Chapter 1 – Suffocating Fame
People want to have their voices heard. Some people want to be noticed for their voices and be famous for it. A young girl named Mindy is one of those people. She wants to be famous so that she can bring attention to ideas and causes she thinks needs attention. She’ll use her skills and talents to achieve this, but like most people, it’s unlikely that she’ll get it.
Mindy is just another girl in Hillside City with no connections to people in entertainment. Despite this, she still wants to become famous and does everything in her power to do this. She does well in school, is friends with most people in it, takes part in dozens of extracurricular activities, and such. To get people to look at her more, she makes her eyebrows prettier, uses eyeliner, and shows off her legs when she can since that’s another thing people notice about her. Her commitment to becoming famous has affected her to the point where her dreams are starting to become nightmares. She tells herself that it’s just her stress affecting her and nothing more.
Tonight is another night that Mindy dreams of fame. She puts a sort of beauty mask on her face against her will. This mask has green eyes like her but it’s completely white and has pink lipstick. The mask attaches itself to her with three straps that are tightly wrapped around her head with a fourth strap that suffocates her neck. A black cloth in the mask covers the rest of her head so that she can’t really take it off or breathe in any air. She’s on a timer as she lives a life of fame. Before she’s tried to take it off and has succeeded, but once she does, she no longer is famous and becomes forgotten, so she tries to get around this every time. One time she cut holes in it, but this only made people mock her.
This time, Mindy tries to keep it on until she can find a different mask. She enjoys talking in front of large crowds about what she thinks is important.
“The poor of the world should be given homes to live in and jobs to work,” she says to a crowd, “These people do nothing but beg and die in our streets. We should treat them as fellow humans who deserve our love and respect.”
The crowd cheers and takes pictures of her as she continuously loses air. To draw out this dream, she calmly breathes in her mask though she hates that she can’t make this go on forever. Mindy attends a fashion show next. She wears dark pink heels and a pink dress that shows off her legs that has part of her shoulder showing. This outfit is somewhat painful to wear because of how tight it is, but she bears it because people like it. Mindy wins the competition hands down and gives another short speech.
“My parents and teachers are the ones who taught me to live my life the right way. That is why I am donating all the money I’ve won today to animal rescue groups and cancer research. Money is a tool to be used and not kept. That is why I vowed to always stay in the middle class in order to stay humble.”
Again, she gains the approval of the crowds as they cheer their praises and love of her. The air in Mindy’s mask begins to grow thin so she quickly heads backstage and tries to get it off. The mask’s straps tighten themselves to stay on as Mindy struggles to take it off. She manages to, but when she looks into it, she sees dozens of eyes within the mask, which makes her drop it. Despite her disgust with the mask, something compels Mindy to take it with her. The people around her now stare with either disgust or disinterest at her. Security sees her as an intruder and kicks her out of the building and throws her into a muddy puddle.
The city Mindy is in now is unfamiliar. She doesn’t have a way to get back home or contact her parents, so she walks the streets cold and alone. While wandering, she comes across pictures of her in the trash and people who talk about her as fake. There are some that try to pick up for her, but they are made fun of by people who start to rant about how they were let down by Mindy who they thought would give them hope. Shamed by their words, Mindy walks by them as she gets more upset as time slowly passes by. Eventually, she comes across her parents in the streets. They’re dying and unable to move from their place. Mindy tries everything in her power to get her parents help, but no one listens, and no one cares. Tears form in her eyes as she sees that they’re clutching a photo of her as if they were the only ones who still supported Mind. Without any other options, she puts back her mask on. Now people respect her and come to her aid without a word coming from her. People arrive to clothe and feed her parents and take them to a hospital. Her old fans apologize for their weak faith in Mindy and clean her and give her a new dress.
After all is said and done, Mindy is brought back to her house and left alone. Now that no one else can bother her and her parents are safe, Mindy tries to take off the mask again. She’s breathing in it as if she never took it off, which means she is on the edge of suffocating to death. The mask’s straps dig deeper and deeper into her neck and head. It seems to have already crushed both as Mindy feels a cracking sound and can no longer breathe. In a complete act of desperation, she takes a knife and cuts the mask off not too worried about the harm the blade might do to her face. She does end up cutting off the mask, which she throws at her couch. Once she’s properly breathing again, she checks social media to see if there are any adverse effects. People online still seem to love her and are positively talking about her actions today. Mindy breathes a sigh of relief and goes to the nearest mirror to see the damage done to her face, however, she gets more than a surprise. Her face is completely missing and all that’s left of her face is a black hole where it once was.
Confused about how she can still see and breathe, Mindy goes to find her mask and sees that her face is inside of it. The mask grows a body which is wearing the same dress that Mindy is. It looks at her before walking outside to a crowd of fans who carry her off. Mindy tries to get through the crowd, but they block her, making her unable to get her face back. With nothing she can do, she heads back inside and thinks of a plan before a curious idea enters into her head. Mindy puts her entire arm into the black hole of her face until she can feel something. She pulls at that something until her face comes out of it. In complete amazement, she stares in the mirror for a while.
“Mindy! How much longer are you going to take to do your makeup?” Mindy can hear her mother saying, “You fix your looks more than a fashion model. Come on and eat breakfast already. A young beautiful woman like you needs to eat. We made your favorite!”
Mindy snaps out of looking at herself and sees that she’s been looking into her own mirror in her room for a while now. She’s all dressed and ready for school, but it appears she wasn’t dreaming and was daydreaming instead.
“That was weird. That never happened before,” she says aloud to herself.
“Mindy!”
Mindy puts the strange occurrence aside, for now, to focus on today.
“Coming mom!”
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