10 Days to Ruin

ARIEL

I blame Superman for the way my life turned out.

If The CW hadn't cast Tom Welling as Superman in Smallville, it would've been different.

If Tom Welling didn't have cinnamon roll eyes and the bone structure of a sex god, it would've been different.

If I hadn't been a hyper-impressionable twelve-year-old girl caught deep in the vicious chokehold of puberty when the season four premiere of Smallville aired, then I wouldn't have been so jealous of Lois Lane getting to see Tom Welling naked that my crush on him immediately and violently transferred to a girl crush on her, and then I wouldn't have wanted to be a reporter, and then I wouldn't have gotten this job at The New York Gazette, and my editor wouldn't have sent me to this gala, and I wouldn't be in this situation I'm in.

But The CW did cast Tom Welling.

Tom Welling did have cinnamon roll eyes and the bone structure of a sex god.

And Lois Lane did get to see him naked in season four.

And so all of the other things did happen, one domino colliding into the next, shit rolling downhill, and so now, I'm cloistered in the men's bathroom at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, hyperventilating and bleeding from a cut on my hand and wondering just how the fuck I'm supposed to go back out there and do my job.

The woman in the mirror doesn't have any more of an idea than I do. She's staring back at me helplessly. Green eyes, auburn hair, punching well above her weight class in a Diane von Furstenberg dress she stole from her best friend's closet.

"What're we gonna do?" I try asking my reflection. She just mouths the question back to me, that useless tramp.

I sigh and look down at my hand. If you thought the Met would be ritzy enough to ensure their door handles were free of jagged, rusted edges, you'd have thought wrong. I just opened up a good two-inch gash in my hurry to slam the stupid thing behind me after I charged in here, because the women's bathroom had a line two dozen deep, because of course it did.

I've got my other hand clamped on top of it to stop my life juice from splurting everywhere. But the blood is starting to well up between my fingers and it's making me a teensy bit queasy.

I don't do blood. I don't do stitches. I don't do grievous wounds or even particularly bad bruises.

When you grow up the way I did, you see enough of that stuff to last a lifetime.

But I'm by myself in here and no one is coming to my rescue. So with a big, brave inhale, I peel away my good hand and take a look at⁠-

"Nope. Nuh-uh. Nooo thank you." My reflection agrees with me-that's a nasty cut. If I spend even a millisecond longer looking at it, I