Hello and welcome to the Blog Showdown!

This is where one of eight pilot blogs will be posted and the one that has the best engagement after three weeks from their posting will become the new permanent Monday blog!

Today we are going to be debuting Fork in the Road, a creative writing sort of blog where I present a first part of a story and then at the end give you all the choice to where the story heads.

This is a simple enough story to get the idea of things going, and it has definitely been a while since I’ve done some creative writing work so I hope I’m not too rusty.

Shadowed Hearts

Calliope stood alone on the roof, as usual.

She sat near the edge, as she had always done, waiting for the school bell to ring so she could come back to the silent monotony of school and deal with the people that she hated ever since they were children.

They never liked her either. Calling her names, taking her things, leaving awful messages in her locker, no one really even made the effort of trying to be nice to her.

Well that wasn’t true. There was one person who was usually pretty nice to her, Grayson. He wasn’t high on the popularity scale either and his average looks didn’t attract many onlookers, but he was a transfer student who was nice to everyone, even when they weren’t kind to him.

For some reason Grayson was especially nice to Calliope, and she couldn’t see why. Her dark hair was long and usually covered her face, which was almost always in a perpetual scowl. She considered her body to be pretty average, though many people had said that she was too thin.

Calliope had always felt that Grayson was trying to be nice to everybody until he made friends with a popular group, ditching the nice guy act in order to follow whatever personality that group liked.

Until then he was the wandering nice guy, trying to befriend everyone, including the school’s punching bag Calliope.

As Calliope finished her sandwich, the sound of the roof door opened, startling her. Calliope turned to see a confused-looking Grayson, whose shocked face quickly turned into a grin.

“There you are! I’ve been looking for you!” Grayson said, striking some goofy triumphant pose.

Calliope didn’t respond, and rather sighed and went back to her meal. This was usually how Grayson acted, as if waiting for a studio audience to laugh at some dumb joke he made. Grayson walked over and pointed at an empty spot next to Calliope and asked, “Can I sit here?”

Calliope shrugged, knowing that he would keep pointing to places until he got some form of approval to sit near her. He was always asking to sit near her, it was very odd.

“So, how’s lunch been?” Grayson asked as he pulled out his own sandwich to start eating.

Calliope shrugged again. She had been making her own lunches since she started high school and was an average cook at best, but she didn’t feel like putting so much effort into lunch today and decided on a sandwich and fruit for lunch.

Grayson, on the other hand, had a bag full of all sorts of food. He had a few sandwiches, bags of chips, several candy bars, and a more energy drinks than Calliope thought a human could endure in the amount of time she had seen him chug them down.

As he was halfway through is meal, Calliope noticed something strange. Despite Grayson being his usual cheery self, there was something in his behavior that didn’t seem right. He was prattling off about a new video game he was playing, as usual, but his tone of voice was quicker.

There were points in the “conversation” that Grayson paused, as if we wanted to say something but couldn’t bring himself to do so. Calliope was very observant and generally noticed when people were acting off their usual rhythm, but with Grayson being fairly new she only had so much time to get used to his general patterns.

“So, um, hey you know about the school dance, right?” Grayson asked after another one of the awkward pauses.

Calliope nodded. It was hard to avoid anything about that dreaded social gathering since that’s all that anyone would talk about and there were posters about it on every wall in the school.

“Yeah, of course,” Grayson replied awkwardly. This was very out of character for him, normally he would have a much more defined statement in response.

“Are you were going…to you know, the dance?” Grayson asked, his face slowly getting redder.

Calliope shook her head. He should definitely know her well enough as a social pariah, why would anyone be asking…

“I was wondering if you wanted to go to the dance with me!” Grayson finally splurted out, his expression looking shocked as if the words jumped out of him without his knowledge.

Calliope froze.

He was asking her to the dance?

“It doesn’t have to be like a date or anything! We could go as like friends, but then since the dance stops at like nine we could go to a burger place and hang out for a bit because you know the food at dances is usually bad, but I can take you straight home afterwards if that’s what you want!” Grayson said, noticing her expression change and immediately going into damage control before she could make a response.

Calliope didn’t know what to say. He had to be joking right? This had to be part of some sort of prank? Ask the weird girl out to the dance to get her hopes up and then pull the rug out from under her in front of the whole school?

Calliope stood up, her own face feeling much warmer and finally said something to Grayson, “Why?”

Grayson looked shocked. He probably had a response to a dozen other possible responses, but “Why?” wasn’t one.

“What do you mean?” Grayson asked.

“Why me? Why not any of the other girls you talk to?” Calliope asked in a way that was trying to get some sort of truth from him.

There had to be a reason. There had to be some sort of malicious intent that he was planning because no one in the school would have dreamed of wanting to be seen with her in a social gathering.

He had to be pulling a joke, there had to be a punchline, there had to be an angle.

Grayson sighed and said, “Because I like you.”

It was Calliope’s turn to be shocked.

“You’ve been really nice to me, and not in like a fake nice that a lot of other people have been,” Grayson continued, “Like the first day I was here, you helped me catch up on the lessons.”

Calliope didn’t really think much of that, she just did it because she wanted to avoid dealing with him for an extended period of time.

“And when you lent me a dollar for lunch when I was short on cash and didn’t ask for any money back or take back me paying you,” Grayson said.

That was more out of pity, Calliope saw that he was hesitant to get food mumbling about a dollar, and it was only a dollar, why would she ask for that much back?

“I know I’m new and I’m probably not your first pick, but will you go to the dance with me?” Grayson asked sincerely.

Calliope was stunned. She thought about it, and while it would have been very easy to say yes or no and he would probably be understanding whatever answer she gave, there was a cold familiar feeling in the back of her head.

A small, growling sound that meant only one thing.

She heard the scuttling on the right side of the building, and just as she was about to react there was a shadow right behind Grayson that he hadn’t seemed to noticed.

This shadow loomed over him, a large scythe in its arms drawn back ready to slice his head off. The scuttling on the side of the building became louder, which meant that the creatures had already infiltrated the school, but if she left then she could stop them before they hurt a large group of people.

But then Grayson would die at the hands of their master.

What should Calliope do?

[Save Grayson]

[Stop the Threat]

In Conclusion

There is the pilot chapter of Fork in the Road, and I really do apologize for this taking much longer than normal, life circumstances are what they are.

Now if this does get chosen for the new Monday blog, you will have to wait and see the next part for quite a while, but hopefully your patience will be rewarded.

Thank you for reading, see you next week with a new blog for the Blog Showdown! If you want to see more of this sort of blog, engage with it and we’ll see how it compares with the others!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual

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