Vanity Kills

As soon as James awoke on that Saturday morning, he instinctually felt that something was off, that something was out of place. There was a disturbance in his usual calm, centered bubble, and he had to find out exactly what was causing this.

First off, his apartment, 2J, which he shared with his three best friends, his friend’s mom, and his friend’s sister was unusually quiet, especially for a Saturday morning. He hadn’t relished in this much silence since he had been back at home in Minnesota.

Everyone was gone. James was alone for once, and he honestly didn’t know what to do with himself.

There were just so many endless possibilities on how he could spend the day. He could catch up on his fashion magazines, or spend all day tanning by the pool, or even stare at himself in the mirror all day since none of the other guys were around to judge him. But none of those ideas sounded very…fun. He was, of course, James Diamond. He had to go where the people were, and all the people at the Palm Woods, home of Hollywood’s future stars, congregated around the infamous Palm Woods pool.

And James would be lying if he pretended that he wasn’t going down to the pool to pick up girls and woo them with his sun bronzed washboard abs. He had been feeling the model-tall curly-haired brunette that had let him rub sunblock on her back that one time, so he was hoping that she would be there. Hell, even if she wasn’t, aspiring starlets throughout the apartment complex wanted him. James never had trouble finding a date. He could tell a girl that she looked hideous and that her dress was so 2003, and she’d still want to make out with him.

Needless to say, James was feeling pretty confident when he walked into the apartment’s sole bathroom that Saturday morning, but little did he know his shallow world was about to come crashing down.

James went through his usual routine: he showered, he brushed his teeth, and he washed his face with Cuda Action-Blast Facial Scrub. Just as he was about to primp his shaggy brown hair to perfection, James reached for his comb, his lucky comb to be exact. He was thrown off when his lucky black comb wasn’t in its usual spot, but he remained collected, searching the bathroom counter for his favorite fashion utensil.

The more James searched, the more his heart began throbbing erratically in his chest. With every inch that he combed over, no pun intended, his palms became more and more clammy. A bead of sweat trickled down his perfect cheekbone. His lucky comb was nowhere to be found. He had searched the entire bathroom.

And then a light bulb lit up in his panic-stricken mind. The guys! They must have stolen his lucky comb! James knew that they envied his way with the ladies, so it all made perfect sense for them to try to destroy the one thing that meant the most to him: his looks.

The one thing they never counted on was James fighting back. He was going to make them pay.

First, he focused on exacting revenge on Carlos, only because they shared a bedroom, so it would be easiest to start there. It took James a few minutes to figured out what he was going to do; Carlos didn’t really care about anything. He wasn’t as uptight as his other two friends.

The only thing that Carlos really treasured, almost as much as James did his comb, was his hockey helmet. He wore the helmet almost twenty-four hours a day, only taking it off when he had to shower or sleep.

Fortunately for James and unfortunately for Carlos, Carlos had left his helmet on their shared dresser. James took the helmet in his hand, holding it as he tried to figure out how to use it against his friend. At first he considered filling it with mayonnaise, but the creamy color of the mayo would stick out like a sore thumb against the black helmet.

James carried the helmet with him into the kitchen as he searched the cabinets for something gross and sticky to fill his friend’s helmet with. He found the solution to his question in the door of the refrigerator: chocolate syrup.

The boys made milkshakes a lot after rough days of vocal rehearsal, so both chocolate and strawberry syrups were a constant staple in the apartment. The Hershey’s chocolate syrup was the perfect consistency to mold itself into Carlos’s helmet, becoming glue even as it dried and bonding Carlos’s short black hair to the inside. It would be both a pain to get his head out of and a pain to clean off of the helmet.

As the thick syrup oozed from the bottle and into Carlos’s helmet, James couldn’t help but feel a sick form of satisfaction. He was already beginning to plan out what he would do to the other two guys, Kendall and Logan. Both guys were a lot smarter than him, so he had to put more thought into how to get under their skins.

He decided to torture Logan next because, even though he was the most intelligent out of the four guys, he was also the most uptight. It would be much easier to get to him than it would be to irk Kendall, who wasn’t easily phased.

James carefully placed Carlos’s helmet back onto the dresser in the exact position that he had found it.

The door to Logan and Kendall’s bedroom was cracked, so James easily slipped into the room. Kendall’s hockey equipment littered his side of the room so badly that James was worried that he’d trip over something and bruise his beautiful face.

James spent a lot of time protecting his face.

Logan’s side of the room was relatively tidy, but James was having trouble finding something of Logan’s to ruin. That is, until his golden brown eyes landed on the desk at the far end of the room.

Logan was the only one out of the group of hockey-players-turned-boy-band-singers that had elected to have a desk in his room. Honestly, he was the only one that cared enough about school to have an area specifically for doing work. Sure, there was a computer desk in a corner of the living room, but that was for surfing the internet only.

On top of Logan’s desk set a textbook which James found utterly useless. It wasn’t a book for school, it was a medical book that Logan had bought off some college textbook website. Logan had wanted to be a doctor before this pop sensation nonsense got in the way, and every night he liked to flip through the textbook and read about some of the fascinating things that occurred in the human body.

James just thought he was a nerd.

James sat on Logan’s bed, thumbing through the pages of the textbook and trying to decide how to destroy it. He considered drawing lewd doodles of penises over some of the diagrams, but that would have been too easy to ignore. Instead, James took his latest issue of Pop Tiger! and tore out the one-page posters of teen idols such as Taylor Lautner and Dak Zevon and glued them onto some of the more intriguing pages of Logan’s medical textbook. James cut and glued until he ran out of popstars to use, then he sat back and admired his work. Instead of reading about appendicitis and oncology, Logan would be reading about the Jemi break-up and what shoes he should wear on a first date.

Logan would get a first-class welcome into James’s world.

As James waited for the glue to dry, he eyed some of Kendall’s thing. No doubt, Kendall’s most prized possession was his Minnesota Wilds jersey. He practically wore it every day it wasn’t too hot to wear long sleeves in L.A.

Of course, since the temperature was up in the nineties that day, Kendall’s jersey set neatly folded in the top drawer of his dresser.

As James rifled through Logan’s desk to find a pair of good scissors, he heard the front door swing open. It wasn’t long before Kendall’s little sister Katie burst into the room.

She caught James red-handed.

“Dude, what are you doing in my brother’s bedroom?” she asked, one hand placed on her hip.

“Uh, um, nothing,” James stuttered, his eyes darting frantically around the room. “I just needed to borrow Logan’s scissors for a collage I’m making.”

“Oh yeah,” Katie cocked an eyebrow at him. Damn, she was good. “What exactly is this a collage of?”

“My favorite teen idols,” he replied, confidence enhancing his tone. He held up the tattered issue of Pop Tiger! innocently.

“Oh okay,” Katie mumbled beginning to back off. “Oh yeah, I have something of yours,” she said before dashing off into her room.

She returned with James’s lucky comb clenched in her small hand.

Katie placed the plastic object into James’s palm. “I couldn’t find my hairbrush this morning, so I borrowed it. Sorry I didn’t ask you first, I didn’t want to wake you up.”

James’s jaw nearly fell to the floor.