Excerpt: The Devil on My Shoulder

Chapter 1

In Which Everyone Minds the Gap

A rush of hot air whistled through the small, tiled corridors, blowing past her face in a stale whoosh. Dark curls stubbornly fought their way out of the confines of their ties and brushed urgently against her cheeks. Kia paused to hoist her decidedly large bag up a small flight of stairs in the underground corridor, one hand straining on the handle, the other straining for support on the railing. The bag clunked heavily on each step as she lugged it up painstakingly slowly. Another blast of air from a train somewhere in the depths of another tunnel blew past her. With a hiss of ever so slight annoyance, Kia hefted the bag to the landing and began to fumble through her pockets.

“I really hope I wrote it down. . . Oh, bugger, I’m screwed if I didn’t because I haven’t got a single pence on me for a payphone.” She muttered to herself, oblivious to the confounded stares of passing strangers, honestly mistaking her for a crazy person. “Oh yes, what brilliant planning skills you’ve got, Nakia. Stellar at these sort of operations you are.” Past ever so slight annoyance now, Kia exhaled a deep sigh of relief as she finally pulled a small scrap of paper out of her jeans. Once the paper was uncrumpled, she was able to discern her small and scrupulously horrible handwriting, but just barely.

One satisfied nod later, she was re-crumpling the paper and sticking it back into her pocket and taking off down the corridor, now heading in precisely the right direction.

~~~

No less than five minutes later, Kia had seated herself carefully, and quite strategically, by one of the doors in the train, her overly large but completely necessary luggage meticulously stowed in a messy pile (if a single bag can possibly be messily stowed) beside her person. She was now able to sit back and enjoy the ride, more or less. However, there were a few too many worries possessing her concentration for her to be peacefully reclining. In fact, the state of her slouch was decidedly un-peaceful. All because she was running away.

See, the situation had been imminent for quite some time, and it had finally drawn itself to a climax. The beginning, though, is generally a good place to begin, in order to properly explain things. Sometimes it’s helpful to understand the end as well, but in this case that would just be cheating.

As soon as Kia was settled, her mind began to flit away, images of her mother and her mother’s second husband, Rupert filling her thoughts. Rupert had never approved of Kia. He had always thought that she was an incorrigible young girl who had been allowed to do whatever she wanted whenever she wanted for far too long. But since her mother never failed to intervene on her behalf, Kia had never before been threatened by Rupert. But now, the circumstances were completely different. Her step sister, Clarice, had announced her engagement to the eternally pretentious Malcom K. (for Konstantinius) Polek IV. Now she was being compared to her sister like never before, now that she was so blatantly “uncouth” and her sister had an incredibly fortunate marriage at a relatively young age. Rupert had been happier than she had ever seen him before, Kia ruefully admitted to herself. Immediately after he had given his approval to the “happy couple,” he had turned an imposingly calculated stare on Kia. And she knew that nothing would be the same again. Rupert would have his way, because her mother would be to preoccupied planning the wedding and organizing even more social affairs than normal. Kia would have been forced to grow up as Rupert saw fit, and he would then “introduce her to society” like all the upper class snoots did, and soon after, some pompous prick would ask for her hand in marriage and she wouldn’t be allowed to say no. That is, if she didn’t stop the cycle herself. So that is what she did.