OK, so I got this completely ridiculous sci-fi story idea (the sort I'd laugh at from someone else) because of a couple things that happened to me a few weeks ago. Several weird and/or random moments happened, and one night they just connected in my head alongside thoughts of Pete and Julie.
- I wore a nickel necklace, and an allergic reaction caused this burn or rash on the back of my neck. Then, it went away like it always does. I didn't wear the necklace again, but it came back one day and just started burning severely, though I couldn't figure out why.
- That same day, I was working at the cash register at the bookstore, and, for approximately two seconds, I lost my voice, my face turned red (according to my co-worker Felicia) and I started coughing uncontrollably, unable to breathe. Felicia freaked out, and the customer I was waiting on thought it was incredibly odd. But a couple moments later, I was completely fine and back to normal.
- That night, I sat next to table full of people playing a game of Magic - The Gathering at Steak n' Shake. People kept looking at me and staring. My neck started burning again, and I put my head down on the table because I felt dizzy. Nancy, my waitress and a friend of mine from high school, got very worried and kept asking me if I was all right.
- Randomly, I was also listening to the new self-titled Liz Phair album a lot. I kept playing its first track, "Extraordinary," over and over.
That night, I told Nancy that those random events, even me listening to the Liz Phair song, had given me an idea.
I told her that I wondered that day if Julie was all right, that Julie and I had shared a past connection once, and I wondered if my weird momentary illness was some sort of echo of hers. And I told Nancy that I had an idea for a weird, supernatural WB series as a result of it.
What if I'd slept with Pete, whom I was really attracted to? What if it'd hurt Julie, which it would have? What if all of her previous explorations of me and my magical abilities left us somehow "tied" more than she realized? What if she tried to do something dark to me, inflicting herself with some sort of pain? What if she hexed the mirror in order to communicate something horrible, some sort of injury upon me? What if, instead of doing whatever she intended to do to me, it hurt her and communicated all of her natural abilities, the psychic leaning and the telekinesis, on to me?
What if she tried to essentially strangle me, instead hanging herself and leaving me with the echo of a psychic rope burn? What if I didn't know she was doing it and instead just felt it?
So here's my idea, which I've essentially stated through questions.
First scene: A college-aged girl, dejected over a disastrously-ended relationship, seems to commit suicide in a room lit by candles in a circle (so cliche). Morrissey-sad music plays in the background. Noose around her neck and hair over her eyes so that her facial expression is never quite clear, she mutters something, seeming to cast some sort of spell, and she steps off of the chair where she's standing, hanging herself. But what looks like a traditional suicide may not be. On the floor under her, nearly shattered by the kicked-away chair, is a mirror. The camera lingers over it, examining it from the air. It's not just any mirror - but it's not your typical magic mirror either. It's a college girl's mirror, adorned with photos and memorabilia. Among the photos are shots of her boyfriend, shots of other people. The camera zooms in on a photo of one guy, the main character, at the center of the mirror, directly underneath the dangling body. Blood drips on the photo.
Second scene, no cuts at all but a transition to the actual main character, smiling the exact way he was in the photo: He's working as a cashier at a bookstore, standing in front of a big, dark window that's become reflective with the night sky behind it. The lights reflected in the window disappear. The window behind the guy shakes. Suddenly, in the middle of quoting a price to someone, he starts coughing. At first not much, then violently. He can't speak, can't do anything. He starts rubbing his neck, feeling for something that isn't there. The female cashier next to him gets alarmed, asks him if he's all right. He looks up at her, and his face is unnaturally red. And he collapses, apparently dead.
Fade to credits.
Back from credits, the scene at the store continues a few minutes after the guy's collapse. The female cashier, holding a cup of water, talks to the male cashier, still flushed but conscious and apparently OK. His voice is hoarse, and he keeps rubbing the back of his neck. He thanks her for the water, keeps insisting he's fine. She looks at the back of his neck and notices something that looks like a burn, appears harsh and irritated, but soon the guy's able to walk around and serve customers. He's fine. He doesn't know exactly what happened, but he's fine.
He drives home to his apartment later that night, and he tries calling the college girl on the phone, saying he knows they've not talked in months but he can't get her out of his head, for whatever reason.
"I know I shouldn't even be calling you," the guy says. "You're probably right. It's probably best if we just let everything go. But I'm worried about you, even though you'd say it wasn't my place to be worried. No, you'd probably say that your only problem nowadays is me."
Months pass again. That has to be very clear.
When we re-emerge, the lead guy is somehow changed, even though he doesn't even realize it. He has more effected mannerisms, seems to anticipate bad things coming before they happen. It's not immediately clear what's happened to him.
He quotes the exact price of a sale amount to a customer who just walks up to his register, before he even scans an item. He stops children in his store from walking away from their parents, insists that this one customer with an odd look about him and an odd reaction to the music playing on the inside of the store leave immediately.
The girl cashier, again, would ask him what the scene was about, and the hero would respond that he has no idea - that he just had a bad feeling about the guy.
The girl cashier would change the subject, asking our lead if his dating life has improved at all. It becomes clear, from the way he talks about his ex, that he's avoiding use of pronouns, and the girl calls him on it, tells him that she's already aware that he's gay - because he told her so months ago.
"Sorry, old habit I learned from dealing with my mother," he tells her.
A guy walks into the store, and our hero immediately recognizes him and becomes sorta standoffish. But the guy sorta storms up to our hero and hugs him, saying it's good to see him and that a year shouldn't have passed since they last saw each other.
"That long?" the hero says. "Of course it's been that long. I thought it best if we didn't talk for a while, you know."
"It hardly matters now," the guy says.
"Huh?" our hero asks, not knowing what the guy is referring to.
Later, they're sitting and talking during the hero's lunch break. From this, you find out that the guy who walked in is the suicidal college girl's boyfriend, that our hero hasn't even heard about her death yet and knows nothing about it. So her boyfriend informs him and also informs him that the hero's phone message was left for her five minutes or so after she died.
___
Basically, that's all I've figured out of the story.
In an attempt to either hurt or help the hero, the college girl cast a spell over her own suicide - passing along her enchanted abilities to him because the two of them were linked. Now, it's unclear to me - and should be unclear to the hero as well - the extent of what she was trying to do.
She could've been trying to kill the hero, whom she trusted implicitly until he had an affair with her boyfriend, the guy who later informs him that she died. She could've been trying to pass along her powers - which she saw as a curse - on to him in an attempt to doom him as well, though she intended to kill herself. Or she could've been trying to arm him against another threat - the boyfriend, who may or may not know that the hero now has an echo of the girl's "powers."
(This is SO not the sort of stuff I usually write.)
To a degree, of course, the hero figures out something witchy happened, that he is somehow preternaturally gifted with strong psychic abilities and mild telekinetic strengths. He remembers that the girl didn't quite enjoy her powers, for she went through life as though little about others ever surprised her, but he figures that he can actually use them to benefit himself and others - that it doesn't have to be a curse and that it doesn't have to corrupt someone with a basically good human nature.
Of course, how good his nature is also comes into question because of the sex and the deception that we know about. I mean, everyone makes freshman mistakes, disastrously destroying relationships while coming to grips with our sexuality and identity and our influence over others.
Have you ever deceived someone in a deplorable manner, then thought back on your actions and thought 'How is that even possible from someone like me?'
Anyway, back to real life and the story behind this story idea, when I told Nancy the waitress that I felt like I'd died for someone else and that I felt like I'd somehow gotten a scar from a psychic's possible injury or death, she freaked out and made me change the subject.
I liked the idea. I thought it was good and creepy, though I didn't see how it would lend itself to future episodes. I mean, what new can happen to an unwitting psychic that hasn't already been done a million times? Sure, he's gay, and there's not been a gay paranormal TV show or teen novel series. But the character's gayness alone doesn't define him.
I like the mystery behind the first set of scenes, the intriguing idea that you don't know if someone intended to bless him, curse him or kill him, but I'm not sure if that can be made into some sort of "mythology."
Is this something I - who has no experience at quality fiction - could write? It seems like supernatural gay teen fiction, which seems like a rather untapped market, but I don't know.
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