It’s not like I think the acid is a good idea. I don’t.
But my brother Justin has this thing about parties and if I don’t look like I’m out-of-my-mind happy, he’ll always take it personally.
He offers me the tab, balancing it on a safety pin so he won’t rub the dose off by touching it with his fingers. The blotter paper has a little Christmas angel printed on it in yellow ink. I wonder if it’s supposed to be a joke, or if he’s just confused. It’s October.
Sometimes I get the feeling he’s trying to piss off our dad, and this is just another way to do it—like Justin has me on his team and the sport is being more like him. Being exactly who my dad already thinks I am.
The theme for the party is Trailer Trash Showcase, which Justin came up with because he actually likes cheap beer, or because he started lifting over the summer and wants an excuse to wear a shirt with no sleeves, or maybe just as some kind of a misguided middle finger to everybody who ever made fun of us growing up for our clothes or our shoes or the street we lived on.
Now that I’m here, though, standing in his kitchen, the actual event doesn’t really feel cool or edgy. Underneath, it seems more like giving up—you just say it first, before someone else can.
After too much time debating it, I reach for the acid.
“Atta boy,” Justin says, smiling like I’m a dog who’s done a trick, and then charging off to find a shot glass or a bottle opener or to bother someone else.
My friend Ollie gives me a look, but doesn’t say anything. He’s pretty good at seeing how things are going to turn out, but he’ll usually keep his mouth shut.
Ollie’s easy to be around, but sometimes hard to read. His mom left a couple years ago—just took off one day without warning. She said she needed to simplify her life, so she threw a bunch of stuff in the back of her Civic and moved to San Antonio, which is about the most screwed-up thing I’ve ever heard. In some ways, Ollie is probably as messed up as I am, but that’s not why we’re friends. Or at least, we’ve been friends longer than things have been shitty.
“Mars,” he says. “Are you sure you’re in the mood to go sailing tonight?”
Which is a hard question to answer.
The acid isn’t a big deal. It’s Friday night, so it’s not like I have someplace else to be. Lately, though, my life is a little off the rails. I already feel like the walls are coming down around me. I want to feel different, sure. But I don’t want to feel any more ruined than I already do.
Also, Justin’s Trash party is not the greatest place to get chemically altered. A lot of people are walking around with huge ratted hair and their front teeth blacked out. I can picture several scenarios where the night doesn’t go so well. They just aren’t bad enough to make me change my mind.
“Don’t,” Ollie says, like he’s going to give me a reason.
I put the square on my tongue anyway, because it’s free, and because no matter what, it’s a guaranteed alternative to feeling like I feel right now.
The party is loud, bigger than most of the ones at Justin’s house, and everyone’s swarming all over each other. The girls are sweating off their makeup and I know that before long, I’ll have to go out in the backyard just so I can breathe.
“You didn’t have to take it just because the Captain gave it to you.”
In Ollie-speak, the Captain is shorthand for Captain Cockjob, but Justin doesn’t know that. He thinks being the Captain is a good thing, which makes me half sorry. I’d feel all the way sorry if he wasn’t such an unrelenting cockjob.
Tonight, though, he’s at least acting like a brother, and he did just give me the blotter tab, for no reason except that he wanted to. “Come on, he’s okay.”
“Yeah, he’s fine, as long as you’re swinging from his nuts.”
I laugh, even though that’s so true it’s not funny.
Ollie shrugs, then flinches as the Captain comes barreling back into the kitchen. “Whatever. Oh, hey, I was going to tell you. I saw Little Ollie in the art hall before Spanish today.”
The Captain laughs and pounds Ollie on the back. “Wait, you’re naming your junk now?”
But Little Ollie is a real person, this douchey freshman who looks remarkably like regular Ollie—not Ollie now, but Ollie when he was fourteen.
We ran into him in the quad one day at the beginning of the year and it was so weird and Twilight Zone that now regular Ollie occasionally keeps an eye on what Little Ollie gets up to.
Ollie shoves the Captain’s hand away and doesn’t answer. “Anyway, he was just lounging up against the lockers like a pimp, scamming on this little freshman girl. It was kind of crazy to watch.”
“Is he smooth?” I say, not really caring, but already a hundred percent sure that I’d rather have this conversation than any of the ones the Captain has on offer.
Ollie shakes his head. “Not so much. When I passed them, he was looking like he wanted to jump down her shirt headfirst.”
The Captain’s still off on his own tangent like Ollie hasn’t said a word. He hoists himself onto the counter, settling in between us. The way he’s talking is loud and blustery, and I feel bad, because no matter how bad I feel, I can’t help thinking that if we just ignore him, he might still go away.
I stand slumped against the kitchen sink, waiting for the acid to kick in and drinking a beer.
The Captain is telling the longest, stupidest story in the history of the world, all about how Hez, his roommate, wouldn’t get out of the Captain’s easy chair.
“—and he totally didn’t believe that I’d do it, that I’d piss on him, but—”
Ollie sighs, leaning his elbows on the counter and staring down with his hair hanging in his face. “That’s because you’d have to be a complete degenerate to piss on someone.”
The acid is starting to come on in little tremors, like someone just threw a rock into water and now the waves are rippling out from the center.
When I look up again, Ollie’s watching me.
“What?”
He shrugs and sort of smiles, but like a floppy cartoon character shrugging for something sad, and I know he’s right—and I knew the score anyway—but it’s too late now.
He says, “If it gets bad, think of something really boring. Like history, or something.”
“I don’t think history’s boring,” I say, and my voice sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard before, all sad and slow and musical.
Ollie shrugs again. “Deep-sea fishing, then. Or baseball.”
But really he’s saying, We both know this is going to get bad.
“You’re right,” I tell him, but I’m not sure I say it out loud. I might just be using my brain.
Then the two of us sit there being right, but not getting any satisfaction out of it. There’s not really a prize for that kind of thing.