinked in confusion at the strange response. My swollen eye was starting to throb now. She sighed.

    “What’s your name?” She asked, almost like she was bored now. I thought for a moment before I responded. Well, this world seemed fantasy enough…

    “Aeris. Aeris Roseblood.” The woman stared at me. Her expression changed from confused, to angry, back to confused, then back to angry and stopped.

    “Liar!” She hissed, drawing her sword once more and in a fluid movement the tip was at the hollow of my throat. I whimpered as a bead a sweat rolled down my face to my neck.

    “Aeris Roseblood is my name handed down to me by the Gods and Goddesses! How dare you tell such a filthy lie! I’d have your head if it wasn’t for…”

    ENOUGH.

    The voice was musical as it rang through my head. I clutched my poor ears for a moment, waiting for the pounding in my head to stop. Apparently Aeris heard it too, as she backed away from me with a hand on the side of her head. It took me a moment to realize the voice was inside my head.

    The cat started to walk toward me from its sitting place, and as it did it morphed. The fur became long, red hair. It began to stand upright and by the time it reached me, it had turned from a strange little cat to a full-grown, and very naked, woman. Thank goodness her hair was long enough to cover the embarrassing parts. She looked just as fierce as the other woman, but at the same time she looked much kinder. I gasped at her face.

    She looked exactly like my best friend, Kimmy. She smiled at me and I swallowed, resisting the urge to hug her and bawl my eyes out.

    “Why are you using my sister’s name?” She asked me in her musical voice. And though her face was still kind, she sounded just as threatening.

    “You’re Scarlet, then…” I gasped, the world started to get spotty and I felt light-headed. The naked woman in front of me nodded, looking confused.

    “Yes, my name is Scarlet Roseblood. You never answered my question…” She trailed off, looking at her sister, Aeris's eyes flashing.

    These two were exactly like I wrote them, why didn’t I realize it sooner? Then this world was the world I created for them. But that would mean I was inside the story I was writing just minutes ago. That couldn't be possibly, stuff like that only happened in stories. It never happened to real people like me. I really was unlucky, I was going to be killed by the two women I created to escape from my world. I suddenly felt clammy and my insides twisted inside of me when I tried to answer Scarlet.

    “My… my name… is…” Their world went dark as I heard distant shouts of “She’s gone!”