I wish I didn't have such awful dreams.
The girl hated other introverts even more than the extroverts, but above all else, she hated herself for hating other introverts. She should be supportive, she supposed, and so loathed herself for her failing.
One day, she ordered an enormous corner bathtub to be installed in her house. I suppose she thought to calm herself down with a nice bath after a stressful day. As far as I know, it never got used for that purpose.
The installers came, and their mostly quiet efficiency let them install the tub without terribly freaking out the girl. As she started running the bath, a knock at the window startled her. One of her neighbors peered in at her through the slats of the blinds, waving cheerfully. Every visible inch of his grinning face set her teeth on edge.
Doesn't he know how disruptive he's being? she thought furiously to herself as she stomped around the house, trying to find the door that this neighbor was trying to enter through. Stupid broken doorbell. Stupid neighbor, moving around and being hard to find. Stupid people trying to talk to me.
As soon as she opened the door, the annoying, clueless, extrovert neighbor let himself right into her house. She glared and sputtered, eventually squeezing out that she is drawing a bath right now. He perked up and asked to see the new tub, because he'd seen the installers, and he was interested, and so on and so forth.
One thing led to another, and between the stress of her job, the installers, and the incredibly pushy and yappy neighbor, the first use of the tub turned out to be washing away all the blood the neighbor drained into the churning water. Nobody was quite sure how it happened, only that the last thing anyone saw of him was a light red swirl as it was sucked down the tub drain.
Maybe, she thought, staring at the draining water, if I killed the other extroverts, that would be like supporting my fellow introverts.
A few days later, she invited the lesbians down the street to her house. When they knocked -- the doorbell was still busted -- she answered the door naked. The lesbians were variously shocked, suspicious, and intrigued. She jutted out her jaw and spat, "You were hitting on me when I first got here. If you still want me, come take a bath."
Bemused, the lesbians let themselves be led to the tub. They climbed in, she uncharacteristically chatty, though not particularly skilled, and they rather more quiet. The stuttering conversation still grated on her nerves, and by the end of the bath, the water had again turned red.
Later still, I, and another person I didn't really know, were invited to visit the introvert's bedroom. We had gotten to the point of being naked and entangled when suddenly, the bedroom doors burst open, and a camera crew spilled in. A microphone was thrust at me, and a cheerful announcer said something along the lines of "Surprise!" -- we were -- and "You're on such-and-such show!" -- apparently, we were.
The introvert began to tremble violently. I held her hand, and spoke into the microphone. "What are you doing here?" I asked. Someone we knew told the crew that we would be here! I shook my head and asked the only other person in the room -- besides the TV crew and the trembling introvert -- who disavowed any knowledge of this. "You're upsetting our host," I told them.
We went back and forth a bit, until the introvert took the microphone from me, and confessed that she had been planning to sleep with us, then kill us as she had done to a few others before us. It got really awkward after that. The crew, my fellow guest, and I all managed to disentangle ourselves and leave without too much unseemly haste. The introvert was still naked on her bed as we crept out.
I don't think I really believed her at that point. A small part of me was shocked and relieved to have been rescued from death -- by a surprise TV crew, of all things. But the rest of me was pretty convinced that it wasn't really ever a danger.
The introvert eventually got a boyfriend. He was some kind of therapist and CIA agent. They got along well, and he was helping her be less upset all the time. For a while, the killings stopped, and we all thought things were going to be okay. The introvert had even thrown a real party, with no killings, at her house. Then he got called in for a job while the two of them were out together.
Leaving her at the entrance, the therapist agent went into the depths of the factory basement. There was shouting, and a gunfight, and a poisonous gas leak caused by a stray bullet. Once the shooting subsided, the therapist agent stumbled his way back up to the introvert. Alas, he had inhaled too much toxic gas, and collapsed a few feet from her, hand outstretched in a plea for help.
The introvert tentatively stepped forward. I thought for sure she had gotten better, enough to maybe go to his aid. Instead, she looked around to make sure they were unobserved, and stabbed him in the chest. Then, she wandered away into the night without a backward glance.
