"You fucking maniac!" The six-foot-four man hollered as he struck his petite wife.
"You have no fucking idea of how I raised five kids on my OWN!" the redhead replied as she blocked another punch.
"Seriously Emma, if you weren't so uptight, I wouldn't be so jaded today! I work two jobs!" John shouted again, his booming voice sending tremors into his wife's eardrums.
"Yes, you are certainly jaded after having intercourse with all those trash-bag…"
Before Emma could complete her sentence, John booted her in the solar plexus, sending his alluring wife backwards.
Behind a dilapidated wall, Seth, Ethan, Victor, Elizabeth and Natasha watched in horror as their mother's head came into contact with a table edge, before slumping unconscious in a pool of her own blood.
"Mom!" 7-year-old Elizabeth cried as warm tears began to crawl down her face.
At 3:33 am on July 18, 1999, after an arduous battle, Emma Mahogany Slater kicked the bucket. One year later, John Parson Slater got life imprisonment for manslaughter. The children's lives would change forever as the ominous cloud over them failed to dissipate. Even though her siblings eventually picked themselves up, Elizabeth slowly degenerated into mental instability. After the murder, she retreated into a shell, which resulted in her friends gradually leaving her. Then she seemed to be coming out of this dark shell by actively conversing with others. This would prove to be a false dawn as she soon uttered incomprehensible garbage, and disrupted lessons at school. This continued until the school had no alternative but to request Seth to take her out. Just as Elizabeth's future looked like a mangled wreck, she secretly registered for a show called Total Drama Island and now joined 21 other teenagers on a subpar campsite.
While Izzy, as she was better known saved her outgoing best for the cameras, this only served to mask the pain within. When the cameras stopped snapping, that was when the vulnerable Elizabeth inside the redheaded beauty was released…
Present dayEveryone wondered why Izzy locked her cabin door. They eventually came to the conclusion that her room hid highly reactive nuclear weapons or other horrors that did not constitute as family-friendly content. In fact, it was much simpler than that. Izzy's darker secret was deep within, just beneath the skin.
The claret marks on her arms were clear as day, but her vert sleeves would hide them when she ventured out of her room. For now, as the blade danced across her skin, she temporarily unmasked. The left side of her face soon felt wet. Tears shed not for pain, but for her mother. This was the first and only solution for her to escape the horrible world. Confiding in others would only draw chortling from the typical pedestrian. That was also why Izzy had only three friends on the island: A home-schooled reject, a quick-tempered powerhouse and a cynical bookworm. The trio was not dissimilar to her, outcasts that would earn the same ridicule from the community. Anyway, she liked it this way. Approval from the real world was nothing in comparison to the pain and pleasure she felt right now.
After a while, satisfied with the burgundy cuts all over her upper limbs, she put her cheerful mask back on and walked out.
Meanwhile, the aforementioned home-schooled brunette was sitting in a corner by himself. Ezekiel did not have many friends either, having unintentionally angered the females on his first day. Digging his nose in public and not knowing teen slang didn't help his cause either. Out of those, only Izzy and Bridgette had forgiven him, the rest still threatening him on occasion or ignoring him altogether. Even when he tried to converse with Bridgette, he was never successful as the surfer girl's lips were stuck to those of her laid-back boyfriend most of the time. Ezekiel thus cut a desolate and despondent figure.
After a while, Ezekiel found it drab, and thus made his way back to his suite. Suddenly, he heard, "Hi Zeke!!!!!" Unfortunately for poor Ezekiel, a redhead who everyone was all too familiar with bowled him to the ground a mere 2 seconds later.
"Sorry Zeke, but the chipmunks on that tree were going loco for boom boom! Gotta go!" Within seconds, she had disappeared. Ezekiel shook his head as he looked at the tree Izzy was pointing at. He was sure that no rodents inhabited that. The encounter pretty much summed up Izzy, she was a good friend but too unstable to live like a normal being. Nevertheless, her beryl eyes continued to fascinate him. If only he had an iota of her hyperactivity, then he would probably have more friends than a mere four.
Like any other night, Izzy was tossing and turning in bed, thinking about her mother. Finally, unable to fight off the insomnia, she decided to take a shower to cleanse herself. The firecrotch crept furtively to the showers as to not awaken the others. Always unconventional, Izzy loved to be bare to the bone, the cold water running down her shoulders and scarred arms.
Meanwhile, Ezekiel faced the same problem of insomnia. Deciding to enter the bathroom to take a leak, he unknowingly stepped into the female bathroom. For the second time in a row, he made the wrong decision of checking out the sound of running water. Some errant users, probably Duncan and Geoff, had dropped the soap on the floor, making the ground slippery. Unable to control himself, he lurched forward, but quickly regained his balance, his shoulder ramming against the cubicle where Izzy was bathing. Unexpectedly, the door opened due to a faulty lock to reveal Izzy's back. Ezekiel almost choked on his saliva when he realized his folly. Atypical of situations like these, the prairie boy's biggest shock was not seeing the psycho naked. It was the ugly marks on her blemished arms.
"I…I…Izzy, what happened to your arms?"