S1 Week 4 Bonus Story: Danse Macabre Pt. 1

The Dance of the Dead

Welcome to Trainwrecks, a free-to-read fiction serial that follows a group of six Seattle-adjacent friends from the year 2004 to the year 2015. Join Luna Cruz, Sebastian Velasquez, Dimitri and Victoria Hale, Duke Kingston, and Jasmine Nolan as they stumble their way from adolescence to adulthood, falling in love, making mistakes, overcoming their pasts, and staying together through it all.

Friday posts are for paid subscribers. For $5 a month or a discounted rate of $50 a year, readers will get four bonus stories that delve deeper into each individual character’s history or the narrative’s current events. You do not need this content to understand the main story.

Author’s Note: Danse Macabre was originally written as a separate novel. It is in first person POV because Jasmine wanted to tell her story herself. This is also your warning that younger Jasmine engaged in a lot of problematic behavior, as most of us did when we were growing up. Please forgive her. It’ll get worse before it gets better.

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What most people won’t tell you is that life is one big love story. Creator, creation, separation. From the time we are born, we are cast away from our one true love, seduced our whole lives long by people and things that want our everything but won’t give anything in return.

I was thirteen years old when I lost my virginity.

I was fifteen years old when I met my one true love.

And a few months after that, I met Sebastian.

~*~

My parents are second generation Chinese Americans. They were born and raised here, their English without accent, Dad’s Americanized surname of “Nolan” nonthreatening. But because my grandparents had not had it easy when they were growing up, they didn’t make growing up easy for their children. They imposed strict rules on them, pushed them to their breaking points in pursuit of success, dragged them to church on Sundays not because they were interested in religion, but because they wanted them to blend in.

Then my mother—like a cliché, she says—met my father, a good boy from a good family who was as sick and tired of rules as she was. Their love was rebellion disguised as compliance. And when they married, they vowed they would never smother their children the way they had been smothered.

Enter me, February 28th, 1988. I was a worryingly quiet baby. My parents, who had either heard horror stories or grown up around children themselves, remembered the squalling, screaming, sleepless nights they were expected to endure. But according to my mother, I was so well behaved that I only cried when I absolutely needed something—and at a nice, sensible volume. They fawned over me, and as I started walking and uttering syllables, they began to offer me choices.

Even as a toddler I was allowed to pick what I wanted to wear. When I was able to form sentences, I got to choose where I wanted to go on our weekends together. In preschool, I got to decide which extracurriculars I wanted to try. And if I didn’t like it, I wasn’t forced to stick with it. No questions asked.

In hindsight, this may have created some false sense of superiority in me. My parents were not just parents, but two people put on this earth to cater to my happiness. I could not understand when other little girls said they weren’t allowed to do things, that they didn’t have a say in their families. Why not? How could their parents be so cruel?