First-Person Fiction

This story reads like a confessional made by a person begging for redemption from a booth in a church, though it doesn’t sound remorseful as one may expect in this situation. So to correct myself, this story reads like a confession, period. This is about a bunch of dumb teenagers making dumb decisions to impress boys but they don’t have restraint in their pursuits. The tone is calm and recollecting, like a confession made by a killer or someone haunted by a memory they can’t forget. Even when Silva is dying, our narrator seems like she’s in shock more than anything. From what information we are given, Natalia is known to obsess over what she wants and goes to extreme lengths to get what she wants, though even this seems like a bit much to our narrator.

This story builds tension beautifully by letting us know from the start that this narrator and her friends don’t like Silvia and they wish bad things upon her. “But we wanted her ruined, helpless, destroyed.” This sets the tone that something IS going to happen, but we as readers don’t know what. We’re also given the lovely warning about the dogs that foreshadowed the ultimate, untimely demise of our victim.

While the story itself is pretty cut and dry, it does perfectly encapsulate the teenage experience in one way or another. We all have had at least one friend like Silvia, who always tries to one up you for no reason or always seems to have a ridiculous amount of money and flaunts it with no regard for how it makes other people feel. We all have had friends that we’ve kept around just to leech off of them and get what they have like our narrator and her friends did with Silvia, and then they get jealous when the expected comes to be. This may be a little broad of an assumption to make, but I do think that wishing something bad upon someone else happens whether we want it to/truly believe in its intention or not. Teenage years are full of turmoil and sexual storms and other BS that makes life hard and that seems like prime time to harvest negative emotions from like the Virgin did from Natalia. While most of us in our teenage years never actually went through with our ill intents (as far as I know), Natalia did because she was presented with the opportunity at the right time. Yes it was a little extreme, but in the end, she is human and not all of us are nice and benevolent. What else can I say, teenage years suck.