Written for the Spooky Season Writing Challenge, Week 5.
“I hate him, Taylor. I hate him so much.”
Kaitlyn sat sobbing on her bedroom floor, her best friend Taylor’s arms wrapped around her. Strewn around the room were ripped and crumpled photos of a moderately handsome teenage boy with a confident smile and blond curly hair.
“He’s garbage. He never deserved you anyway.” Taylor had always disliked Bradyn, but she’d held her tongue for Kaitlyn’s sake. Bradyn had a brash, overly confident demeanor that gave Taylor an uncomfortable feeling she had trouble finding words to explain.
Kaitlyn looked up, her eyes wild. “After two years! I thought we were going to get married!” She choked back a sob and swiped at the tears still rolling down her cheeks. Then she set her jaw and growled, “I’m going to get back at him. He’s going to suffer for this.”
Taylor blinked, caught unawares by her friend’s sudden ferocity. This was a side of Kaitlyn she had rarely seen.
“What do you want to do to him?” she asked, envisioning a campaign of embarrassing AI-produced “photos” of Bradyn spreading throughout Red River High School like wildfire. That would be a fitting revenge against the boy who had, Kaitlyn had just discovered, been cheating on Kaitlyn for the past six months.
The fire burning behind Kaitlyn’s gold-flecked eyes told her that Kaitlyn had another, more sinister plan in mind.
Kaitlyn wiped her nose with the back of her hand and swallowed hard. “I’m going to curse that piece of human trash.”
Taylor had given Kaitlyn the book as a joke. Kaitlyn’s birthday was October 31, and the two of them had always laughed about how that must mean Kaitlyn was a born witch. But Taylor had never expected that Kaitlyn would actually take On the Dark Path: Curses, Hexes, and Other Dark Magic seriously.
But here they were, alone in Kaitlyn’s bedroom, having “cast a circle” with Kaitlyn’s little X-ACTO knife decorated with a pink and white plastic cat paw, the bedroom door locked and barricaded with a dresser to keep out prying parents and nosy siblings.
Kaitlyn leaned over her chemistry notebook, carefully writing Bradyn’s name on a blank sheet of graph paper. Then she ripped the sheet out of the spiral notebook with an angry flourish and placed it on the ground next to the lit “Blood Orange Pumpkin” candle in its glass jar.
The spell had called for a black candle, but this red one was the best the girls had been able to come up with on short notice. “It won’t make any difference,” Kaitlyn had said, showing Taylor the candle, its silly cartoon pumpkin and vampire-fanged blood orange smiling out from the label. “It just needs to be a candle, that’s all.”
Taylor felt immensely silly taking part in this, but if it made her friend feel better, she was willing to do it.
Kaitlyn picked up the glass jar and tilted it, letting the red wax spill onto the letters of Bradyn’s name. As she did so, she muttered something Taylor couldn’t quite make out. Taylor wasn’t even sure it was English.
Once the ink marks were fully encased in wax, Kaitlyn set the candle back down. She picked up the paper and folded it, still muttering too low for Taylor to hear clearly. Taylor watched as Kaitlyn stabbed a needle through the folded paper, then held the paper up to the candle’s flame, letting the fire burn it all to ash.
The two girls watched the flame dance inside the glass jar, the aftermath of the spell a mess of red wax and gray ash. Like a crime scene, Taylor thought with a shudder, before laughing silently at herself for taking it seriously.
Two days went by, then a third. Bradyn appeared to still be alive and well. Neither girl was on speaking terms with him, but they saw glimpses of him in the hallways, in the cafeteria, before and after school. He looked happy, healthy, and normal. And worst of all, Nevaeh was constantly wrapped around him.
“I don’t think it worked,” Taylor ventured one day at lunch, gesturing with her eyes toward Bradyn and Nevaeh at the other end of the cafeteria. “Shouldn’t he have died or something by now?”
Kaitlyn’s eyes burned with something that scared Taylor. “Just wait,” she said in a low voice. “He’ll get what’s coming to him.”
It started with a cramp in his side.
Bradyn was busy typing out a surreptitious Discord message to Nevaeh during trigonometry class when he suddenly felt a sharp, stabbing pain on his left side. He let out a yelp, causing Mr. Bolton to look over at him. Bradyn quickly hid his phone in the pocket of his hoodie and shook his head vigorously when Mr. Bolton asked him if anything was wrong.
For the rest of the day, Bradyn experienced a dull ache that would come and go, centered around the lower left side of his abdomen and his lower back. He thought about asking to see the school nurse, but he decided to wait and see if the pain would go away on its own.
The pain did not go away on its own. It continued for the next three days. Bradyn started to worry he might have appendicitis, but when his mother took him to the pediatrician, the doctor said there was nothing wrong with him and suggested he take some Tylenol.
Bradyn stayed home from school for two days. Not only was he in pain, he couldn’t stop thinking about Nevaeh and her perfect body. He took advantage of the time off from school to lock his door and peruse the parts of the internet his mom had tried to protect him from with her useless parental control app. Nevaeh wasn’t the only girl on earth with a great body.
After two days off of school and a relaxing weekend, Bradyn felt fine again. On Monday, he went back to school, where he noticed Taylor looking at him in disgust between first and second period. What a dumb bitch, he thought. She’ll do anything Kaitlyn tells her to.
But a week later, the situation got much, much worse.
Bradyn was letting Mrs. Hinkle’s voice drift over him, hoping she wouldn’t call on him to answer any questions about Hamlet (he hadn’t read it, hadn’t even had ChatGPT summarize it for him), when he felt something warm and sticky between his legs.
His eyes went wide. What the hell was that? Bradyn tried to reach his hand toward his crotch without drawing attention to himself. He touched a finger to the wet spot between the legs of his jeans, then raised it, keeping his hand hidden halfway under the desk.
Blood. There was blood on his index finger. A light smear of fresh red blood.
Bradyn felt panic take hold. Why was he bleeding? Was he dying? Was his dick about to fall off? Had Nevaeh given him an STD?
The bell rang. Thirty teenagers stood up as if a switch had been flipped. The room filled with the sounds of chairs scraping, papers rustling, bags zipping open and closed. Bradyn thought about the blood on his jeans and remained fixed in his seat. He fought an urge to cry.
Once everyone else had filed out of the room, Bradyn had a moment of clarity. He took off his hoodie, then finally rose to his feet, quickly wrapping the hoodie around his hips and tying it at the waist. He might look like an idiot, but at least he wouldn’t walk down the hallway looking like he was bleeding out of his ass.
Mrs. Hinkle stared at Bradyn and opened her mouth like she was about to ask him something. In his hurry to leave the room before she could do so, Bradyn almost forgot his backpack. He fled from the room just as Mrs. Hinkle began to speak. When he looked back, he realized in horror that he’d left a small pool of blood on the yellow plastic chair.
In the boys’ bathroom, Bradyn slammed the stall door shut and locked it, breathing hard. Fumbling with the button and zipper at his waist, he managed to get his pants undone and yanked them down.
His underwear was soaked through with blood.
Hands shaking, he slowly pulled his underwear down, terrified at what he might see underneath.
There was blood leaking out of the tip of his dick.
“Oh my god!” Bradyn whispered. He turned and vomited into the toilet.
Once his stomach was empty and the retching had stopped, he stood up and wiped his mouth with the scratchy school toilet paper. The white tile floor was polka-dotted with bright red drops of blood.
Bradyn looked down at his penis again. Something deep red and jelly-like was oozing its way out. He retched again and held his dick over the toilet, watching in disgust and horror as the beet-colored blob squeezed out of his urethra and plopped into the toilet below.
After cleaning himself up as best he could and wrapping his penis in toilet paper to keep the blood at bay, Bradyn ran to the nurse’s office and pulled open the door so hard he sent it crashing into the wall. “I have to go home,” he sputtered at the nurse. “I’m really sick.”
The nurse looked at him skeptically. Bradyn looked around the room to make sure they were alone, then leaned across the wooden counter. “I’m bleeding,” he whispered desperately.
His mother came to pick him up. Bradyn didn’t tell her what was wrong, just let her assume it was the same issue he’d stayed home for a couple of weeks before. He balanced uncomfortably on one butt cheek, trying to prevent the bloodied denim of his jeans from staining the pale gray upholstery of his mom’s Honda Civic.
He escaped to his bedroom as soon as they arrived home, locking the door behind him. He stripped off his blood-soaked clothes, yelled down to his mother that he’d be taking a shower, then headed for the bathroom.
Bradyn exhaled and let the hot water wash the blood off his skin, watching it swirl away into the drain. As the steam and warmth of the shower relaxed his tense muscles, it seemed the bleeding had stopped. Bradyn breathed a sigh of relief, turned off the water, and stepped out onto the bath mat.
A drop of blood immediately fell from his penis and landed gracefully on the pale blue bath mat under his feet.
Bradyn swore and reached for the toilet paper to wrap his dick in again when his hand stopped mid-air. On the shelf above the toilet was a nearly-empty package of his mother’s menstrual pads.
He ripped open the plastic packaging of the last remaining pad and wrestled with the sticky flaps, trying to attach the pad to his penis. He swore again. How the hell did women use these things?
Finally dressed and possibly protected—for now—against penile bleeding, Bradyn fled back to his room.
There was a knock on Bradyn’s door. His mother’s voice. “Bradyn? Open the door, honey, I need to talk with you.”
Reluctantly, Bradyn approached the locked door. “What do you want?” he asked.
“Just open the door, baby. We need to talk.”
We need to talk. Those words were never good news.
Bradyn unlocked the door and cracked it open a couple of inches. No use. His mother pushed his way into his room and closed the door behind her. Her eyes flitted around the room as if searching for narcotics.
“Is there something you want to tell me, young man?” his mother demanded.
Bradyn gulped. “No.”
His mother held up the empty plastic package that had once held 42 ultra-thin super-long maxi pads with wings. “Would you happen to have an explanation for this?” she asked.
Bradyn stammered, then cracked. He gave her the full story, from feeling the wet spot in English class to discovering the blood in the boys’ bathroom at school. He was horrified to feel tears welling up in his eyes. His mother’s jaw had dropped so low, Bradyn thought it might have dislocated.
“We’re taking you to the emergency room. Now,” his mother barked.
In the waiting room at the hospital, Bradyn wished he had another maxi pad. Now and then, his penis would gush uncomfortably. Every time, Bradyn was sure the blood had soaked through the pad and onto his clothes. He got up each time to check, craning his head over his shoulder like a puppy chasing its tail.
Finally, a nurse came out and called his name. She smiled and led Bradyn back to a room where he waited another ten minutes before a short man with shiny black hair and glasses finally showed up.
“Brandon, is it? What brings you in today, Brandon?” the doctor asked jovially. Bradyn was too embarrassed about his medical problem to correct the man about his name.
The doctor ordered an ultrasound. Bradyn followed a different nurse to a dim gray room, where he was instructed to change into a hospital gown and lie face-up on the paper-covered table.
Bradyn’s heart pounded as the ultrasound tech maneuvered the wand across his lower abdomen, peering at the screen in rapt concentration.
Finally, Bradyn could take it no longer. “What is it?” he pleaded, his voice coming out a thin creak. “What do you see?”
The ultrasound tech turned her dark eyes to Bradyn. She shook her head slightly.
“It’s a uterus.”
Bradyn’s scream erupted from his chest, roared through the rooms and corridors of the hospital, and echoed out into the cursed dark night.
The prompt for this week’s Spooky Season Writing Challenge was “The Curse.”
This story is a certified banger! And what a twist at the end! Great job!!
I did not see that one coming! Great job!