Bride Who Murdered Her Groom Ch. 02

KENT UNIVERSITY

Alia and I have switched towns like mad. Endlessly even. Since I met Alve two years ago, we have relocated more than fifteen times. At least seven times in a distinct and separate year. This curse, it has just made our lives so miserable and a painful living hell altogether.

I have met numerous and wonderful very good-looking boys. Boys that I wished I had the time and effort to get to know them much better and familiarize with them. Boys I would have fallen in love with so helplessly had I tarried longer in their reach and presence. But then it was for the better that I stayed away from them and move entirely out of their promising lives. I would do nothing but ruin and wreck their lives for them.

Alia met my father, Hans, when she was at university. She studied Literature (bachelor's degree) and she got a masters and a PHD in Creative Writing and Economics. All her life, she has wanted to be a published writer and author altogether. But she fears what would come off her life if she produces something successful and popular enough to unravel out our actual private life and the secrets that we are drawing a veil on. To her, fame and popularity can be quite detrimental. Very much indeed.

Like me in times past, she cast away all the rules and went on pursuing my father. No, not chasing and stalking and bugging him up to marry and wed her. She hanged out in places where he was fond of dropping by with the hopes that he would...see her. He did! I remember the words Alia herself used that other day she was recounting to me about how the two of them had met up.

"Your father, he was the lucky and winning womanizer. Every month, he had to court and take to bed a different girl. It was a game and contest that he and his shallow-minded peers played. And he played it so well and in such a staggering and mind-blowing manner. I fell for him on our first encounter; and as I behaved a little bit stupid and yet strangely different from all the other girls, he hesitated on whether to go for me or not to. When other guys appeared interested and began making moves on me, he acted fast for fear of losing me. I had to go about being unyielding and a little bit inane, just to give him a cruel and laborious time. Which I sure did."

The story altered. "I remember the day he died. The day the curse hit and destroyed him. I was four months pregnant with you, Ragnhild. And we were staying together. We had just moved in and every time I did feel that our happiness was short-lived and going nowhere. I couldn't help it. There were nights when I woke up weeping and crying and your father would be waked by my noise and hug me and shush me and ask me what the problem was. I just couldn't tell him. There was no way for me to figure out how I was going to let out things to him. How was I supposed to tell a man I deeply and sincerely loved that he was soon going to be dead for loving and sticking on to me?"

In my bedroom, there are pictures of Hans Ascwin. He looks just like me in some way. I have light brown hair, black eyes, and golden-colored skin. That is what Eugene precisely had. But then, I look more like my mother. Alia herself is brown-haired, brown-eyed and pale-skinned. I share more of her facial symmetry and body shapeliness and curves. We are very much alike.

The morning following my nightmare, on Tuesday 14 August 2018, I woke up at five to strive and withstand the temptation and almost overpowering feeling to head back to bed and sleep again. I went on to sit in the living room, close to the still afire burning place, where I tossed in a handful of stony-like but long-burning wood, and here, I fetched the diary that I had carried with me and began scribbling the words:

Alia and I moved to Kent two days ago. The town is this big and wonderful and amazing; the people here have been good and kindly to us; our neighbors always check in to bring us gifts and presents of all sorts. There is this funny thing though. Ninety per cent of my presents are from boys. Or men I should rather specify. Young men. Two boys from our neighboring house, Helge and Jostein Amundsen, who are brothers, I must what's more add, brought me my current alarm clock and newly-shopped romance novels and an enormous blank diary that I have to fill in and a glittery-like pen that scrawls with shining and glimmering ink and wholly nice- looking teddy bears and sweet-most and pretty flowers and a nice and very new pair of jeans and—their biggest and final present, an old-dated but still functioning and superbly operative laptop. Jack said that it belonged to him and he was giving it over to me as it had a highly effective and powerful browser with which I would surf the net and research up any assignment that I might have. Words cannot adequately express my gratitude to these two adorable and loving brothers.

Brogan Dunn, the blond boy from next door, brought me blooming and freshly flowers and a nice new hat and a cake written 'Welcome Ragnhild and Alia to Kent,' which he said his grandmother, Caelan Dunn, had supposedly baked. It was so sweet and tasty and pleasant that I had not tasted anything marvelous like it before.

Lance Farrell, the leggy and well-built and highly handsome bachelor from four houses down the street, brought me an expensive perfume he had picked for me while on a recent trip to Spain, and which he said he had bought from one of the Spanish royal family members themselves. He showed me photos of himself in Spain and this Maria Theresa Castillo woman whom he said was married to a grandchild of the Queen of Spain Herself. She was holding the perfume itself and smiling at the camera happily, appropriately dressed in a very expensive and far-reaching yellow dress that had an Indian look and elegance to it. On top of that, Edward brought me paintings and cookers and cutlery and carvings and dresses and boots from Spain itself! Everything he handed me screamed, "Spanish! Spanish! Spanish! And more Spanish!"

I will end here. Ten other men brought me diverse and unlike things. I cannot list them all or else my diary would be filled up and...become something else rather alien and outlandish. And I don't want that to happen. This is strictly a diary. Not some detail-everything-to-the- very-last-bits sort of book. No way! That said and made clear, I am still muchly grateful and indebted to everyone who have brought me something from the depths and very bottom of their hearts, I fathom. Diary, goodbye!

I had an interview at nine. At Kent University, where I wanted to study Fashion and Design. Not to become a model specifically. Clothes designing and artifice were my thing and talent. I habitually dreamt that one day I would come to be this fortunate and lucky and prosperous designer with my very own corporation and list of celebrities endorsed. But then for that to happen, I had to work very, very, very and sincerely hard. Nothing was going to come on a silver plate, free and un-worked-for. Not in this racking and toilsome world of ours. Not here.

After an effortless and slight warm showering, I stepped back into my bedroom, half-naked and clothed with a long white towel. By half-naked I do not mean that all my breasts were uncovered and denuded. I know. In our house Alia and I were the only living things around. Living humans to be point-on. Females exclusively. Who would care if we looked at each other naked? But then, ever since we had moved in here, we were occasionally bombarded with endless knocks and visits from our male neighbors. Not all of them being bachelors and unmarried. It was best that we put on something after washing, just so certain occurrences would not come about by accident.

Before my tall mirror—yes, I still disliked enormous mirrors, bit in this case, I had no alternative than to tolerate them—I slipped on a gray skirt suit and gray shoes and combed my hair straight and then tied it at the back of my head with a fastener. I looked...fine and superb. No qualms and misgivings about it.

Shortly afterwards, while I was hopping down the stairs, Alia cropped up into the living room, carrying a plate of cup cakes with one hand. She gestured over to me and voiced out, "Come and have breakfast, will you?"

"No, thank you." I rushed past her off into the kitchen and she right away followed me.

"You are going to have an interview on an empty stomach, Ragnhild, are you?"

"I will eat later, mom." I tossed open the door of our tall refrigerator and began looking about with worried and anxious eyes.

"I don't want you collapsing and passing out while the interview is still running."

"I won't pass out, mother."

"Your stomach will groan and creak. And that will be an embarrassment before the interviewer. Eat something please."

"Nope. I will give an apology if that happens. I have never heard of an interviewee who was kicked away from the interview for the sole reason that they were famished and had their stomach groaning and lamenting."

When I glanced at Alia, she scowled at me, rolling her eyes what's more. "You are stubborn, you know that, do you?" She asked me.

I grabbed out cheese and caned coke from the fridge and then heated scones from the oven, which I packed into a lunch box, before I responded back to her. "Sometimes to get your way in life, mother, you have to be this firm and persevering. That is how life largely works."

Alia dropped her mouth open. "Even if it will cost you your dear life and brilliant future itself, you just have to be willful and pig-headed, isn't that what you are trying to say?"

"One starved meal will not kill me, mother. A gone-wrong interview won't ever destroy my entire future. Don't you get it? It is that plain and simple, isn't it?"

"I have no extended arguments with you."

"Thank you very much. I will be taking my leave now. See you later!"

"Bye, sweetie! What about my kiss?"

"I will be late if I come back for it. Reserve it for next time."

It was showering and drizzling when I drove my way out of the below-ground garage, and on I proceeded my way, away from our newly-bought house, sighing and exhaling out in easement. I would be through the interview. Yes, I would make it through without any troubles and hindrances. If any would arise, I had to know how to tackle and grapple them.

While my car sped on the not-so busy road, I played on some music—Stephanie May's 'Love is Waiting Around the Corner' and Dag Aune's 'Watch Me As I Walk into Your Life.' These were two slow romantic songs that I liked like nothing else. Every day I awakened from my sleep, I had to put them on to freshen and vitalize and enliven up my day. Is life ever possible without love? I don't think so.

Twenty minutes after, I eventually made it to Kent University. The drizzle was still present and ongoing. Shit! I had forgotten my umbrella back home and I wondered how I was going to make my way out in the rain. For that mistaking, I had to pay by getting drenched and wet. I surely had to.

As I was about to park my car, I hit into this lusciously-colored but olden-looking red car that was about to proceed its way out of the parking lot. My bonnet smashed into its tail-lights, shattering and wrecking them and the bonnet itself splintering up to some degree; my heartbeat quickened up. How had such a thing come to happen? How? And what would I do now? What?

***

Lightning Powers of Recall

It was cloudy and dim and overcast outside. Poorly lit and pitch-black that each time I looked out the window of my bedroom, all I could note and sight outside was an enormous and by leaps and bounds hunks and bulks of lofty and giant trees. It was all I could perceive and nothing else really. All I could catch a glimpse of and flawlessly and perfectly lay and clap my eyes on.

Alia sat by the flank and edge of my bed, her dusky brown hair far-reaching and spread out, her sparkly verdurous-like eyes glistening and scintillating at me in the luster and sheen yellowy gold light about us. She had a cloud-nine and yet scared and timorous feeling about her. It made me think and be curious on what all this could be all about. What in particular? Something bitchin' awesome and pearler or what unerringly?

"Mom," I bade and summoned her, shuddering and quivering unevenly. She gawped and took a gander at me straight away. "Yes. Are you okay and actually fine, my dear?"

"I am, mother. But there is something out of the ordinary and eccentric about you. Won't you mind splitting to halves the particulars and fine points about it with me?"

She twinkled and was all grin from ear to ear in no moment of time. She then pressed on, "It is nothing really, Ragnhild. I am just thinking back to that elderly and past-it day when I first fell in love with your father. The first time that we really met, that is. I cannot simply and with no trouble let slip from the memory something ruinous and inopportune like that, or can I?"

"What is infelicitous and ill-fated about that, will you please acquaint me with it?"

She smiled and beamed again, all pleased and ecstatic but terrified and shaken out of her courage and bravura at the same time. Could it be something that grave and critical? There was no way I could easily and with my eyes closed and shut discover that? What was it really with her? What precisely?

"I chanced on your father in the course of a very frightful and appalling accident. And something spills the sly, shifty beans that the same will soon come about to you. I don't know how bona fide and veracious that is. But if it is factual and accurate, then you will damned and have your death knell chimed and tolled the day something alike to this comes to see the light of day in your life."

I had never seen Alia so merry and apprehensive at the same time. Could that be a grim cue and forewarning actually? Could it be?