3-3-5 R, W, and NC-Blue

"Red, White, and North Carolina-Blue" by CopperSkink.

The date should be summer of 2043. If it's not, I'm sure the site editors won't mind me sending in an edit just to change the date.

Starring Scarlette; with appearances by her band known as Red, White, and North Carolina Blue; Jen; and Cloudy.

All rights preserved. In a jar of vinegar.

I don't know how much more of this I can stand. I look terrible, which is saying allot, I feel sick, and I haven't spoken to anyone I love in over a week. My precious hair that I used to take such immaculate care of is kept in a small handful of tight braids. After five or so days, it'll start to mat. I used to love my hair because of the person I got it from. A lot of things I loved about myself I got from her, but now I look like this. Heavy black eye makeup that doesn't go with green eyes, foundation on top of foundation, ruby-red lipstick that tastes sickly and doesn't match my outfit. The only thing the eye makeup does for me is cover the rings I've been getting from lack of sleep.

This outfit isn't me, either. I wear tight bustiers all the time, but the ones I wear to my shows remind me of some street-side "ladies" whose charms are for sale. That, and this ridiculous little skirt. It reminds me of those little deals we would wear as thirteen-year-old girls, only with half the frill cut off. The boots are worse, being all black leather like everything else, something out of a biker store rather than fine ladies' wear that I'm used to.

Must be the makeup getting to me. Too many young girls, younger than me, that I've seen dressed like this on curbs, dressed as trashy as they can to drive themselves through the cheapest fast food they can find to augment their cigarette diet.

And there's another thing, cigarettes. Where did I get one? It was right there on the sink next to a glass of something clear that stank of death. Were they mine? Do I smell the same thing on my breath? Things have been so unclear lately. Since...

I wanted to wash the makeup off my face to regrow some of my dignity, except I wasn't completely sure I hadn't performed already. I was dead tired, but that's true of my pre-show just like my post-show. There was tearing in my mascara that made me look like I'd been beaten to tears and sent onto the street without being allowed to fix my makeup.

Back to the makeup again. The part that stared at me when I looked into the mirror. The part that told me I wasn't myself.

Par for the course, that. I touched the ugly black tear. A horrible smear. If I didn't leave it alone I'd have to redo the entire thing. I still wasn't sure I had to go to work. The bathroom smelled of drugs and sex. Or was that myself I smelled? Either way, "varsity" bathroom. Place where the performers put on their war paint before a show and slummed it up with free hookers after.

The smell of the place was getting to me, as was my reflection. I quit the bathroom, hoping the smell would stay behind along with the evil mirror of myself.

Down the hall, gross blaring noise and gross blaring lights showed me what room I was staying in. The door was unlocked; must have been security watching further down the hall. Inside was a scene that shook my nerves, but I didn't have the strength to feel disgusted.

"Hey, look who's up!" called the white-haired Starry from behind some slug wearing a torn-up leather jacket. She had been glued to him top to bottom when I came in, but he didn't look like her boyfriend. But there was her boyfriend on the other side of the room, making out with Foilz, the keyboarder. Foilz usually prefers girls, but the few that had been brought back for the "post-coitus" part of the show were either dropped off already or in someone else's arms.

I felt that low-down tingle telling me something exciting was happening, and I felt an awkward sense of wrongness that my sense of disgust didn't override my hormones. I could only watch the two boys slithering together with a lewd stare. I was attracted to the other sex noises in the room, and I found Sunny likewise entrenched with a boy who seemed freshly ripped out of the slums for one day at whatever event center we had just performed at. A part of me recognized that such was the dress kids chose to wear when watching us work. A reminder of myself in the mirror explained to me that they had an excuse with me for a role model.

Dillie was almost on top of Sunshine with a girl who matched Sunny's boy. I'd seen enough roadies, lackeys, groupies, and grungies to pick out a couple when I saw them. Both were rather well tied-up with my bandmates just from the noise they were making. Sunny abandoned her boy after I watched for a few minutes to grab the girl Dillie was macking on, and my distasteful lust grew. With the enthusiasm Sunny was going for the poor girl, I couldn't help but start dripping.

Dillie made a move for the boy who was abandoned. Sunny still had her hands on him and he was trying to get in on the action between the two girls, but too much was too much when another guy put hands on him, and he rushed out the door, for which he had to crash into me.

I spared a thought for Dillie, though it didn't make perfect sense at the time. I know he's more phobic than Foilz so he must have been on X to have made a pass at another guy, it just didn't click then that it meant that my mates were probably on drugs.

A teetering, wobbling Dillie came lumbering after me when he was left with no one in his arms, having finally noticed me. He tripped over an unconscious girl gripping fast to her ghost-white arm. He fell hard to the floor, waking the girl up and causing everyone left awake to start laughing like hyenas. He got up, threw a tissy fit, and chucked out one of girls who dared mock him. Only he pulled her back in to get some touch, but she slapped his face and took off. Also bumping into me first.

When he was finished cursing his curse of a thousand lawyers upon her fleeting shape from the door, he staggered back around and had plain forgotten about me. "Whur's Rox?" he slurred, even after having just gone around me to slam the door.

"Right behind you, Dildo," Foilz giggled in his fruity jargon. He had gotten the boy he was with out of his shirt and was tweaking his nipples in the sexiest way. I knew I was supposed to be ignoring behavior like that, but I couldn't bring myself to.

Dillie turned to face me, but the combination of having a dry mouth and needing to curse out our keyboarder made him forget about me again. I got pushed out of the way like the trash he had just ejected from our room in his search for something he could both drink out of and smash Foilz over the head with.

Starry was nowhere near as far gone as Dillie, but then again she wasn't as heavy a drinker as he. I could still smell the amphetamines on her as she sashayed up to me with her bedroom eyes. The boy she had nabbed came with her, and I could see a familiar lust growing from every part of his body, the same lust I feel when I'm about to score two chicks at once. But for him, the prize was two of the girls in the band he had just gotten trashed at. In my exhaustion, I couldn't imagine even Dillie being in worse condition than I was. All the better for the boy.

I'm sure Starry said something to me when she got to me, but it was only a cursory greeting to her grabbing me by the hair and slamming her lips onto mine. The boy was quick to join in by planting his greasy lips on my sweat-slimed neck in anticipating of taking his turn with my lips. His hand was already under my skirt and trying to fit its way into my ultra-tight leather hotpants. Starry was doing the same from the front, attempting to accelerate the sickening feeling that was making me enjoy this sickening scene.

She pushed her tongue into my mouth, and mine went out to greet hers before my mind could catch up with what was going on. I felt the hard nub of her tongue piercing sweeping around inside my salivating jaws, but another less hard object was being forced in along with it, one not fixed to her tongue. I swear to God, I wouldn't be surprised if that woman had a pill dispenser hidden in her mouth. She only had the skills of a child in a toy store, after all.

My years of resistance training were all that I had in me when I forced myself away from my would-be molesters. I mindlessly spit the crumbling pill out of my mouth as I fell away. It landed in pieces on the face of Starry's boyfriend, he being naked apart from the usual black leather spikes in the form of collars or wristbands, on top of an equally-dressed girl who looked like she was about old enough to have snuck out of summer band camp to show up at our show to the show with her fake friends and her fake I.D.

"Hey, Rox," he muttered through blood and sweat when he saw my face looking down at him under the flashing shades of dark light. He turned back to his current conquest and went back to work on her, though she didn't wake back up. With my mind a little sharper from escaping the groping hands, I could manage the thought that she hadn't been awake when he did his little deed the first time since the rules of after-show parties like this and screaming teenagers didn't bleed onto boyfriends of band members, though none-too-few of the already-few boys that made it in were shy about going after the girlfriends of band members.

Speaking of whom, stumbling around the nude pair had landed me in the lap of Dillie's girlfriend, and Dillie not eight feet away waking up another passed-out groupie from the floor to deal with the flaccid wreck he had just pulled out of his pants.

I fell into her lap in hope for safety, and the joint protruding from her lips sang to me of false peace and comfort. She offered me a drag, and when I was too slow to respond she kept it for herself. When my eyes regained their infrequent focus I saw she had my hand in hers and she was smelling it with untoward affection. Her tongue creeped out to taste my hand, and of course I had to see perfectly how sickly my own hand looked to me, jet-black nail polish and all. She placed my hand on her breast and turned her attention towards me, still puffing on her stick. Our heavy eyes locked.

Her heavy breast warmed my hand and the rest of my body. When she kissed me, she was more reveling in the taste of my mouth and the feel of it under her tongue. Another ecstasy fallout, I cursed with empty resolution. But when I didn't feel another intrusion of those devilish pills, I was suddenly enthusiastic about kissing this sweet kid, whom I think I recall was an acquisition of Dillie's from only a few shows earlier. She had the biggest chest out of the group of screaming teenagers that was in line to follow us back to our room after our set, and if I recall, it was Foilz, not Dillie, who first got her clothes off and onto the floor that night. But it was Dillie with whom she woke up, and Dillie's then-girlfriend still moaning with Starry's boyfriend inside her. Starry's boyfriend survived Dillie's wrath, but this fresh thing replaced Dillie's previous fare and had made it to tonight.

The unnamed girl was moaning liberally at the pleasure of touching and tasting me. Normally I cringe at the mere sight of a girl lost on that drug, but I couldn't hold two thoughts together long enough to care. I cared only about how much she enjoyed touching me, how much I enjoyed having her large breasts in my hand. I untied her flimsy top to access her free breasts after she began tonguing my eyelids, and I sucked her nipples like they would feed me the drugs I craved to silence the pain in my body.

She moaned all the louder. One of her hands had gone down into her shredded jean shorts to supplement the pleasure I was giving her. Yet another of my weaknesses. I had to stop what I was doing to watch this beautiful little girl masturbating for me, and I could have come on the spot had someone touched me just then. To think that such an innocent-looking body was trapped here with us was nothing short of criminal.

She kissed me again when she caught me not doing anything. The combination of disgusting eye shadow on her lips and smoke in my mouth made me break into a fit of coughs. The incorrect noise seemed to bring everyone to attention. Foilz was the one to get up and offer me something to drink. The boy he was behind looked relieved that the pain had ended and he began to focus on yet another girl with whom he had entwined pelvises while Foilz was still giving him the prison treatment.

I accepted the short glass and drank it in one. It burned of pure liquor. Liquor, and something else. Something nasty. Something wicked. Something I had been trained to despise since I was a tender fifteen and too young for rock star parties.

The big-chested girl had gotten on her knees in front of me and was licking the sweat from the leather of my hot pants, but Starry claimed her for her own lust. Dillie then tried, but I wasn't so far gone as to accept the equipment he presented to me, especially after whom I had just seen it come out of. I got out of my seat on the smoky leather couch and found myself in the arms of Sunny.

Sunny had been making dreams come true for the same boy-girl couple I saw her with when I first came in. At least the boy's dreams; the girl had been forgotten on the wayside after a few rounds of three-person kisses and touches.

Sunny eventually weeded the girl out to get at the boyfriend's trousers and what he had on underneath. The sucking noises were somewhere between nauseating and thrilling up until I crashed into them. Sunny offered to let me take over, but I declined in a drunken slur. The boy's girlfriend tried to take over her man's tool, but Sunny quieted her with promising kisses before getting back to the job itself.

The poor, disillusioned girl then pulled me to the side herself. "Let me lick your cunt," she insisted in weak tones.

I turned her down as nicely as I could, considering my disposition, and Sunshine intervened. "Don't be a rotting pumpkin, Rox," she demanded. She abandoned her post a second time to initiate the girl and me kissing. The girl didn't kiss very well, but Sunny knew how to touch me from plenty of previous parties, and soon she had me on my back with the enthusiastic girl on top of me. She then got back to the boy in satisfaction while the girl slid down my body with rough kisses and gropes.

Again I fought back, only in a way that my perverted side insisted: I pulled what was left of Sunny's bottoms down and directed the girl's hand there. Once her fingers were inside, I directed her head down as well, only I stopped her when she tried to pull her fingers out in favor of her tongue. I insisted she use both, and in the girl's stoned state, and to my shame, she figured out what I wanted from her and began her assault.

Sunny was feeling good in no time, and all I had to do was watch. She pulled her body away from the girlfriend to mount the prone boyfriend, and she wasn't using the front entrance.

The girl stormed away in frustration to land in the lap of the first creature she could find with his eyes open. It turned out to be the kid who was doing strange things with an unconscious girl. The two pounced each other, kissing deeply and lovingly in a way only true love can achieve, yet is so easily broached upon artificially with the right combination of expensive party drugs. It wasn't until long after I watched them make it to the floor and begin making love that their faces were familiar to me. They were a brother and sister that I recognized from the local Christian church I sometimes visited. Poor kids would probably hate themselves in the morning if they remembered what they did. And from what I know about the ecstasy my bandmates used, they would. Worse was what their parents would do to them.

I tried to talk reason to them, but they only went at each other harder, even trying to get me involved. I gave up in vain, only to see the girl excitedly flip onto her stomach and invite her equally-stoned brother to do to her what Sunny was getting done next door. I still stayed and watched, finding the sight every bit as beautiful as it was tragic.

Dillie had finally recovered from whatever ailed him and he was finally trying to get something out of me. I had had enough at that point and I pushed him away. Foilz again came to his rescue, telling me that I was being unreasonable, or whatever it is someone stoned out of his mind says to someone too exhausted to think straight.

Though the rest of the band was disturbed at my willingness to be uncooperative, Foilz in particular seemed genuinely confused that I was putting up any resistance at all. He turned to check something, the same place he had gone to get me my drink earlier, and finally my brain was able to do some simple math: I had to get out of there.

Here you are again, Rox. What would your mother think? She doesn't get a say because she's dead. Maybe you should ask your twin sister. No, she's too busy crying about her own problems. Talk to your twin brother. Wait, that's the one your twin sister is crying about. You have other sisters, though. Pity they're all married with kids your age. Two of them being your precious twins that make your problem seem stupid.

She's dead, get over it. They're alive. They need you, but you're too busy moping about your dead mother that you can't help people in need. You can't take things for granted like you used to. You never know if today will be your last chance to...

Well, this is fun. Bitch all you want, but you still have a job to do. About the only thing you have left, so try not to fuck it up, alright?

Super.

So, did I sing already, or not?

Same scars on my wrists. Did I cut them? Doesn't matter. Didn't work if I did. Wristbands to keep guitar strings from digging into my wrists soaked in sweat. Feels like post-show.

"Rox, hurry up! We're running late!"

Okay, pre-show. What was I just doing? Why am I covered in sweat?

"What am I doing here, Star?"

"I'm Sunny, dipshits. What's wrong with you lately?"

Good question. Telling twins apart usually isn't so hard.

"Are we gonna do a show now?"

"Honestly? I don't know how much more of this I'm gonna put up with. Get it together, Rox. This is our last show for a while, but it's the big one, yeah? Just keep it together until we get off the road."

To Scarlette Roxabel Stetzen

"What's this, guys?"

"It's an..."

"Never mind. Just read it, Rox."

"The members herein have decided that henceforth, the mentality of the individual "Scarlette Roxabel Stetzen" is so deemed unfit for the needs of the band and the direction it is tending towards. As such, it is in the best interest of all parties involved that she and the remainder of the band part ways, effective immediately.

Signed,

Starlight Shepherd

Sunshine Shepherd

Foilz Benny

Dillie DeLaGillo

"...Guys?"

"You had it coming, Rox. Sorry."

What time is it? God; cottonmouth. Fancy headache to go with it. Always headaches lately. Can't even string two sentences together lately, but I can remember that I have headaches all the time.

I don't feel half bad. Scratch that, I feel terrible. My head is pounding so loud I can't think.

Then again, I've felt worse. Or have I? My neck hurts, my back hurts, my wrists hurt, my ass hurts, my stomach aches, my pussy aches, my heart aches, my brain aches, my eyes sting, my mouth is dry, and I don't crave sex. I haven't felt this bad since... Yeah, best not remember. Better take a...

"Hello?" I asked of my bare surroundings.

Where do I usually get those from? They're usually just waiting here for me. Caffeine pills or something, that's what they said they were. Aren't there now.

God, I need a pee.

"Hello? Guys?" I tried again. Where the hell is everybody? Aren't there usually people here?