"Prompt:
Take an everyday object and make it disappear. The main character goes on a journey to look for it, and more and more tension arises."
Maria awoke from a deep slumber, reaching her arm out from under the covers that encapsulated her like a cocoon to grab at her fuzzy pink journal, stuffed with phone numbers, pictures of cute boys she had cut out of magazines and stuck in with glue, and most of all, secrets. She wrote in that old, crusty thing every morning whether it be about a dream she had where she was on a date with Rick Springfield, observations from that Italian restaurant she and her friends liked to frequent because the cook was handsome, or some other teenage anomaly. Everything went in there, no matter how embarrassing it was. There was a boy in her class named Roger, with bleach blonde hair and a tasseled leather jacket, looking like a younger Billy Idol who always stood outside the schoolyard with his friends, smoking cigarettes and blasting The Clash from their boombox on the dingiest cassette tape ever because the record store owner down the street didn't care about quality, only quantity. What a shame. Maria had a crush on Roger, and whenever she saw him, she'd run off to go scribble something new about him in her journal, even if it was about his hairstyle being slightly different, whether or not he decided to wear eyeliner that day, or what songs he and the boys were listening to. But that morning, when she grappled for the familiar feel of the fuzzy pink under her fingers, it wasn't there. She didn't have any brothers or sisters, so she had to have misplaced it, right? Sitting up and tossing the duvet to the floor, Maria ran her fingers through her messy brown curls and cracked her back before scouring the side table. Where was the journal? Maybe it was in her backpack... hm. She always took it to school in case she had to write about Roger. The hideous colours of her pink and green Hello Kitty backpack that she had had for the past two years sat in the corner of her room, slumped over like a sack of flour. Her journal had to be in there! Where else would it be?! Good God, what if she left it at school? What if Roger found it and began reading it out loud to his friends? No... that wouldn't happen, she liked to hope. But then again, Roger and his group were a bunch of punks who did whatever they pleased... she was done for. They were probably reading her entries right now.
Oh diary, Roger looked so good today! That leather jacket he always wears makes his muscles pop right out... I wonder if he lifts. Probably. God, he's so dreamy!
Maria took a deep breath and dumped everything out, watching Hello Kitty throw the contents up like a bad night of drinking. A purple calculator, a half dozen pencils, a few notebooks, two pens that were probably dead by now, a Richard Marx cassette as well as a Pet Shop Boys one, cheap headphones that didn't always plug into her Walkman properly, and a pair of white tennis shoes. No, this couldn't be right. Where was her journal?! Now there really was a possibility that someone could be reading it right that second! Her life was done for. Her reputation, gone. She could never head back to school and look at anyone the same way, even her teachers. What could she do? It wasn't just the secrets in that journal, but the phone numbers and photographs inside, too. It was essentially a giant scrapbook... and now it was gone. She couldn't cry about it, that wouldn't do any good even if she really felt like it right then. Just the thought of anyone reading it made her heart pound rapidly out of her chest, as if it was running a marathon... this wasn't good. How could she live? Her life was over right now. That was it. No journal? No peace. All of her happiness leaked out of her... there was nothing to live for anymore. The journal was her life... her death, even! Wait, no. That didn't make sense. Well, anyway, she was going to find it, one way or another. And she'd start by looking through her room. If not that, the house. If not that, her mum's car. If not that... school. Oh boy.
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Creative Writing: All of the short stories I wrote in my senior year of college
Short Story[Published originally on April 29th, 2021] Here is a compilation of all of the written works I did while in my Creative Writing course in college. I haven't edited any of them, just uploaded straight from their original documents. Some are funny, so...
