The Writing-Practice Journal

Prep Entry-Contest Round 2:Antagonist Background Story

This entry is also in "Prep 2017" 

October 14

(Woman against herself…through no fault of her own. The antagonist within Eve is her misplaced belief that she isn’t wanted by her parents and her birth mother alike. )

Inside the hotel’s ballroom, the crowd jostled around the thirteen-year-old Eve, bumping her against the stools lined up at the counter. No one seemed to notice her in this sea of moving parts, and no one noticed the tiny camera in her hand. But isn’t it always the same, always this way? she thought. Nobody ever noticed her for herself.

People were singing together with the band, and their voices mixing with the bass drum thumped in her head. It was hot inside with the heat beating down on her.

As soon as she saw him, she clicked. If she couldn’t have her father back, she could at least have one photo of him, a photo of him away from her, away from their home. In the photo she just took, her father’s fingers would have grasped the wrists of a brunette. That was what she had seen when she clicked.

“Are you looking for someone?” She was startled. A waiter was talking to her. {i]Play along, she told herself.

“My parents,” she said. “They said they’d meet me here, but maybe it is next door in the café. I’ll check there, now.” She lunged forward toward the door for the long walk home.

By the time she reached home, it was already after midnight. Barbara was sitting in the armchair facing the entrance, but she had fallen asleep, her jaw slack, her lips parted in a delicate snore.

Eve tiptoed to her room, finding her way to her desk, and stuck the camera’s memory card into the slot on the side of her laptop. There it was the photo on the screen, her father Kenneth Freman holding on to that woman whose eyebrows were raised quizzically. If this weren’t her father, the photo would have been a funny shot. She snorted. Her mother had thrown her father away at this other woman who probably didn’t want him, either. The one to blame here had to have been her mother, Barbara Judith Freeman. She had thrown her father out of the house.

“Eve Pamela Freeman! Where have you been?” Barbara stood at the door of her room.

Eve closed the laptop and turned around. “Here, doing homework.”

“You were out late. You know the rules. You have to be home by 10:30. I called Ginger’s. Her mother said you had left around 7:30 or so. She said you refused her offer to drive you. Where have you been?”

“I came home.”

“No, you didn’t. I sat on that chair a little after ten o’clock.”

Eve sighed. “Okay, Mom. Sorry. The truth is…I went looking for Dad. I went to the hotel. The Fox Hollow. I called his office earlier. His secretary said he was in a meeting and after that, he would go to the hotel for another meeting and a concert.”

Barbara’s eyes opened in shock. “You did what?”

Here it comes. I tell her the truth; she freaks out. I lie; she freaks out.

So, now the lie. “I couldn’t find him.”

“I don’t know if you are telling the truth, but you are not to go seeking him, understood? You may end up in a dangerous place. God knows where he hangs out.”

“Sorry, Mom!”

“Sorry won’t cut it, young lady! You are grounded for the next two weeks.”

“But…Mom! What about the tryouts for the school play?”

“No, tryouts. You are grounded. Period.”

Eve sighed. No need to argue. Her mother Barbara was acting like a complete nutcase again.