Serial Thursdays: Part 1 of 8: Fuzzy Morals

Just warming up here… not sure where I’ll go with this or if anywhere at all but I need to jump feet first or I’ll never start!!! Enjoy and just remember it’s all fictional, don’t look too much into it peoples 😛

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Eight. 

Eight is the number of people I could call right now and ask for help, and they’d come and give it, no questions asked. 

Eight.

Eight is the number of people I have hurt intentionally over the past year.

Eight.

Eight is the number of people who would like to see me dead.

Make that nine. 

I didn’t count myself. 

I’m sorry.  I don’t know you, and I’ve already lied to you.  The truth is that the number of people I could call right now and ask for help – and they’d come over and give it, no questions asked – that number is zero.  If you have even one person like that, just one person – count yourself extremely lucky.  You know the old cliche “If you can count the number of true friends you have on one hand, then you are a very lucky person” – that is one cliche I’m finding out to be real accurate.  I mean, just real accurate. 

So, eight.  Eight is, however, the number of people I have hurt intentionally over the past year.  And nine, well nine is the number of people who would like to see me dead.  Maybe ten or eleven if you throw in some wives here and there – but I’m getting ahead of myself. 

One, one was a real doozy.  A real gem of a guy.  Marty, his name was.  Marty grew up in the old school, he believed in equality ’bout as much as any man who didn’t think his wife should have to work, as much as any man who honestly, truly believed that men and women were simply born different, not just physically but that a man’s brain was naturally larger and more suited to, you know, thinking, than a woman’s brain was.  Despite that, though, he was really a sweetheart, with a few misgivings about his own… how do I put this delicately? tendencies.  Tendencies to like a little girl a bit too much to be legal, you catch my drift? 

I’m Libby, I’m 5’4, about 120 lbs, I’ve got all the womanly parts, sure, but I’m only 15.  Which can be a big problem sometimes when I want to do certain things, like go somewhere fun, but I can’t because I can’t even get a license, or I can’t go listen to music at certain clubs even if I’m not drinking, it’s just an issue. 

So how did I meet Marty?  Well, here’s how it goes, I took my little sister Lola, she’s barely 10, a real baby if you ask me, but I love her when she’s not being a pain, well I took her to the diner for an ice cream soda.  Our parents were at work, I was taking care of her, and she’d finished all of her homework and showed me her tests, she got like all 100s on them, some 105s because of extra credit.  Lola is really book smart, I’m not that into studying and all, but she’s good like that.  A real genius. 

So she’s chowing down on her ice cream soda, really relishing it, licking the spoon after each bite, taking sips through her straw, laughing, giggling, and telling me about the kids in her class, and I’m teasing her about the boys she’s mentioning, and everything’s great when I get this ugly feeling on the back of my neck.  Like someone’s watching us.  I turn my head really slowly, and I notice that someone is standing in front of the diner, which isn’t unusual, people meet other people outside all the time, right?  But this person has their back to the street, and he or she is peering into the diner, and I realize that whoever it is is staring directly at our table.  It was making me really uncomfortable. 

I glance at Lola, who’s going on about some boy named Devin, totally oblivious, and I interrupt her to tell her I’m going to the ladies’ room.  I walk in that direction and quickly double back to the side door, slipping out.  The creep hadn’t moved – he was staring at my kid sister.  Not only that?  As I stood there, somehow without him even noticing me, I realized he was touching himself.  I let out some sort of inhuman roar and leapt at him, clawing at his face, and I basically knocked him over, which was pretty easy to do, despite his size versus my non-size – afterall, I caught him offguard and I guess he was just, you know, not expecting it, and his hands were kind of preoccupied.  I started slapping him and screaming things like “You filthy pervert!” and he was saying things back, and finally I realized he was saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I have money, please stop,” and things clicked into place.  I stopped hitting him.  How much money, I wanted to know.  Would he leave us alone afterwards, I asked.

Marty nodded and told me he would give me as much money as we wanted.  I think I may have given him a seizure when I asked for a hundred grand. 

You see, Lola is really smart.  But our parents don’t make a lot of money, and Lola could really use extra money for extra classes and later on, for college.  I reasoned that he hadn’t touched her, he wasn’t going to touch her, so what was the big deal with asking him for some money to pay for those classes, for college even?

So Marty gave me the money, and I opened a bank account solely for Lola and her schooling.  I never did see him again, not in person anyway. 

You’re probably wondering why Marty wants to kill me then.  I mean, I blackmailed him for an outrageous sum of money, sure, but everyone should be happy here, right? 

Not exactly… because after the money was in my hands, I called in an anonymous tip that he possessed pornographic material featuring minors and blahblahblah.  It was a shot in the dark, but I saw an article in the paper a few days later that he’d been arrested and found to be in possession of large quantities of such things, and there was evidence of, um, not exactly aboveboard activities.  Yeah. 

Maybe that makes sense now why Marty wants to kill me? 

And that’s just number one on the list.  But really, I want to know, do you think I did the right thing?  Was I really wrong to do what I did?  I mean, he was clearly disturbed, a bad person, the money is going to an excellent cause – I’ve enrolled Lola in some classes at the local high school now – so it’s win-win all around, right?

Right?