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Addict
Join Date: Aug 2005
Posts: 164
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Trying a Different Story Progression
He lay spread across the wide, taut black of a trampoline, his chest heaving toward the open sky. All the while his eyes lazily glanced between the two others sitting near him. One was a large boy called Daniel; the other, a black-haired girl named Jenna. Over their cellphones they hurriedly threw words and invitations to acquantices on the other lines:
“Right, _____, his dad’s in Dallas so no one will be here for us. ——Yeah, I think there’s supposed to be a dealer here or something later. . . . I don’t know. Colton set it all up for us.”
Jenna then flipped her cellphone shut and smiled down to her host, still lying across the trampoline.
“How’s it all going?” he asked. The question conveyed little excitement, and as he spoke, his attention set on a swirling downpour of burnt, summer leaves descended from the swaying trees looming overhead.
“Really not sure, really,” replied Jenna, smoothing her cream-white skirt down over her knees. The two were friends but not at all close. Another mutual friend whom Eric had known since kindergarden, Austin, loved her enough to fuck her every now and then or, in any case, fucked her enough to love her every now and then. The poor thing, it tore her to pieces, he thought. She gazed back at him with an air of seriousness. “Eric, this could either end up very big or very small.”
It sounded condescending to him, the way she addressed him by name, but he paid it no mind. Across the trampoline, Daniel sat upright with excitement, still chattering over the phone.
“That’s fine,” Eric told Jenna. He did not much care. His thin lips parted in the sultry summer evening , and from them escaped a sigh.
By eight o’clock, thirty-five people had gathered at Eric’s unsupervised house. Earlier, the three believed few would ever show up. “Well, it’s okay. That’s what we get for planning this only one day in advance,” Eric said. “We can still have a good time anyway.”
But that was before, and now slow, trippy music danced through the sweaty air; the dry, exotic-scented smoke from glowing marijuana leaves rose from the porch; and lines of empty amber-black glass accumulated on the laminate kitchen countertop.
“Christ,” Eric hissed. Jenna and he had taken refuge upstairs in his room and lay side by side on the bed, but still the shrill conglomeration of screams, laughs, and music pervaded their sanctuary. The music, though, was not his worry.
“There are drug dealers in my house,” he went on. “Drug dealers! How did our little get together get this far?”
“I don’t know.”
“Seriously, people I don’t even know keep coming and going like it’s some kind of club.” Jenna nodded silently in sympathy. “Except instead of like a club, here you can snort lines of hydrocodine on the kitchen counter, smoke blunts in the living room, and roll on ex whenever you damn well please! And unlike a club, we’re only seventeen. This is ridiculous: there must have been eighty different people here at one point or another already——“
“Austin is downstairs,” she interrupted.
“Yeah, he’s probably completely gone, too: he’s done everything you can buy. ——Can you believe I played baseball as a kid with two of those drug dealers? Jesus, I mean, I never really talked with them, but——“
She grabbed his arm tightly and held it, and he stopped. Her eyes burned into his like a quiet, vulnerable child’s. Under her thin shirt, the shape of her breasts pressed out, striving for the night.
“Austin is downstairs.”
Austin was downstairs. On a couch he slouched down with his delicate eyelids resting and his hair in a dirty-blonde mat, and beside him, a couple massaged each other under a blanket, both under the moaning ecstasy of a drug by the same name. The girl’s leg shot out from the blanket and kicked Austin in the thigh, and suddenly his eyes flicked open. His dilated pupils gazed across the loud room under a hazy mist, and turning to the snaking, twisting blanket to his side, he laughed and jumped to his feet. Where is Jenna? he thought. Tonight is a night to have a swell time!
So he went outside to the porch and giggled at the circle of college kids passing around a pipe, and they all giggled back in high-pitched voices. This is so chaotic, he thought. Where is Jenna? She was not on the porch, he ascertained, and she was not to be found on the trampoline, in the the kitchen, or in the living room, either. So Austin went upstairs. The music boomed.
At the same time, Daniel tenuously stood in the dark street, gone and stumbling, with a sober guy named Jonathan, who must have been one of the three people sober at the entire party.
“Yeh, man,” laughed Jonathan. “I can get you all that right now. I’ve got it on me. I can get you anythin’, man, with enough time, but that I’ve got right now.”
“Hahaha, don’t joke like that. You’re not suppos’d to mix what I took earlier and that. Anyway, if that’s the price you’s selling it for, I’ve got that and only that, and then I’ll be stripped of cash for the whole weekend.” Daniel said all this with surprisingly capable judgment, but his articulation was poor: either too rushed or too drawn out. But Jonathan’s face lit into a smile.
“So you got enough, then?”
“Well . . . yeah, but you know what I just said, man. You heard me! And it wouldn’t be healthy. It might uh kill me.”
“How ‘bout this, then? You pay me for it, and I don’t give to you so it can’t kill you. We both win in that situation.”
“Wait, one secon’. . . .” Daniel said, trailing off. His hands met at his waist and folded together, and he seemed confused. “I’m so embarrassed,” he finally remarked, “but what did you say?”
Jonathan put his arm around Daniel’s shoulder and led him into a patch of shadow:
“Look, jus’ come over here and let me explain. . . .” His other hand was reaching into his own back pocket.
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