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WHEN TOGETHER, it was five Derry schoolgirls who formed a girl gang: Cindy, an "it" girl who, in the past six months, had ditched nineteen boys, slept with four, and had kissed a cardboard cutout of Molly Ringwald on a dare (the boys were just a cover up, though: her parents would rather her sleep around than — God forbid — fancy girls). Then, there was cloudy-haired Monica, who rocked to heavy metal and smoked trees, Heather, with the round face and intense love for Keanu Reeves, Kimberly Crouch, who'd had four pregnancy scares since her thirteenth birthday, and then their newest addition, the complete crackpot, Romilda Yves, who was all jagged edges and harsh lines, and had hacked her hair all choppy after a recent psychotic episode, leaving rugged edges and silky ebony locks in the porcelain sink.
The bathroom where this said incidence occurred was located in one of the many cookie-cutter houses that were terraced across Derry, with pruned lawns that were mowed once a day, or twice if need be, behind weeded pavements that had been newly lain to replace the old gum-speckled sidewalk. She often wondered how a girl so mismatched had been dropped slapdash in the middle of all this normality, in a world were her guardians were one-dimensional and her friends adopted her because of her naivety only.
However, she'd heard the gawking that people had done over the past four movies (Belch Huggins claimed to have all four moves pirated on VHS, and had watched the age rated eighteen at merely eleven). She'd been given nightmares from the horrific posters with the scar-faced man who had blades for fingers, and the costumes that they'd been selling at the corner store for halloween.
She was fourteen now, though, and she'd be an adult soon enough, and already sought herself mature for her age. However, fears were elicited from her childhood, and moulded into her adolescent being. One of these fears, however, happened to be Freddy Kruger.
Walking as a fifth wheel behind her group of friends that were too close-knit to allow her between their threads, she peaked over the shoulders of the pack and said, "Are you sure this is the best idea? Cindy, what if they ask for our age? You ... you know I have high blood pressure!"
"Eugh, stop being such a baby," Cindy whipped around, her blonde hair lacerating around but managing to swish prettily against her neck. She clutched a bottle strawberry lipgloss in her hand, the wand in the other, the pinkish glitter catching the light. She griped, "Do you want a diaper? A pacifier? Life sucks losers dry, Romy, I'm sure you're quite aware of that by now. I'm not stopping you, feel free to leave at any time you'd like. Now do you want to see this movie or not?"
Romilda certainly didn't fit in with the aesthetic of this teen-movie clique. Her hair was pin straight and spider-black, and there was a chip in one of her front teeth after she'd fallen headfirst over the handlebars of her bike and onto the concrete. For as long as she could remember, she had dressed like a greaser — it was how her parents had done it, and she'd grown to idolise Grease and The Outsiders and her brother who had likened himself to dressing same, up until he became the family dirtbag, stopped slicking his hair, and started stealing her aerosols and listening to Metallica and other heavy metal on vinyl, rattling their housing block to the roots.
