And now, thinking of luck, I really believe I must have none. Not even zero, actually; it's a negative amount by this point in time.
So, picture this: after a long, stressful afternoon of purchasing vibrators and condoms and such for a middle-aged Mexican man's probably imaginary girlfriend, a.k.a. the arch nemesis neighbor of my beautiful future Costa Rican soulmate, I decided I needed a relaxing evening of me-time. A.k.a. time for me to put on my fuzzy llama-imprinted pajama pants and lay in bed watching Bigfoot documentaries while simultaneously eating manually mega-stuffed Oreo cookies and reading up on the false Taylor Swift pregnancy scare of 'last Wednesday morning'. It didn't take long, though, before I fell fast asleep and began to dream of feasting on Taco Bell nachos and quesadillas for a belated Thanksgiving Day dinner.
But then, of course, we all know that it seems like we wake up just as quick as we dive into deep rest, even if we get a full five to fourteen hours of sleep in a night. This time, however, I think I might have actually woken up just as fast as I had fallen asleep. Because... well, here's what went down.
First, I opened my eyes (duh). Then, I sat up. And then... as I slowly came into consciousness, I realized that something was definitely up.
Why?
Well, probably because... oh, I don't know, but maybe the fact that I found my wrists to be tied together by a scratchy thick rope, of which was connected to a large-trunked tree behind me, of which my back rested against, as well as my surroundings of dark nighttime forest all around.
Immediately following my observations, then, I screamed.
"Can it!" I heard some man's voice shout out from behind where I sat on the cold, damp and dirty ground, and then fell quiet as a tall figure in all black clothing, including a ski mask and a baseball cap, walked around my side.
I stared at up at, presumably, him for a moment.
"Who are you?" I questioned.
He slid his hands up to his hips, and then took a step back.
"Your worst nightmare," he replied.
I squinted as he both turned toward and stepped behind my back.
Well, I don't know if I'd say that, though... I've always thought of my worst nightmare being the cancellation of The Big Bang Theory or the end of Adam Lavigne's career or something of the sort. I guess this can be a close second, third, or fourth, though.
I craned my neck to see him disappear behind the tree I was knotted to, and then decided to stand up, since nothing was really keeping my attached to the ground. At the same moment, then, I looked down to notice I was still wearing my llama pajamas, though I was also wearing my black dress flats and thick white sweatshirt of which had not been washed in, very obviously, a few good, long months.
At least whoever had, I guess, decided to kidnap me and drag me out to the center of the woods in the middle of the night was kind enough to keep me somewhat comfortable in the chilly early spring Wisconsin temperatures.
I stepped to the side, my hands down in front of myself, to peer around the tree the man walked behind, and then saw that five other similarly dressed individuals were making their way toward where he was now standing in anticipation from about ten feet away.
"Oh no," I mumbled out, turning back around and ducking behind my tree of captivity. "Please be a dream, please be a dream..."
Maybe, though, I really was dreaming. And, maybe, then... I could control the dream I had spiraled down into somehow.
"Okay," I whispered, nodding to myself as I spun around to come face-to-face with all six of the creepily costumed individuals.
"Oh!" I yelled out, jumping back a bit at their sudden, unexpected appearance.
"Good job, Ronnie," the one person standing in the middle said with an almost overly feminine female voice. And, though it was entirely pitch black all around us, I could see that her features were lined with heavy dark makeup behind her mask's eye holes.
"And," she went on, now crossing her black-gloved hands over her noticeably busty chest. "I'm glad to see you're awake, Emma."
I stood silently with my tied hands down in front of my waist for a long moment as she cocked her head to the side, and then decided to squint a bit toward her and her posse standing behind her. And tried to, again, convince myself that this was all just a bad dream.
"This is not..." I started. "The Emma you're looking for..." I paused and waved my wrists in a circle in front of myself. "This is not the Emma you were supposed to kidnap.”
The girl in the front of the pack moved her hands to her hips.
"And I'm," I continued. "Going to wake up now, so..."
I scanned the six standing a few feet in front of me, and then shifted my weight to turn around. I looked at each of the very realistic looking forest trees near ahead, and then attempted to smack my cheeks with my knotted hands.
"Please wake up..." I grumbled to myself.
"Oh, you just wish you could wake up from this, don't you?" the girl behind me questioned.
I turned myself gradually back to her.
"Kind of." I nodded a bit. "Yeah."
"Well," she responded. "That's just too bad."
Immediately after she spoke, she threw her head both forward and downward, then ripped her ski mask off and tossed her bouncy chestnut brown curls back as she revealed her face to me; I raised my eyebrows at her.
Miranda Lively.
"Remember me?" she asked, placing her hands once more on her hips, right after throwing her mask to the ground below.
I pushed the corners of my mouth into a smile.
"Hey," I began back. "Yeah, Miranda... Mandy, funny running into you all the way out here, right... girl?"
She smirked.
"Oh, Emma Lenford," she began, crossing her arms and beginning to step toward me. "I'm sorry, but I don't think your good humor will get you out of this one."
I looked down, and then back up as she approached me and brought her face a close few inches from mine.
"Really? I was..." I muttered. "Kind of hoping it would..."
Miranda smirked, again, and then turned to pace a tad to my left.
"Now, Emma," she started. "I'm a little short on cash right now, and I need your help..."
"Getting more money?" I shot out as she turned back to me. "I... don't have much, but you can have what's left in my college savings..." I paused to flash a smile that I dearly hoped she would not see through. "Friend."
She glared at me for a long second.
"What's left?" she interrogated.
"Yeah," I replied. "I kind of took some out a while ago to buy a new fish bowl... and a new fish... but then it died... and there really wasn't much in there to begin with, so..."
Miranda rolled her eyes and turned away to continue pacing back and forth in front of me.
"I already have the solution to my problem," she stated.
"Well, good," I commented.
"And it requires harvesting your blood," she said as she stopped to glare at me once more.
I widened my eyes at her.
"My... blood?"
"The blood of a virgin," she added.
Um.
"The blood of a virgin..." I repeated, nodding slowly. "Well, uh... See, I'm not really much of a virgin, so—"
"Oh, please," Miranda butted in, leaning herself to one side, hands on hips once again. "I know a virgin when I see one."
"Really?" I questioned with a slightly heightened voice pitch. "Because I think a..." I paused to raise my wrists and make air-quote gestures the best I could within my constricted means. "Virgin can kind of mean, like, a few different things—"
"Shut up," Miranda, again, cut me short, and then glared directly at me until I lowered my hands once more and submitted to her command. "Now…" She shifted in place a bit to glance to her right, away from everyone else. "When I found out that all I needed was a little virgin's blood, I figured..." She glared back over at me. "Why not the blood of the little tramp who helped conspire to shoot my cousin Kyle Ermings?"
Whoa.
Okay, I need to point out a few things here... one, since I guess I am a real pure and innocent virgin and everybody apparently knows it, why would Miranda choose to call me a 'tramp'? Seems pretty illogical to me, but whatever, I suppose. Secondly... Kyle Ermings is Miranda Lively's cousin? (Surprisingly) New info to me. And third... I DID NOT HELP CONSPIRE TO SHOOT KYLE.
"Um, I'm sorry," I began, tilting my head a bit to the side. "But, uh... what?"
I squinted at her pretentious eye roll toward me.
"Oh, don't act so innocent," she ordered.
Again... aren't I supposed to be acting innocent?
I shook my head and lowered my eyebrows at her.
"Miranda," I started. "I swear to you—I had nothing to do with anything that happened to Kyle that one day."
"Uh huh," she skepticized, taking one step into my direction, now bringing her expression about a foot away from mine. "And you also wanted me to believe that you weren't a virgin, didn't you?"
"And I'm," I began back, searching her ridiculously thick lined eyes for a second. "I'm not, and you... you shouldn't really know that anyway, so..."
"You little lying bitch," she muttered out, now turning and stepping back over to her clique of masked men to the side.
I winced back from her hiss.
"Give me the bag," she uttered out soon after, and I turned to watch the one person standing at the front of the group hand a large black duffel bag over to her.
I stared, then, as the entire clan gathered around her sides, and, afterward, decided to speak up for myself.
"Are you sure you don't need, like," I began to yell at their backs. "Just some O negative blood, or... AB positive... because I think that's kind of what the real difference in types of blood boils down to, and you can just, like, get that from about any Red Cross post!"
I watched as each one of them dropped to a crouch, surrounding the athletic bag from all sides, and then heard a loud zipping sound.
"And my blood might not be as clean as you think!" I went on shouting, now kind of just distracting myself from whatever they were rummaging through in their luggage. "I mean, you said I'm not really that innocent, Miranda... And I can be dirty, too, like... I haven't even brushed my teeth in... almost twenty-four hours!"
"That one," I heard Miranda mumble to her fellow group members, ignoring my assertions completely.
"Or," I decided to go on, despite her obvious lack of attention. "What about AIDS, huh? I mean... I don't think I have HIV or anything, but... you can never be too safe about it, right?"
Miranda stood and spun around to step back over to me, a pretty good-sized paring knife in her left hand and, of all things, a jar of what looked like to be peanut butter in her right.
"What'cha got there?" I urged out, right as she stopped a foot away from where I stood.
"Shut up and give me your wrists," she spat out.
I took a subtle step backward as she unscrewed the red peanut butter jar lid and tossed it to the ground below.
"Now, Miranda," I muttered out, taking yet another step back as she glanced up at me once more. "Remember that... that one time when... you passed me in the hall at school, and you... kind of smiled at me, and I didn't really smile back, because I thought you were looking at Chase Grould behind me... well, know that I really did want to smile back, and—"
"I said shut up and give me your wrists!" Miranda boomed, now throwing her knife up by her ear, positioning the tip of it perfectly toward me.
I jumped another step back and instinctively threw my glued arms up to cover my face.
"Please don't kill me!" I screeched.
"Give me your god damn hands or I'll slit your throat!" she shouted back.
Instantly following her words, I felt the side of a soft, smooth fabric grab at my hands and proceed to yank my arms back down.
I screamed out in terror as Miranda's gloved hand pushed the bottom of my dirtied white sweatshirt up to my elbow, and then threw my gaze to the side as she situated the knife in her grasp and began to press the icy cold tip against my fleshy thick skin, right in the middle area of my forearm. I continued to screech out as I felt the blade swipe the edge of my body, letting a few involuntary tears slip in the process of feeling a small stinging sensation, and then peered back and silenced myself as I felt Miranda's grip flip my arm upside-down. I observed as she squeezed my skin a bit and held her peanut butter container directly underneath her grasp. I watched four drops of my own blood seep out and drip into it, and afterward stared while Miranda released me and spun around.
"That's it?" I mumbled.
I dropped my arms, allowing my sweatshirt sleeve to slide atop my most recent cut, and studied her back as she stepped back to the clique of others, who proceeded to surround her in some sort of circle, all of them joining hands in the process.
"Um," I started. "Can I go now?"
Miranda began to let out a loud, eerie chuckle. I stared as the others' voices, all of them deep and seemingly masculine, followed her suit.
Soon after they didn't stop their huddle of laughter, I glanced down at the rope knotted around my wrists, and then made the decision to begin wriggling my arms out of their grasps. At least try to, I should probably clarify. Because it was unnecessarily tight, and I was senselessly unskilled when it came to girl scout-related artistries, this particular one being the art of dealing with knots. Either way, though, I persevered in my efforts as the chuckles of the group quieted and all of their voices turned to creepy, nearly inaudible whispers. It didn't take long for them to quiet again, however, and then I peered back upward as their feet sounded into shuffles and the circle stepped back from where Miranda stood, her back to me for the time being.
I watched as she turned toward me, her one hand occupied with clutching her Jif peanut butter and the fingers of her other gloveless one currently shoving one heaping scoop of the thick condiment past her deeply red-lined lips.
"Is... that all it?" I questioned as she stepped into my direction.
Miranda popped her two fingers out of her mouth, and then tossed the peanut butter jar over her shoulder, letting it land somewhere in between her and the group still standing silently behind her.
"Not quite," she replied, replacing her hands on her hips while she stepped even closer toward me. "You see... you've been spending an awful lot of time around that one girl lately..."
She stopped a mere foot in front of me and glared from my feet to my face.
"What... girl?" I asked.
She smirked.
"Oh, now what was her name..." she mumbled, gazing over her shoulder for a second. "Oh, yeah." She returned her attention to me. "Stella, isn't it?"
I studied her harsh expression for a split second.
"Oh, Stella?" I urged out. "She... 's not really a friend or anything, per say, exactly, to me, anyway, so—"
"Oh, I know," Miranda shot out, nodding her head slightly. "She's just a pawn in your little plan, isn't she?"
I stared at her, blankly, for a long moment.
"Uh... What plan, exactly, are you referring to?"
Miranda rolled her eyes and moved her arms to a cross over her chest.
"You don't have to play dumb now, Emma," she said. "I know you're only befriending her to make it look like you never had any involvement with what that asshole Grayson did to Kyle... when, in reality, you were the whole reason it happened in the first place!"
I had widened my eyes at Miranda as her vocal volume raised, and then gazed from her to the number of masked men behind her to the tree beside my feet to her face once more.
"Um... I'm sorry, Miranda, I really am, but..." I paused and shook my head at her. "I don't know where you're receiving your information from because that's actually not what happened, and I swear to you I had nothing to do with Grayson and... well, I know I was actually his friend and all, but I had absolutely no idea that he was going to do anything that he did and... you know, on second thought, I actually am really good friends with Stella, like, genuinely, and—"
"Oh, shut up!" Miranda spat before I could finish.
She threw her hands back down to her hips before continuing.
"I'm not buying little miss innocent," she snapped, glancing to the side a short second. "And, anyway..." She looked back at me. "I need you to take care of a few things for me."
I squinted at her face through the darkness for a moment.
"Like, a check-up for more blood or something?" I questioned. "Because, really, if you need more, I can go to the hospital or something and just get, like, a bag drawn out for you and you won't—"
"Do you ever stop blabbering?" Miranda abruptly shot out, cutting me short a tad.
I bit my bottom lip and shrugged, then gradually glanced down to my feet.
"Just offering suggestions," I went on, after all of that.
I flickered my eyes back up to Miranda as she cocked her head to one side.
"Well, it's not helping," she proclaimed. "So..." She dropped her hands to her sides and twisted to my left, now starting up her fiendish pacing once more. "I need you to pick up something from Stella's house for me, since you two are such good friends..."
I held back my tongue as she spun around and paced leisurely into the other direction in front of where I still stood, tied and tired and tattered and all.
"And that would be," she continued, now glaring back over at me as she ceased walking. "Her daddy's credit card information."
I pursed my lips, and then nodded a slight bit.
"For... his money?" I asked, tilting my head toward my shoulder.
"I don't think that really matters," Miranda answered, crossing her arms yet again.
"Well," I replied. "It kind of does, because I just gave you that blood sacrifice for more money, right? And so... you're kind of wasting my resources if that's what it's all... about."
Miranda smirked at me.
"You have two weeks to get me the info," she stated.
I watched as she spun one-hundred and eighty degrees around and two of the completely covered people standing behind her stepped into my direction.
"Whoa, whoa, wait," I jerked out of my body.
Miranda glared at me from over one shoulder while the two people approached me from either side.
"That won't be a problem, will it?" she interrogated.
I looked up at the ski-masked face of the light-skinned individual on my right, and then did the same to the identical one on the left before snapping back to Miranda.
"I... hope not," I replied to her. "But, um, one question..." I paused as she turned more toward me and narrowed her pretty much perfectly plucked dark eyebrows. "Will anything, like, happen to me... since I kind of gave you my blood for your... uh, thing?"
She smirked, again.
"I don't know," she said. "Probably a few good years of bad luck in every aspect of your little miserable life or something." She shrugged. "I don't really pay attention; I don't really care."
And then she laughed. And then every other person around her followed suit... except for me, of course. I, instead, widened my eyes and scanned the array of chuckling masked individuals all around me.
Bad luck? In every aspect of my little miserable life?
Nothing hilariously new to me.
Still, though, I stopped my eyes on the giggling man on my right and waited for him to desist long enough to open his eyes and look down at me once more.
"Yeah, laugh it up, bud," I said to him, and then glanced back at Miranda ahead. "Actually, Miranda, I think, just maybe, that I actually do kind of have a problem with your little plan."
"Oh?" she shot out. "And what would that be?"
I stared across the way at her for a long few seconds.
"Well," I began. "I don't exactly... want to."
Miranda threw her hands down in fists and took a step forward.
"You don't want to?" she growled, taking another step.
"Well," I started. "I did say that... but, um, listen, Miranda—"
"No," she spat out with another step. "You listen, you little slimy slut bitch..."
I leaned back a bit at the ring of her words.
Again, a little contradicting of a point contrasting with what she apparently already knows about me (hint: virgin or slut?) ... but, oh well, I suppose.
She threw her pointer finger up at me, took yet another step toward my face, and continued.
"You will do this for me, or else I guarantee you will regret it for a very long amount of your pathetic time on this Earth." She took another step, now merely a few good six inches from my body. "And if you even think of going to the police against me, so help me, I will..."
She shook her head and threw her hand down, then spun around and let out an ear-shattering scream.
I jumped in place at the short sound she wailed out and attempted to throw my hands overtop my ear drums, but then ended up reminding myself that my wrists were still cuffed together too tightly to lend me any protection. I stared at the back of her head, then, as she fell back to silence. After another moment or two, I glanced around at the other still figures, and then returned my attention back to her.
I waited yet another quiet moment before piping up once more.
"Um, sorry, but... I didn't quite catch that last part, there..."
Miranda spun back around and pointed a finger at my nose once again.
"Get rid of her, now," she ordered. "I'm done with her tonight."
"Oh," I shot out as the two guys standing at my sides grabbed at my upper arms. "Are you... sure, Miranda? We're... done?"
She stepped back and spun around, revealing two more masked men, each holding the edges of an extremely large, black garbage bag.
"Oh, um, what's that?" I questioned, though I received no answer from anyone and actually already well knew what it was.
"See you Monday, Emma!" Miranda yelled out as the two threw the top of the plastic bag over my head.
"Oh, great," I muttered.