The last time Jessica went to the city cemetery was three years before when her family buried her grandmother. She never thought of ever going there for, well, enjoyment. But that's why she was going now. She felt drawn to it, like a magnet. The more time she spent in this new Goth life, the more fascinated she became with the concept of death. And whereas before she would have been disturbed by these new feelings, now she had accepted them. And even wanted them.
She walked among the gravestones, running her fingers along them, feeling the cold stone beneath her fingertips.
"Jessica?" a voice asked.
She turned and saw a lanky man (probably in his 20's) with greasy unkempt hair and wearing overalls.
"Do I know you?" she asked.
"Of course, ya know me. It's me. Louis. The groundskeeper?"
"Oh. Yeah," she said, feigning knowledge of him.
"You come for the bodies again?" he asked, with a peculiar uneducated accent.
"Bodies?" What was he talking about?
"Well, shore. The bodies in the crypt. Ya wanna touch 'em?"
Jessica should have been turned off, disgusted even, at the thought of touching dead bodies, but she wasn't. In fact, she had the opposite reaction. She was turned on by it.
After entering the crypt, Louis opened one of the caskets. Jessica looked down at the slowly decaying corpse and ran her hand down its arm. She smiled.
"If you wanna get in with him ..." Louis suggested.
"Can I?" She was actually considering it.
"You usually do."
Jessica smiled and climbed into the casket, straddling the corpse, then bending down and kissing it on its deformed mouth. At the back of her mind, Jessica couldn't believe she was doing this. But she wanted to. Something made her want to.
Louis watched on and smiled at her.
On their way to The Occult Stop, Sarah and Amber stopped off at a gas station so Amber could buy more cigarettes.
Once outside, Amber put one in her mouth and lit up. She inhaled deeply and exhaled smoke.
"You know," Sarah said. "Those things will kill you. You might get lung cancer, or something."
Amber looked at her. "Do I look like someone who'd care?"
"No."
There was a brief pause, then they continued on their way.
When Melissa got home, she went straight to her bedroom. She had something to do.
Sitting at what was now her computer, she opened up the hacking program that Zelda told her not to touch. And she used it to hack into the school database again. She still didn't understand how she was able to do it, but her fingers did, and was good enough for her.
Once inside, she erased any mention of Amber's "track record", which would have eventually spelled doom for her. Amber was her friend and she couldn't sit back while she got carted off to some juvenile detention center, or at the very least be expelled. If she now had the ability to hack, she might as well use it for a good reason.
But then she stopped when she spotted a student's name listed in the database. It was Pete Somers, the boy from her first period class who made fun of her that morning, calling her a robot. A devious grin appeared on her face, as she made one small correction to his file, showing that he had been drinking on school grounds.
Then she quickly exited the database.
Let's see how he likes that, Melissa thought.
Tiffany and her newest pet Zach walked into her room. Zach looked around the room, in amazement. But Tiffany knew that if he wasn't under her spell, he'd probably be disgusted by it all.
"Zach, sit down," she ordered. And he sat down on her bed, looking at her with eyes filled with admiration. Quite different than how he looked at her at school that day.
She smiled. "You're going to help me figure out these spells," she said, walking over to the bookcase and taking one of the witchcraft books.
"Okay, Mistress," he replied.
