"What the hell, Eva!" 

Nora clumsily pushed through the crowd of drunken teenagers, followed closely by her twin sister, Eva.

"I swear I didn't know about the party, Nora! I guess, Ethan just wanted our eighteenth birthday to be special!" 

Eva weaved through the volley of class-mates desperate to distance herself from how this night was turning out. Eva had simply wanted to spend time with her sister and her new boyfriend, Ethan.

Eva, ever the socialite, thrived in crowds and parties and spotlights. Nora, on the other hand, got diarrhea just thinking about any of those things. Nora seethed in anger as the cabin around them exploded in ever louder music. She was sure she had specifically asked Eva that they keep it low-key this year.

Earlier in the evening, Eva and Nora had entered Ethan's cabin-in-the-woods, to an explosion of ‘Surprise!' by sixty of their class-mates, causing Nora to instinctively shriek and hurl her steel water-bottle into the crowd. The bottle decked their exchange student right on the noggin, who, on his way to the floor, knocked over a table lamp into the fish-tank electrocuting three very expensive Basslets! 

Nora, understandably, had been on edge ever since.

"But look!" Eva pointed out, in the present, "The dead fish did not dull the party one bit!" Eva shuffled behind her sister, lightly stepping over the smooching couple on the floor.

Nora grumbled at the things Eva chose to care about. She rushed to get away from the commotion and flung open the bathroom door right into the faces of two young girls who had just finished touching up their make-up. "Sorry, Sorry! I didn't mean to!" She called out behind the whimpering girls running into the crowd with their faces covered. "I never do..." 

Nora glared at her sister as both hurriedly closed the bathroom door behind them. 

"Listen, Eva! I don't want to worry you. But you remember that story Nana used to tell us, about Gods reincarnating every 100 years in human form? I have been marinating in this unshakable feeling for a while; what if I am Chaos, you know that Greek lady that wreaks havoc everywhere she goes? Like, in human form?" Nora turned to look at her own wide-eyed reflection in the mirror.

"Ummm... what?" Eva paused a second to return her twin's bewildered stare in the mirror.

"How else do you explain all this?" She gestured at the general mess at the party, "Oh and not to mention, I forgot to take my anxiety medication today!"

"Okay - yea, now that bit is bad!" Eva massaged Nora's back as her sister hunched over the sink. Nora's anger slowly melted into weariness. Eva tried to refocus her sister's attention, "maybe, you could try talking to that Rick - guy, huh? He seemed into you."

"I would, except he tried to kiss me a couple of minutes ago in the kitchen"

"Oh no..."

"Yea, had scalding water land on his... thighs. Why does this always happen to me!" Nora looked around to make sure there was nobody else around that she could hurt. Her heartbeat seemed to be the only thing making any noise. "Maybe I could just stay here till everyone leaves?" 

"No! I don't want my sister to spend her eighteenth birthday alone, in the bathroom! Hold on, I think I might have your emergency medication in my purse. Can you wait here till I go grab some?"

"Gladly!" 

Eva smiled reassuringly and slowly opened the bathroom door an inch to the deafening celebration of their birthday. She found an opening and quickly made her move.

Nora immediately locked the door behind her sister and let herself sink to the bathroom floor. She took a few deep breaths to loosen her clenched jaw.

"Alright, nothing can happen to me or others as long as I stay here!" Nora told herself. She mustered the courage to get up and walk over to the bathroom window across from her. The window opened over the porch and into the silent woods surrounding Ethan's cabin. She breathed into the night and allowed the crisp air to fill her lungs. She spent a few minutes looking at the clear skies and twinkling stars overhead, blocking out all the noise and all the lights. That seemed to calm her nerves. Tonight might not be so bad after all.

"Watch out!"

She heard the warning, moments before the bathroom door buckled under the weight of a rushing football team, proudly displaying their ability to ignore decorum and property rights. Not unlike an overflowing toilet, the party poured into the bathroom pushing Nora out of the window! With a loud thud, she landed onto the porch-roof and felt one of her legs sink in as a shingle beneath her gave way. The porch-dancers below her stopped their music to acknowledge a singular appendage hanging through the shingle-sized hole above them. They collectively walked their eyes up the leg into the pleading eyes of an unsettled Nora. For a moment everything went silent.

"Please... Run!" 

She triggered a cinematic chain of events as more of the roof crumbled under her weight onto the hysterical kids running to find cover. Bean bags broke her fall by bursting at the seams and spewing beans all around them. This sent the porch-runners into uncontrollable wobbles as they slipped over the beans, introducing themselves intimately to the floor if they weren't cowering over it already.

Nora's blood pressure was through the collapsed roof at this point. She quickly picked herself up and Hail-Mary-ed indoors to find her sister. She smacked some heads and punched some faces on the way but that was the least of everybody's worry right now.

Eva looked from her purse toward the source of the screams, correctly assuming the reason behind them.

"Eva! I'm coming!" Nora called out to where her sister was waving the medication.

Everyone stopped all of their revelry to watch Nora flail toward her sister, poking innumerable eyes, and crushing countless toes. One of those toes belonged to Rick who promptly picked up his foot in agony, kicking Ethan in the groin and pummeling him onto the coat rack. The momentum of Ethan's protein-packed body knocked the rack over, destabilizing the liquor cabinet which immediately toppled, smashing its pristine glass doors and decanters with highly flammable liquids right in front of the huddlers trying to singe the night's memories in the warmth of the fireplace...

 

"What the hell, Nora?" Eva calmly asked Nora as their entire class looked on at the blazing inferno of Ethan's cabin in the cool of the night from a safe distance of six feet from Nora.