Tesselate

Hi guys, so after seven years of starting and sometimes completing a hundred short stories, I wrote a novel. 

Below you can find the first chapter of Tesselate. 

Chapter One

Cecilia

The water had gone cold. Cecilia lied still in the bathtub, all but her face enveloped by the lukewarm water. Her loose pink floral pyjama shorts floated around her slim thighs and her transparent white cotton shirt revealed her baby blue bra. Her eyes had become heavy as she stared at the ceiling, her eyes finding and focussing on the worn grey paint that had begun to slowly peel away in the corners revealing cracked plaster.

An empty wine glass sat on the window sill just above the tub, after consuming 7 filled-to-the-brim glasses from her stash of half empty bottles of left over alcohol and wine from parties. She hid them in the laundry closet on the top shelf, behind the box of old video games and the Nintendo, where her mother was far too short to ever reach or bother to look.

Blotches of orange light from the setting sun danced on the frosted glass window, seeping through the leaves of the garden beside the house. Her mother would be home soon, she thought. But not soon enough.

She waited for the unconsciousness to take her. She was dizzy, but she wondered if it was just the alcohol and not the fact she had just swallowed half a packet of Nurofen and 11 of her mother’s sleeping pills.

Cecilia began to wonder how it had come to this. She used to be so happy. How had she become so pathetically weak?
She guessed she had always been weak. She had always struggled talking to people, her face lighting up like a flare when she met others; even through the layer of makeup pasted on her skin. She avoided arguments and held a poker face when she would overhear the other kids talking about her in school, terrified of confrontation.  She was even weak against herself and her thoughts that would scratch and tear at her; completely vulnerable to her own mind. But this was probably the strongest thing she had ever done.

She was ready. 

She thought about how her mother might feel. Cecilia knew she’d be sad, possibly even heartbroken. She would probably try to drag her out of the tub, hold on to her soaked lifeless body and scream for the neighbours. She felt bad for that. Poor mum, she thought.

She thought about what her father would think. Perhaps he would be regretful and apologise for all the times he had failed. She hoped so. Fuck dad, she thought. 

Then she thought about what he might say. Probably nothing at all come to think of it. He would probably reply to the news with nothing more than a slight wince - emphasis on the ‘slight’. He probably wouldn’t even talk about it. Probably wouldn’t even show up to her funeral.

“And fuck you”, she whispered, still staring at the cracked and peeling paint, half expecting the words to give her some sort of major relief, hope even, but if anything they left her breathless; any action a huge struggle now.

She could feel it. Her stomach began to churn and an ache was coming along. She thought she’d might be sick which would be lovely wouldn’t it – being found in a bath filled with the contents of your own stomach? Then she wondered why she had chosen the bath of all places anyway.

Perhaps it was because it was the place she would always find herself sitting in to get away, water or no water, writing in her journal and trying to make sense of everything. Perhaps it was because she just generally liked baths; they always made her feel better. Her mum would always tell her to have a bath when she felt sick. Her mother was right on that note.

She considered sitting up and aiming for the sink but all her energy had gone and her arm felt like a 20 kilo spaghetti noodle. Her eyes felt just as bad as they fought her to go to sleep. She closed them focussing on the red and black specs until she slipped into a deep unconscious almost immediately.

She had lived her last months the way she would die; alone. 

Molly

It was three in the afternoon, smoke hung like a cloud beneath the ceiling of Molly’s bedroom, despite her attempts at aiming out the window. Her back rested on the black frame of her queen sized bed, blankets ruffled and clothes lying in every direction possible, even draping off the shelves that hung high above her head.
She wore a large white men’s shirt – who’s shirt it was she wasn’t sure, that was more of a dress on her, purple ruffled pyjama shorts and last night’s make up. She had just woken and had yet to check the time, assuming it was only 10 in the morning; sure that she still had long to make plans for the day.

She held her make-shift plastic bottle bong that had begun to turn brown and the inner walls were covered with green debris. She tapped on it lightly with her index finger to the beat of the soft music while she refilled the cone piece with more weed, humming along.

Her mother was at work, seeing as it was a weekday, and Molly spent most of her days ‘looking for a job’ and making plans for the evening. Last night she had driven to her friend Cody’s, who was a beautiful girl thatt lived by the beach in a huge two storey house and tended to throw parties spontaneously, which was how last night had concluded. Most of the people in the ‘group’ also had that habit. There was no living slow with them – no time to stop and think. That’s how Molly had liked it.

After concluding that Molly was more than high enough to start her day, she hopped out of bed, stepped through her large room avoiding the endless amounts of rubbish and more clothes that lied on the wooden floors and skipped out and through the hall.

Molly had a very long hallway. A long hall was one that lasted perhaps more than 4 metres but Molly’s hall ran from one side of the house to the other, the doors lining it consisted of two doorways to the rest of the house, four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a store room, a laundry, a toilet and an oversized cupboard that Harry Potter would have died to have. And that was only half the house. Whenever a new friend visited Molly, without a doubt they will comment on the long and rather creepy hallway; most not being able to walk to the bathroom on their own in the night until at least their third visit.

Molly came from a wealthy family. Their house was one storey but large - so large you could be at one side of the house and no one else would know you were home, even with the music volume on full blast. Molly had also been given a twenty grand car the day she got her license, and her mother constantly left money on the counter in the morning before she left for work, though mostly twenties. Despite the generosity of her mum, and her dad when he was home (which was rarely), she would gladly trade it for a somewhat different family – one that didn’t try to buy her love at least.

“Next week”, she assured herself that she would take the whole looking for a job thing seriously, but until then, her plans were to get high, eat and receive more than enough attention from boys via social media and text messages.

Molly skipped to the kitchen, put a pan on the stove, opened the fridge, and began to make an omelette with cheese, spring onion, bacon, tomato, and she had the strangest craving for honey so she squeezed some on the cooking eggs, attempting to draw a smiley face before practically drowning it in its sugary goodness. Whilst grabbing a plate from the cupboard next to the microwave, she stood up and saw the digital green numbers on the screen, reading 3:23 pm.
After several long confused and worried moments of staring and contemplating whether the microwave was broken, Molly glanced at the oven and there on another tiny small digital screen read 3:25 pm. She stared at that too, perhaps for a couple moments longer, trying to recall what her last thought had been and why she was staring at the oven.

“Oh shit”, she muttered to herself, finally processing the time and also realising it was Thursday; her mum finished work early and would get home in approximately 35 minutes. She ran back to the stove, flipped the delicious omelette of all deliciousness onto her plate, scoffed it down too quickly, chucked the dishes into the dishwasher and ran back to her room to try and attempt to clear the smell of smoke and weed in the air, knocking the bong water over in the process.

~

It had been a while since the time when her mother was due home but neither of them said hello or even acknowledged each other’s presence, not that they usually did. Molly still hadn’t replied to any of the 6 texts that sat in her phone, such as Josh asking her if she would like to go to dinner, Daniel saying it was great meeting her last night or even Cody who asked Molly if she could come over so that they could have a girl’s night.

Molly couldn’t be bothered replying to any of them, and although the last thing she wanted was to have a plan-less night of getting high on her own, avoiding her mum and web surfing, listening to Cody talk nothing more than of other people (not the good kind), the number of likes on her Facebook photos or bitching about the boys in her life – and then practically jumping on their laps when she sees them, was surprisingly even less desirable.

Molly unlocked her phone, her screensaver flashing her with a picture of her and Cody in their matching purple bikini’s, posing with their arms around each other at a pool party and laughing at something that was going on to the left of the camera. Josh on the keg stand? Molly thought to herself, trying to recall.
Cody was her best friend – or the closest thing to it anyway. She had stayed with Cody when she got kicked out almost two months ago for back-chatting her mother and Cody practically jumped at the opportunity to be ‘roomies’, offering Molly her very own bedroom in her palace without having to pay a single thing until Molly’s mum eventually begged her to move back after a month.

But there they were, spending their days by the beach and their nights at parties. They didn’t have a single responsibility. They were in complete bliss, living in their own world consisting only of boys, alcohol, the beach and parties; their only worry was eating too much and looking fat in their swimsuits. Maybe Molly was bored. Maybe Molly wanted someone she could be her worst with, not this flawless image she had created in front of those people… Or maybe she was just high and was overthinking her mere existence, but while she was on her phone flipping through her contacts, there was one particular name she was looking for.