Cody pulled me to the side when he caught me walking down the stairs. He rubbed the skin around my nostril clean. Andrew ran down the stairs past us. Cody waited until the cheer Andrew asked for subsided.
I drank past the limit I was comfortable being. More coke helped, but I was still a little loopy. Everything was still twisting.
Cody was like:
“What’s going on? You’re not stopping.”
I was like:
“Nothing. I’m just standing on everyone’s level.”
He was like: “Can you slow down? It’s getting out of hand.”
And I was like: “I’m in the tall grass,” I laughed.
Cody shook his head. “Can you please just tell me what’s going on? This isn’t you.”
“You don’t even know who I am, Cody.”
“Are you mad at me?”
I laughed in his face. “What are you running from, Cody? What are you hiding?”
“What are you talking about?”
“What do you see in me? Who am I?”
“You’re a blue flower. A morning glory.”
I laughed again. I liked that. I pressed myself up on him and kissed him.
Cody never put me on a pedestal. I’m the one who had him on one. Emily kicked it off of him for me. I could see right through him now that we were on the same level. I saw him with rose-tinted glasses, I couldn’t see the red flags.
“A blue flower,” I repeated to him. “More like morning glory.”
“Let me take you home. Sleep it off and we’ll talk about it in the morning.”
I shook my head. “I can walk home, thanks.”
-
I found Chris standing alone outside of the party. He’s staring at the sky again. I stood next to him to see what was so interesting about it. The stars were out again but clouds were moving in.
“What’s on your mind?” I asked him
“Pain demands to be felt. If it wants you, it’ll take you. It makes no exceptions. No one can escape from it. You never know when it’s coming. You don’t know how long it’ll stay. The best you can do is prepare for it as best as you can.”
“What happens after?”
“There is a version of you who won’t survive it. It’s the version of you that had dreams, hopes, and plans. In losing that, you’ll replace it with something as close as possible that you had before. Sometimes you’ll even swap it out for something different because you think it fits better. But it will never replace what you lost. It will never be quite right.”
“So what do I do?” I laughed.
“You can never get back what was lost. It’s that desire that’ll keep these new versions of yourself always feeling foreign. You don’t stop to understand that these new versions were always a part of you. They have always been you.”
Chris looked down from the sky.
“How do you know what I’m feeling?”
He looks at me. “I don’t.”
“Then why did you say all that?”
“You asked me what I was thinking. I answered.”
“Is what everyone says about you true?”
“Will it matter?”Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
In every class anyone shared with Chris, they all told me no one had ever seen him turn in or do any work. Every teacher leaves him alone and allows him to stare out in the distance or sleep in class. A rumor went around that he asks to take the final of every class at the beginning of the semester. Chris has aced every single one. It’s the only thing that explained how he had the highest GPA.
I heard Chris is schizophrenic. I heard he’s only quiet because he’s autistic. I heard he’s always on drugs. I heard her never showers or changes clothes.
“You do a lot of LSD, right?”
“Not lately. It hasn’t given me the answers I seek.”
“I want to try it. Help me through the trip?”
“Even if that’s not what''s supposed to happen?”
“I don’t care.”
“Okay.”
Sara bolted out of the house party and Emily chased after her.
Chris said, “Go.”
Sara stopped to throw up on the lawn of the house right across. She was crying. “What’s wrong?” I had asked like I didn’t know like it wasn’t my fault.
Emily ignored me as she was too busy holding her best friend up.
Sara was screaming. She was screaming. “It’s disgusting! It’s nasty! I hate it! Why did I do it, Ems?”
“I...I don’t know, Sara.”
I pretended to care. I held Sara like a friend. I held her like like I didn’t know this was going to happen. I could have thought up a better plan. I could have made one up that Sara wouldn’t force herself to do. I didn’t want to.
Not really.
“What’s going on?” I asked one last time.
Ems only took a second. “She fucked Lucas just to quell Amanda’s gossip,” she whispered.
I never left the tall grass. I always had a fork on my tongue. But so did Emily and so did Cody.
“It’s gonna be okay. You don’t have to prove anything,” Emily assured her, but the crying didn’t stop.
I texted Lucas to see if it was true. It was. He was ecstatic that he finally bagged Sara. The news that they fucked hadn’t even begun to circle around. Lucas wasn’t going to tell anybody. He wanted to keep it a secret. He asked me to keep it a secret. I didn’t tell Emily or Sara this. I don’t think I ever did.
I should have.
Then maybe Sara wouldn’t have had to put herself through that torture.
Sara’s hand trembled as she struggled to pull out her bag full of cocaine. Emily tried to stop her but couldn’t bring herself to do so. I watched as Sara took bump, after bump, after bump, after bump. She finally calmed down and moved to lay on the sidewalk. She was grinning with her eyes closed. I laid down next to her and held my hands together.
“You can’t use coke to run away forever, Sara,” Emily painfully said.
That’s right. Everyone is always running away from something. It can be fear. It can be pain. It can be sadness or loneliness. It can be jealousy. It can be thoughts itself. It can be the truth.
Everyone is running.
Always running.
And we never stop.
I’ve been running away my entire life.
The perfect persona I sculptivated for myself protected me from what I was running away from. I didn’t wear it anymore. It was slowly catching up to me.
Emily sat next to me. “When did it go so complicated?” she asked. I was unsure if she asked me.
“You don’t see it, do you?”
“See what?”
“We’re both victims.”
“What are you talking about, Elizabeth?”
“Try and remember. Remember who we were.”
“You’re drunk.”
“Maybe,” I laughed. “It’s an addiction, really.”
“I thought you never wanted to be.”
I don’t clarify what I meant. I don’t tell her it’s Cody that was my addiction. I could see how toxic he is. Emily couldn’t. I knew now, but I still wanted more.
I guess that’s what he was going for the entire time.
-
I took Andrew’s hand and let him lead me upstairs. He shut the door behind us and I sat on the bed. He grabbed the plate we’d been using all night and poured more of that incredible drug on it.
“Don’t you think you’ve been doing too much?”
“I didn’t think you’d care.”
“If I cared I wouldn’t let you.”
I snort a line the moment he readied one. Andrew took one for himself. “Can I ask you something?”
“Would you care if Amanda is right?”
“About what?”
“If Sara’s gay.”
Andrew prepped another line for me. “I know she is.”
“You do?”
Andrew laughed. “I’m just waiting for her to muster up the courage to tell me. She’s lost, Elizabeth. She depends on me too much. She has to learn how to stand by herself.”
I snort the line.
“You’re a good brother.”
I think about my own.
“Nah, I’m far from it. I don’t deserve Sara.”
Andrew does another line.
“It’ll come true if you keep thinking like that.”
Andrew laughed. It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t obnoxious. I never heard this laugh before. It wasn’t forced. “Maybe you’re right.”
I did my final line for the night.
“Y’know, I always wondered how it felt to do a drug deal.”
“I can sell to you if you want.”
“No, it wouldn’t be the same. I want it to be like in the movies. With a stranger and out in the open. I think it’ll be cool.”
“I can set you up if you want.”
“I’d like that.”
“But why?”
I shrugged. “Why do anything at all?”