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Friday: the Novelization

I’m stuck in limbo with Harper Collins, but while we wade through the red tape I thought you’d like to read my manuscript!

 
“Friday,” by Rebecca Black, by Wallid Fielding

 
Chapter 1 Vivification

7:00AM. Rebecca jolted up from her bed, still drenched in sweat. Such horrible nightmares….

She had dreamed of Monday’s test, of Thursday’s essay, and how difficult they had been. “Why does my teacher always take off points when I rewrite the same paragraph over and over?” she apostrophized.

Her head pounded so intensely she could barely think. What day was it? Thursday? No, the essay had been due then, which was yesterday. What day came after Thursday, was it Wednesday? No, Wednesday was her music practice, the only thing she struggled with more than her schoolwork. Wednesday was two days ago, which must mean… she stopped to think of cereal. That today was Friday! Hooray! Rebecca began to cheer up considerably. But first, ugh! Her hair! She had to be fresh and she knew it.

 
Chapter 2 Restitution

Rebecca went to the bathroom and became fresh. At once, her hair was straight and her outfit looked nice. “Now I gotta go downstairs” she sang into the mirror. She heard a faint dripping noise. Was the faucet still running? She looked to her feet and saw drops of blood on the floor. Her blood. “Where could it be coming from?” she wondered. She began to feel dizzy. “I had better get that cereal fast, before I faint.”

 
Chapter 3 Reflection

Rebecca woke up some time later on the bathroom floor. How much time had passed? If only there were a clock in here! “Now I really gotta get downstairs!” she moaned. One thing was for sure: everybody would be rushin’.

When she got downstairs, she was seein’ everything — time was goin’. Tickin’ on and on. “O, how transient man is,” she whispered to herself. “But a wisp of smoke, no sooner lit than extinguished.” She gazed longingly into the distance, feeling her life pass before her. She had to get her bowl.

Rebecca sat at the dining room table and stared into the cereal bowl. She pondered its concave shape, its porcelain whiteness, its subtle reflective surface. “How beauteous a bowl,” she whispered once more. “How infinite in faculties; how express and admirable.” She sighed wistfully as she dug her spoon into the empty bowl. Something was missing. Why had she come downstairs? She remembered in a flash: cereal! “Gotta have cereal,” she announced gleefully as she began eating.

 
Chapter 4 Obligation

More time still had passed. Rebecca threw her cereal bowl at the wall and sped towards the door. “Gotta get down to the bus stop,” she explained to her family.

Her fast-paced walk to the bus stop was filled with contemplations. “Why should it be that I gotta do so many things? Should such a fun day be filled with so many imperatives?” Her mind turned to the existential: “Does not a person shape their own fate? Is there really special providence in the fall of a sparrow?”

“I shall conduct an experiment,” she said to herself, “to see if willpower truly exists. If fate does not bind us all, I should be able to break free of these seeming imperatives. I should, by way of reasoning, be able to forswear the bus, and get to school by another means. That is, I should be able to be driven there by my friends.”

As if her mere thought had brought them into being, Rebecca saw her friends’ car approaching at that moment. Her heart froze: could she really go through with this?

“Gotta catch my bus,” she instinctively thought. Gotta… gotta… no! Fight it! I see my friends!

“I am not a slave!” howled Rebecca at the heavens. “A man is not a paper knife, its essence condemned to precede its existence!” She wiped away her tears as she triumphantly, albeit nervously, approached her friends.

 
Chapter 5 The Choice

For all the car did to assuage Rebecca’s existential crisis, it presented her with an entirely new query: which seat can she take?

She weighed her options carefully, consulting her calculator and several flowcharts along the way. “Hurry, Rebecca!” called her friends, motioning for her to join. It only added to her anxiety.

Five seats are in the car, she began. Four are taken, but who is to say that two beings cannot simultaneously occupy a single space? She hastily sketched a four-dimensional hypercube into her notebook.

If I were to sit on the driver’s lap, it may distract him. And what’s more, it always bothers me to feel his erection press against me through his pants.

If I were to sit on the front passenger’s lap, she may get the wrong idea that I’m a lesbian. And yet, if I’m not one, why do I suddenly sense this odd tingling surging through me?

“Come on, Rebecca!” Her remarkably ugly friend gestured once more for her to join them.

Both passengers in the front are clearly kickin’, and it would be awful to disrupt that…. Perhaps the answer lay in the backseat? Rebecca surveyed the backseat. Two people were sittin’ in the backseat. Technically standing, but one could call it sittin’.

I could sit on either of their laps, or one of them could sit on mine, but that would disrupt the symmetry…. Just then a bolt of inspiration struck Rebecca. The empty seat in the middle of the backseat!

She put away her compass and French Curve set and got in the backseat. She smiled at her friends. They smiled back.

“Good choice, Rebecca.”

 
Chapter 6 The Drive

It would be a long drive to school. Rebecca decided to entertain her friends by telling them what day it was. “It’s Friday, Friday,” she explained. “Gotta get down on Friday.”

Her friends contemplated this statement. They found it agreeable.

“Friday, Friday” she repeated. “Gettin’ down on Friday. Everybody’s lookin’ forward to the weekend.”

All nodded in concurrence.

“Fun, fun, fun, fun,” she interjected in quadruplicate.

They arrived at school in what seemed like no time at all.

 
Chapter 7 The School Day

“At last! School!” Rebecca delightfully exclaimed. She raced to her locker with the most buoyant of spirits.

“Combinations are hard!” Rebecca complained beneath a furrowed brow. Just then she heard a voice behind her. It was a gruff, older voice — “Would you like me to help you?” it said. Yes! She desperately needed help! She turned around to thank this kind stranger.

She saw a black tanktop, a black wool hat, a goatee, rippling muscles. It was no stranger at all! But the instant she realized who it was, his hand had already grabbed her by the throat and slammed her into the locker. “Chris-R!” she exclaimed in a panic. “I was just on my way to see you!”

“Yeah. Sure you were,” Chris-R said. “You have my money, right?”

She felt her stomach knotting. “Yeah,” she whimpered. “It’s comin’… it’ll be here in a few minutes….”

Chris-R tightened his grip. “What do you mean it’s comin’? Where’s my money?? Where’s my fucking money???”

She had seen Chris-R like this before. He was liable to do something drastic. “I don’t have anything!” she pleaded.

“Did you lose my fucking money??” Chris-R yelled as he pounded her head against the locker. “Where’s my fucking money, Rebecca?? Where’s my fucking money??”

She cried in pain with each blow. She could feel the locker getting wet with her blood. If only she had five more minutes to get it…. Everything around her blurred into a foggy white. For the second time that day, she passed out.

 
Chapter 8 Nurse’s Office

“You’re lucky to be alive, Rebecca” the nurse said as he sutured the wounds on Rebecca’s scalp, neck, abdomen, and lower abdomen. Every slip of the needle stung — why weren’t they using anesthesia? She tried to talk, but only garbled moans came out.

“Chris-R sure did a number on you. If not for that red bandana tied around your backpack for no reason, there would have been nothing to slow the blood loss before we showed up.” He began to heat the cauter. “Frankly, a normal person would have died already. You seem to have an exceptionally strong will to live. Or are you just excited because it’s Friday?” he joked. Rebecca had a bit of a reputation in the Anaheim Hills Middle School.

Rebecca was suddenly able to talk again: “It’s Friday?” She leapt from the table in glee, knocking over several of the nurse’s instruments. “It’s Friday, Friday!” she exclaimed.

 
Chapter 9 Rehabilitation

Hours had passed before Rebecca was once more calmed down. Before Rebecca was allowed to leave the school, the nurse was required to check for signs of a concussion. “Rebecca,” he said. “I just need to quickly assess your mental faculty. Can you tell me what day it is?”

Rebecca tilted her head to the side. “Yesterday was Thursday,” she reasoned.

“Good, keep going.”

“Today, it is Friday.”

“Good, Rebecca!”

“Tomorrow is Saturday!” She was getting excited once more.

“And do you know what comes after that?”

“Sunday comes afterwards!” She jumped with joy and clapped her hands.

“Not so fast, Rebecca, there’s only one more cognitive test I need to perform.” She sat back down. “Are you able to form a complete grammatical sentence describing your feelings?”

She answered without hesitation: “We we we so excited!”

Good enough.

 
Chapter 10 Pursuit

Rebecca was on the bus back home. It was unseasonably dark outside, although not very cold, judging by people’s outfits. She had no idea that behind the school bus was a rapper, rapidly catching up to the bus. He was in the fast lane, switchin’ lanes, already having passed one car. The school bus was still in front of him. He grinned wickedly as he looked at his passenger seat — empty, except for a cloth, a bottle of chloroform, a length of rope, several sticks of butter, a lead pipe, a baseball bat, concetrated acetic acid, red lipstick, and a razor.

He checked his time: it was Friday. “It’s a weekend,” he said. “We gonna have fun.” He pressed his foot to the gas.

Unfortunately, at that moment, the bus swerved sharply to the right. The rapper was unable to make the turn in time. His car skidded off a cliff and exploded in midair. He was never heard from again.

 
Chapter 11 7:45

It was already 7:45 — the day had just flown by! But it was alright: Rebecca wanted time to fly. And yet she also didn’t want the weekend to end.

She didn’t have a very good day at school, but everything felt great! Because it was Friday! Rebecca stood up in the backseat of her friends’ car. She was surrounded by so many friends.

Actually, she was only really friends with one of them. She sort of hated the rest. “My friend is by my right,” she said as she pointed to the girl on her right. She made a horrible stink-face at the girl on her left, who immediately burst into tears.

“I thought I was your friend too,” she crooned.

Rebecca flashed a W-L sign on her forehead with her fingers and kicked the non-friend out of the car. Her face splattered open as it hit the concrete at 70 miles per hour. The other passengers in the car turned around to look back at the body. Chunks of flesh and brains were covering the bright-pink prom dress she was for some reason wearing.

“Fun, fun, think about fun” Rebecca told herself to keep her spirits up. “You know what it is.” She immediately felt reassured. She did know what it was.

Rebecca once again started to wonder which seat can she take. “Is it possible for one to take a seat they are already in?”

 
Chapter 12 Bliss

Finally, Rebecca was at the party! Fun, fun, fun, fun! So many swirling colors around her! She could scarcely contain herself! She tried describing how she felt, yet in her frenzy was only able to repeat things she had said earlier that day.

“It’s Friday, Friday” she ranted to a partygoer. “Gotta get down on Friday!”

She rushed to another: “Everybody’s looking forward to the weekend!” She patted him on the arm and ran off.

“Friday! Friday! Gettin’ down on Friday!” She raised her arms to the sky, thanking the powers above for creating such a wonderous day.

“Partyin!” she screamed. “Partyin!” She imagined her peers enthusiastically saying “yeah!” in response, although nobody actually was. “Fun, fun, fun, fun!” she continued. “Lookin’ forward to the weekend!”

She had never been so happy.

 
Chapter 13 Saturday

Morning came once more. Rebecca sat up in her bed, her frizzy hair hanging like a tattered old sweater. What was this strange feeling? She sensed it all around her. Something was different. It came to her at once: today was Saturday.

She didn’t know what to do.

 
Chapter 14 Sunday Comes Afterwards

Morning, again. “Time winds like a river,” Rebecca lamented. Now it was afternoon. “Stop,” she said. “Stop… time… from flowing….”

It was evening. “Out, out, brief candle.” She could feel her youth slipping away like grains of sand through her fingers. Her vibrance, her friends, her memories, these things would all fade away. It was midnight. “I don’t want this weekend to end,” she said through an empty gasp. A great coldness seized her.

8 Comments

  1. Dan wrote:

    I suppose it really helps to be an English teacher for this type of writing. Gonna check out the zine now!

    Saturday, April 30, 2011 at 5:40 pm | Permalink
  2. Feygele Goy wrote:

    I hope that image shows up.

    Wednesday, May 4, 2011 at 4:34 pm | Permalink
  3. Travis wrote:

    Amazing. :D

    Sunday, May 8, 2011 at 2:54 pm | Permalink
  4. ablatnik wrote:

    I see in chapter 10 you referenced Black Dynamite

    Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 8:23 pm | Permalink
  5. Tommy wrote:

    Nice “The Room” reference.

    Wednesday, June 1, 2011 at 8:56 pm | Permalink
  6. 5 wrote:

    218

    Monday, June 6, 2011 at 10:45 am | Permalink
  7. jackk wrote:

    friday, friday

    Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 5:28 pm | Permalink
  8. You wrote:

    Quite pleasant initially but fell apart with the too easy use of violence for humor.

    Friday, June 17, 2011 at 4:11 pm | Permalink

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