Roll On

Prologue
“Patron Saint of the Forgotten People,” Estella whispered hoarsely, her eyes dancing in a cocaine-infused frenzy, her lithe fingers twisting the rosary around her neck. “Because that’s what we are, right?”
Phantom shadows slithered on the ceiling of her dimly lit bedroom; sinister apparitions caught in the corner of my eye, but when I turned to get a better look, nothing was there. The muffled sounds from her father’s party on the next floor up floated down to us, music and laughter mingling with the clinking of champagne glasses.
Estella’s hair was an auburn halo of rambunctious curls, her lips formed a shifty half smile, and she stared intensely at me through dilated pupils.
“We’re just useless, pretty little dolls, aren’t we? Nobody wants to know how we feel or who we are. If we didn’t have each other, we’d have nobody.” Her voice broke and her eyes blazed with desperate fire.
I leaned onto one elbow and smoothed the fushia satin comforter on her bed absently. Cocaine made her confide her deepest secrets, the ones she normally concealed under her creamy skin and cocktail dresses. Cocaine made my thoughts accelerate and barrel through my brain faster than I could make sense of them.
Our eyes met; identical in pupil size and opposites in color, mine blue and hers a burnished chestnut.
The sapphire skirt of my dress rustled as I sat up and pulled the mirror covered in finely chopped white powder onto my lap. I saw a flash of silver and noticed Estella had taken the razor from her bedside table. I felt my heart migrate up into my throat as Estella drew the sharp edge of the razor over the tender underside of her pale arm. Her blood dripped delicately onto the emerald of her dress, rolling down her arm and staining her skin.
My stomach turned in revulsion, but how could I tell her not to? She wouldn’t have listened.
Her smile was wide and perceptive. “We’re all masochists in our own way, aren’t we, Iris?”
I nodded and bent my head to inhale one of the lines of cocaine I’d chopped earlier. Courage in powdered form.
My hair tumbled over my shoulders, a thick brown curtain, and I tried to shrug it back. Estella slid closer to me, so close we were nose to nose, and held my hair behind my neck as I snorted the thick white line. Moisture sprung up in my eyes, and I blinked furiously as Estella removed the mirror from my lap and gently rubbed her thumbs underneath my eyes, removing the smudges my liner had left.
“I can’t take you anywhere with smeared eye makeup, you know,” she said lightly, smoothing my hair and touching her own to make sure her energetic curls were still behaving. “Father,” she said the word in an attempt to sound regal and snotty, “will be wondering where we’ve got to.”
“Like he even notices,” I answered, waving my hand dismissively. The blue diamond of my cocktail ring caught the dim light and the reflection blistered all over the walls of her room. “You should change,” I told her, getting up and walking to her mirrored closet doors. “You don’t want your dad asking questions,” I added, gesturing to the blood stain flowering on the expensive material of the dress she’d destroyed.
“We should at least go back for more drinks,” she said, throwing her head back and laughing, her hair a river of reddish-brown curls as she tugged a slim-fitting, simple black dress over her head.
I reached out a trembling hand and did what I could with her self-inflicted wounds, dabbing at the cut and pulling a bandage out from a drawer in her bedside table. I looked up at her as I spread it over her ruined arm, my face hungrily searching hers.
Why wasn’t she getting better?
She looked happy; we both always did. How could we pretend to be anything but, when we had anything and everything we wanted? Nobody who looked at us could tell that inside, something awful festered. Nobody knew that inside, we were as cold and hard as the diamonds we wore on our fingers and our throats.

Sorry if it’s too long.
Anyway, if anyone wants to read the rest and help me out in the way of crtiques, you can e-mail me at melissa_simonson@yahoo.com and I’ll send you the rest I’ve got so far.

Thanks.
BTW- it’s supposed to be confusing. I want the reader to be confused and interested at the same time, and want to read the rest.

i love this, i really do. i adore the descriptive words you chose (blistered on the walls etc) i am a writer myself. you developed your characters very effectively you feel sad for them even though your not quite sure why, i would love to read the rest of what you have written so far