Heartbreaker {Coming Soon}

01 I Missions & Memories

“Mission accepted,” her red lips moved slyly to form the words.  Her ear was pressed to the old-fashioned black rotary phone that sat on her nightstand.  Her eyes panned the room for a piece of paper to write down the details.  They settled upon her desk and she unfolded her legs before lifting herself off of the bed.  She shuffled through her drawers filled with various concert ticket stubs, photographs, supplies, and other items of worth.  Macey grabbed an old receipt for cigarettes she’d purchased last year, before she’d quit.  She scribbled out seven digits, an address, and five letters spelling out the name of a boy, C-a-l-e-b.

“Perfect,” her cousin Ariel said on the other end of the line.  Normally Ariel was the girl with perfect grades, manners, and a great relationship, but things were different this time.  She sought revenge and needed Macey’s talents to help her get it.  It would be one interesting Summer.  They said their goodbyes and the line went dead, causing Macey to prop the phone on it’s base and collapse backward onto her bed.  Her chestnut hair lay strewn across her face in a tangled mess.  Her charcoal painted eyelids fluttered shut as memories triggered by the phone call began playing back through her mind.  

Her thoughts brought her back to her last day at the diner, when everything went wrong.  She remembered the spilled smoothie, dropping her customers’ orders, forgetting to put out the wet floor sign.  She remembered the speech John had given her, she remembered storming out of the restaurant.  She merely had an off-day, but he was cruel enough to let her go.  

Laying there on the bed with her eyes closed, she could practically smell the cigarette smoke from that day.  Looking back now, she hated herself for being an angry-smoker.  She almost tasted the nicotine in her throat, felt the wheel of her pickup truck in her hands, heard the car door slamming shut.  She’d floored the gas as the biting wind smacked her in the face throughout the drive.  Upon entering her house on that autumn afternoon, she had heard her Mother call to her from the kitchen, asking Macey to run to the store for a gallon of milk.  It was just a simple errand.  She’d cursed under her breath, before answering her mom with a curt “sure.”  That was that, she walked back outside.  She tossed the cigarette over her shoulder and sitting in the chipped red truck once again, placed her foot on the pedal.  

After a quick trip to the store, her anger had cooled down.  She realized that she’d hated her job at the diner, it didn’t matter that she was fired.  The radio echoed throughout the car and Macey had smiled as one of her favorite songs came on the radio.  She bobbed her head to the beat and sang along as she drove back home.

Change, change your life, take it all

We’re gonna stick together, know we’ll get through it all

She turned onto her block, not bothering to read the faded sign on the corner reading “Orchard Street.”  As she approached the end of the long block the song on the radio was drowned out by police sirens, firetrucks, and an ambulance.  Flames engulfed the front portion of her house along with her lawn.  Even just remembering that moment caused Macey’s heart to drop in her chest.  She’d stopped the car in the middle of the street and bolted to the emergency vehicles only to find her mother strapped to a stretcher and being loaded into an ambulance that was bound for the nearest hospital.  Her breath caught in her throat when she overheard a nearby officer speaking into his radio “The cause of the fire appears to be a lit cigarette.”  

Macey’s eyes blinked open and a single tear slid down her cheek.  That was the day when everything changed.  Despite the constant reminders, she couldn’t bear to relive it.  No matter how "stern" or "rebellious" her peers seemed to think she was, she broke at the mere thought of her mother.  From then on, it seemed that everything that had ever gone wrong, was her fault.