Thirty-two-year-old Eva Mercy nearly chokes to death on her gum while masturbating. Blacking out, she thinks about her daughter finding her in her Christmas pajamas with her vibrating dildo called The Quarterback. She doesn’t die, however. Eva coughs up the gum and puts on her ancient cameo ring before waking up her daughter.

Eva believes she should have seen this as a sign because all Creole women saw signs. She learned this from her eccentric mother, and at the time, Eva was a young girl who knew only that “Creole” related somehow to Louisiana Black people with French surnames. However, she eventually realized that her mother used “signs” to justify her less-than-responsible behavior. Even though Eva knows her mother’s superstition was contrived, she still feels conditioned to believe that the universe tries to communicate with her. She has had a previous near-death experience and believes she should have known something was around the corner.

After a winter break during her sophomore year of college, when she had nowhere to go, Eva wrote the first draft of Cursed, the love story between the “bronzed-eyed vampire, Sebastian—and his true love, the badass unwicked witch, Gia” (5). Her roommate submitted the manuscript to a contest without her knowledge.