Evil - Chapter 15
Flirting with somebody was one thing but teaching somebody to flirt was a whole different matter.
This is a portal fantasy series with mythological roots and action-adventure tendencies. You can search through all my work on my website.
It's not easy being the Antichrist.
Anjelica’s mother never told her that she was a demon. Now, all she wants is her old life back, but that’s not possible for her. Not after what she’s seen.
Anjelica used to be a popular cheerleader with an awesome life, but that was before an evil cult of demons tried to use her blood to open a portal to Hell and start the Apocalypse.
She was rescued from that fate, barely, and because of the imminent threat to her life, her saviors ripped her from Los Angeles and brought her to a safe house in the middle of nowhere.
They said it was for her own good, but she would rather be dead than stuck in boring, old Bronard, Missouri. She was from the big city, so a sleepy, rural life wasn’t for her.
She longed for excitement.
So, when she met a young witch with a mysterious past who promised to show her everything she knew about opening portals and traveling between distant lands, they bonded immediately
I mean, what’s the worst that could happen, right?
It’s not like they would open an intergalactic gateway to another planet and get thrown into a brand, new world with no way to get back to Earth, right?
Join Anjelica in her own solo adventure and find out what happened to her immediately after the events in Magic.
Still, a promise was a promise, and that evening I stood in Lizzie’s room, ready to teach her how to flirt with boys, specifically one very gothy-looking kid in her grade named Pete.
“All right, before we start, you should show me what you already know. So, let’s pretend I’m Pete and flirt with me like you would flirt with him.”
Lizzie sat cross-legged on the bed, shaking her head fervently. “No way.”
“Come on.” I pulled her arm to drag her up. “There are no wrong answers here.”
She stopped resisting and allowed me to pull her to stand. “Fine, but if you laugh, I’m going to punch you.”
“Fair enough. Now, pretend I’m Pete.” I straightened myself and pushed back my shoulders, trying to act as “manly” as possible. I dropped my voice when I spoke. “Sup?”
“Uhhh.” She began to laugh. “This is really weird.”
“Why?” I said, keeping my deeper voice. “Are you saying I’m weird?”
“Oh, I think you are very weird.”
“Come on!” I replied, breaking character. “I’m taking this seriously and trying to help you. Do you want my help or not?”
“OKAY!” she shouted. “Fine.” She took a deep breath. She waved her arm in a very awkward gesture. “Hey, Pete. What’s up?”
“Nothin’, just hanging out, hatin’ the world.”
She ran her finger through her hair and tucked her hair behind her ear. “Cool. Cool. Cool.” She stood silent for a second and then threw her hands in the air. “And that’s about all I’ve got.” She fell back into the bed. “God, this is lame. I’m hopeless.”
I knelt next to her. “No, that was good.” She gave me a blank look. “All right, that was terrible, but that’s why we’re doing this, right?”
She pulled a pillow close and screamed into it. When she was done, she flopped onto her stomach. “I guess.”
“Good. Now, having boys like you. You just have to be yourself and know you’re the best.”
“Uhh, that’s the first problem. I don’t think that…at all.”
I smirked. “Me either, but guess what? That’s what lying is for. We fake it until we make it. The more confident we are in our own skin, the sexier we are to other people. It’s all about being the best version of yourself.”
Her eyes narrowed. “That can’t be right. I’m a complete weirdo. Nobody thinks that’s sexy.”
“Um, have you ever seen Ally Sheedy? She’s a complete weirdo, too, and Emilio Estevez is totally into her by the end of The Breakfast Club!”
“That’s a movie,” Lizzie replied. “It’s not real life.”
I pulled her up. “No, in real life, you’re way cooler than Ally Sheedy, and Pete would be a fool not to fall madly in love with you.”
“Whoa,” Lizzie said, pushing me away. “I don’t know if I want all that. I’ll settle for him coming over to hang out and listen to records.” She looked at me. “I thought you were gonna show me how to like brush my arm against his in homeroom, purse my lips, or something easy like bat my eyes at him.”
I shook my head. “None of that sounds like you, does it?”
“No, it doesn’t. But just being myself? It can’t be that easy.”
“I didn’t say ‘be yourself,’ I said be a more confident version of yourself.”
“Still, that’s not ‘here’s how to be sexy.’ That’s what I want. Being myself is easy. I am stuck being myself every day, and I hate it.”
“Are you kidding me? Being yourself is the hardest thing in the whole world. Being yourself, putting yourself out there, means letting down your guard and being vulnerable. That is true bravery, sister. All this other stuff—” I looked over at her nightstand and saw copies of Cosmopolitan and Tiger Beat mixed in with copies of Rolling Stone. “—all those stupid magazines, they are set up to leave you broken, so you keep needing them. Once you learn how to be yourself,” I touched her shoulder. “you’ll be unstoppable.”
“You promise?”
“I do,” I said. “It’s not a perfect solution. Lots of people are going to hate it, they might think you’re a weirdo, but the right people? To them, you’ll be the sexiest thing alive.”
Lizzie thought for a moment. “And how do you…be yourself?”
“That’s the hard part. I’m still trying to figure it out. I’m in a new place, at a new school, with new people, and I struggle with it every day because I want to be liked—I want to be loved…and it’s scary to be myself because what if nobody likes me.”
She smiled. “I like you…just don’t let it go to your head.”
“I won’t, and thank you.”
“Can you just…teach me like one thing, though? I mean, you are making a big ask of me, and I feel like you just gave me a pep talk.”
I chuckled. “All right, stand up.” When she did, I stepped back. “I call this one the pet and giggle.” I walked up to her. “Hi, Pete.” My voice rose half an octave, and I let some extra breath into my words. When Lizzie looked at me, I cocked my head to the left. “How was your night?” I bit the tip of my thumb gently.
“Good. I just…hung out, man.”
I smirked as I took my hand and ran it along Lizzie’s forearm. “Sounds fun. Maybe we can do it together some time.” When I was done, I shook it off and smiled at Lizzie.
“Whoa,” Lizzie said. “That was awesome.”
“Yeah, I know. That’s my patented move, so use it well. It combines confidence, smiling, a playful touch, complimenting him, showing interest in his life, and drawing attention to your lips. It’s a super-advanced trick, but if you pull it off, there’s zero chance he won’t look at your butt when you walk away, and that’s what you are after. You just walk away when you’re done, so there’s less chance you’ll mess it up.”
“You are a master,” Lizzie said. “I bow to you.”
***
True to her word, Lizzie came through for me. Dennis’s car wasn’t much to look at, probably the only Yugo still on the road whose engine hadn’t exploded in a blaze of hellfire, but I wasn’t picky. I was just happy for the ride.
“Why do you need to go to the college?” Dennis asked, his eyes on the road. He was considerably more attractive than his car, with shaggy brown hair and blue eyes, but his voice was nasal and grating. He didn’t have much of a style sense, either, but Bronard wasn’t the fashion capital of the world. However, he stood out even from his peers in his ineptness. Half the collar of his checkered shirt was flipped up, and his khaki pants were stained with foodstuffs I didn’t care to imagine.
I didn’t know enough about Dennis to tell him the truth, so I concocted a passable lie. “I’m graduating in a couple of years, and I want to get a feel for the colleges in the area.”
“Most people from here can’t wait to leave,” he replied. “Still, some of us like it.”
Dennis was a freshman at Middleditch Polytechnical College, which was why I hadn’t seen him around school. He turned the corner, and an old Big Gulp cup rolled off the dashboard onto my lap.
“Dang!” Dennis said, trying and failing to catch it. A couple of drops dripped onto my jeans. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I replied. “These weren’t my favorite jeans or anything. Besides, you’re doing me a favor, and I appreciate it, even if that was totally disgusting.”
“I was going to clean it all out nice for you, but then life happened, and I didn’t—well, I didn’t know you would be so pretty.”
“Groan.”
He looked at me. “Did you just say groan?”
“I did, because if my level of attraction factored into whether you treated me with respect and dignity, it’s totally groan-inducing.”
“It’s not that it’s—man, I’m really blowing this—I just—I’m sorry.” He sighed. “You might have noticed, but I don’t talk to a lot of girls.”
“I’m not a girl,” I replied. “I’m just a human who needed a favor, and you were nice enough to give it to me.”
“Right,” he said, then cleared his throat. “So, what are you most excited about seeing today?”
“The librarian at my school said you have some networked computers, and I’m really interested in seeing them.”
“Really? But you’re so pre—I just thought you would major in communications or English or teaching or something.”
I stared daggers at him, trying hard not to chew him out. After all, he could leave me on the side of the road at any moment.
He continued. “I’m a computer science major, actually. Those computers are kind of a specialty of mine. I’d love to show them to you. I believe the internet is the next great revolution in human communication. Everyone able to talk to everyone else in a fraction of a second. A universe of data at your fingertips.”
“That sounds terrible.”
“No way! Think about it; you can be a thousand miles away and talk to your mother on the phone or look up a long-lost friend from grade school you lost touch with.”
“Yeah, and they can find me, too. I hope I don’t live to see the day.”
“It’s coming, Anjelica. By the turn of the century, every computer in the world will be networked together…and we’re going to be at the forefront of it.”
I didn’t feel like arguing and blowing the fact that I really didn’t care for computers or technology at all. I was perfectly fine staying anonymous, especially with demons potentially trying to track me down. I turned up the radio just as it clicked from “Midnight Rider” to “Clyde.” The radios in our little part of Missouri seemed to only pick up Country-Western stations, which brought back thoughts of the Palomino and the night I almost died. I cut the radio off, and we sat in silence for the rest of the ride.
We didn’t have to wait long to cross into campus. Within five minutes of me stopping the music, it crested over the horizon, and in ten minutes, Dennis pulled into the entrance to campus. The archway above the street spelled out Middleditch Polytechnical Institute in big, green, metal letters.
The campus wasn’t anything special—several brick buildings connected with concrete paths. The only things that distinguished them were the chrome names of the buildings on the side. We passed buildings for English, History, and Biology before coming to a stop in front of a small building on the edge of campus that said Computer Science in shiny silver letters outside.
“Here we are. Home sweet home.” He opened the car door. “I know we didn’t get off on the right foot, but I would very much like to show you around.”
I didn’t have any other leads, and Dennis was offering to walk me into the belly of the beast. I nodded and followed him toward the entrance. The campus was sparsely populated, and the few students walking between the buildings stepped double time to get out of the cold.
Dennis pushed open the green metal door and led me down a set of stairs into a dark hallway filled with a foreign hum.
“What are those?” I asked.
“Servers,” Dennis said. “That’s how we can communicate with other computers around the world. Basically, it’s the backbone of the internet. It’s really neat if you want to see—”
“No,” I said emphatically. “Hey, you said you specialized in communication on the internet. Is there any way you can show me how to send a message on the internet to somebody else?”
“Sure!” Excitement filled his voice, and he shuffled into a room with several computers and slouched down behind one of the few open ones. The others were occupied by people with similar hunched postures.
“So, it’s not quite as easy as just sending a message, you know,” he said, typing. “However, there are some forums set up that allow us to communicate with other institutions, post questions, and exchange information.”
“Can you post something on there for me?”
“On where? You need to know where you want to go for any of this to work.”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I just need to post a message on the internet for somebody.”
“And I’m saying it’s not that easy.” His eyes narrowed. “Are you sure you are interested in computers at all?”
I smirked at him. “No, I’m not, but I need to get a message to somebody, and I don’t know how to do that. I need your help. Please.”
He thought for a moment. “Well, there are a finite number of these forums. I suppose we could just flood every message board with them and hope that the right person picks it up.”
I reached into my pocket. “Okay, can you post ‘Phil, need help. Anjelica. 417-555-3214.’”
He shut his eyes and took a breath. “I just want you to know this isn’t how the internet is supposed to work. It’s not for hooking up.”
I squeezed his shoulder. “Anything taken to its logical conclusion devolves into hooking up, and eventually pornography because people are perverts. Now, send the stupid message.”
His voice fluttered at my touch, and I felt him tense under my hand. “I mean, you’re the boss, I guess, so okay.”
This is a portal fantasy series with mythological roots and action-adventure tendencies. You can search through all my work on my website.