.TheAdventuresofStephanie&Helen:pt1.

Okay, so Helen wrote this. For the record, I did NOT use anyone's nail-polish for anything. And if I spilt anything on my mom's new plush rug, she wouldn't hesitate to kill me. And the font is purple. Like Helen's face.

Helen shivered and pulled her coat more tightly against her body. The biting wind still managed to slip icy fingers beneath the perfectly good, long coat that she was wearing, making her frown and wonder whether or not it had been a good buy in the first place. Her fingers were stiff around the once-hot, now cold Starbucks coffee cup she held in her right hand, careful not to spill. Thoughts of hot chocolate and a good romance novel flashed across her mind involuntarily. She mumbled something under her breath about killing Stephanie, her flatmate, for suggesting that she get them both a hot coffee. (Decaf, less sugar, more cream.) She stumbled over a crack in the sidewalk, causing her to mutter a colorful curse that made an old lady gasp.
Helen responded with a sheepish smile and kept up her hurried pace, anxious to get home to throttle Stephanie, too preoccupied to worry about the opinions of senior citizens. She turned the corner. An extra-cold blast of wind hit her in the face, whipping dark, shaggy curls into her line of vision. Helen slapped them away with an impatient hand, angry at them, angry at the wind, angry at herself for finishing her own coffee in Starbucks when she could’ve been drinking it now, now, when she desperately needed some warmth in her icy veins.
At long last, the tall shadow of the apartment fell into her path. Ahh. Home sweet home. Helen ran up the stairs and into the elevator, spurred by a sudden burst of energy. At the apartment door, she knocked over an antique umbrella stand that had once belonged to her ancestor and fumbled to fit the key into the lock. Now this was Helen, fumbling, stumbling, clumsy as hell, yet extraordinarily efficient. She was this close to her hot chocolate and nothing short of a pinstriped hippopotamus was going to stand in her way.
Well, nothing short of a really dumb pinstriped hippopotamus would stand in her way if they knew her well enough, as Stephanie would’ve put it.
The door burst open with a resounding crash - Helen’s personalized way of saying she was home - but this time, her dramatics failed to have the desired effect. Stephanie didn’t let out an ear-splitting shriek, jump out of her skin, or cower behind a pillow. No, this time she kept right on painting on the huge easel set up in the middle of the room…
… with Helen’s best, $19.90 nail polish.
Helen checked her outraged yell just in time.
No she didn’t.
Helen shrieked loudly, dropping the coffee cup to the hall table - narrowly missing spilling it - and clapped her hands to her cheek, her chapped lips forming a perfect ‘O’ in her distress.
“Stephanie…..!”
Stephanie turned around just as the door slammed shut behind Helen. “What?”
Her best friend looked blue with cold… or was it red with fury? Stephanie cocked her head to one side and wondered what to call this new color. Winter blue? Fire-truck red?
Helen was positively purple with rage. “That’s my best nail polish!” she wailed, albeit loudly.
Stephanie turned to look at the canvas, and then at the bottle in her hand. Oopsie daisie. She paused to study her artwork. “Why, so it is,” she remarked thoughtfully, staring at her masterpiece. She swiveled around and met Helen’s gaze levelly, then shrugged.
“I ran out of red.”
Helen marched over and snatched the little bottle out of Stephanie’s hand, taking deep, swooping breaths to calm herself, but without much success. Stephanie sighed patiently, more than familiar with Helen’s breathing exercises. Her green artist’s beret slipped over one eye. This surprised her. She didn’t even remember putting it on. Besides. What was Helen doing keeping a beret in the apartment anyway? The woman never failed to surprise her, even after ten years of fast friendship.
Helen stomped around the room like a demented Godzilla*, knocking into furniture as she marched heavily around the tiny apartment. The brush in the bottle of nail polish shook, teetered, threatened to fall out of the bottle and stain Stephanie’s mother’s plush rug. Helen was too preoccupied to notice, muttering curses and calling upon medieval forms of punishment that, to Stephanie’s ears, were excruciatingly painful.
Stephanie shifted nervously on the wooden stool. She hadn’t read as many medieval novels as Helen had, still the words “murder,” “stake” and “pickaxe” meant something to her.
Sure and sudden death.
Squirming on the stool, Stephanie eyed the cup of coffee on the table. If only she could reach it - she just might die with caffeine in her bloodstream. God knows she needed some fortifying. He watched Helen stamp around the room, cracking a Chinese vase and scratching the chrome decorations, preparing the inevitable lecture.
If only she could escape. Steph stared at the kitchen door like a hamster in a cage. She had just summoned up the courage to move when a shadow fell over her. She looked up. Helen was obviously enjoying the sensation of being taller than her for once. Obviously, for that could be the only reason behind the glint in her eyes.
The MURDEROUS glint in her eyes?
Steph made a desperate scrabble to escape, but it was too late. Helen had her good and cornered between her body and the easel. Steph’s eyes filled with terror, memories of her childhood and her short, brief life flashing before her eyes as Helen rasied the sharpest paintbrush from the rack high above her head…