Chapter Eleven
The day's heat hadn’t fallen with the sun.
A bead of sweat trickles down the narrow path between my shoulder blades as the soles of my bare feet slap against the warm, pockmarked asphalt.
It’s one in the morning, possibly two, and black stains the sky.
My arm is looped with Jade’s. We are skipping the centerline of the desolate ribbon of road, descending Devil’s Peak mountain.
Loose rocks are digging into our skin, catching and cutting between our ravaged toes. Jade stumbles, offering over the half empty bottle of whiskey, and I take it, reaching for another sip.
Knots of laughter weave stitches in my stomach, the mixture of booze and adrenaline tugging delicately at the thin thread. My chest heats, along with my throat and cheeks.
I have always felt most alive when I did things most parents would warn their sixteen-year-old daughters not to do. I didn’t think I was invincible, yet I teetered on the reckless side of carelessness, and I was thankful my best friend had a rebellious bone too.
We are singing now, a chorus to one of our favorite Paramore songs, stumbling toward a bend in the road that hugs a tall and sharp postured corner lined with giant trees. Some deciduous, others not, their limbs curled and bent and knobby like witches fingers.
I gaze over my shoulder, allowing my eyes to wander into the darkness. I can’t see much of anything, only the canopy of old trees that reach for the sky and the moon's warm pallid glow.
“I think this was a bad idea.” Jade’s chuckle is accompanied by a hiccup. She bends at the waist and pushes her lips to the mouth of the bottle clasped with the hand still looped between my arm. She takes a reckless swig, then trips, drags my ass to the ground with her.
The sound of glass shattering rings in my ears, harmonizing with the faint hum of cicadas, and for a moment, I lay face down on top of my chuckling best friend, unmoving, thinking how nice it would be if I could go to sleep. However, when Jade flops like a fish, I take the hint.
I peel myself from her spine with a groan. “I think you’re right.” Sitting upwards, sharp rock scraping against my now torn up knees, I palm my hair from my face. “This was a bad idea.”
I look at her, and she looks at me, and there’s silence as our eyes hold each other’s before our discordant laughter trills out with another one of Jade’s full-bodied hiccups.
“We’re so fucked,” I heave, hand to stomach, finding my feet.
I extend the same hand toward Jade, and when she reaches for me, my eyes catch on the bottle of crystalized whiskey glittering in pieces off the inky road behind her.
“Clumsy bitch,” I tease.
She laughs harder.
My palm connects with hers and something warm and sticky seeps between the web of my fingers as I drag her to her feet.
Metal assails the entrance of my nose and I drop my chin, finding my best friend's hand torn to shreds and weeping at her side.
I snort, yanking it too close to my eyes, inspecting the damage.
“You’re bleed—” I begin to say in astonishment only to be paused by another one of Jade’s violent hiccups.
“Ooops.” Jade giggles, pulling her hand from my grasp and gazing at it the same way I had. She squints, then she starts poking at it. “I don’t feel anything.” She chuckles harder, digging her nails into the crimson crater.
I reach for her, wrap my hand around her wrist and yank it away.
“Leave it alone, you’ll get a disease,” I chide, but it’s not forceful, or serious, or anything that could even come close to a scold because I’m drunk and I kind of want to poke at it too. It looks squishy, fun to play with.
Jade presses it to the front of her shorts, leaving a smear of red behind, and I think that’s good, for the both of us. She exhales theatrically, blows out her cheeks.
“Are we really going to walk all the way—” She begins to whine only to pause when we hear the pitch of an engine in the distance.
Something close to relief settles across my chest, and I sigh out my next breath. I latch onto Jade’s messed up hand, pulling her off the road.
She doesn’t flinch. It’s as if she doesn’t feel a thing.
Jade’s head turns in the direction of the rattling sound.
“Thank fuck,” she rasps when a set of sallow, foggy headlights wrap around the corner.
She sticks her bloody thumb in the air, signaling a ride, then flicks her dark straight locks over her bony shoulders.
“Ever hitchhiked before?” she asks with a wiggle of her sharp, thick eyebrows.
“You know I haven’t,” I laugh, pulling my phone out of the back pocket of my denim shorts, finding that I still have no cell bars. I had lost them long before the party had started.
Jade’s chin is resting on her bare shoulder, her smile joining mine. It’s so bright and beautiful and her crooked canine tooth peeks over her thin bottom lip like it always has. She has the same mischievous glint in her blue eyes that I have come to know and love over the years.
“Glad we get to be reckless together, bestie,” she whispers, chewing on her bottom lip.
The gray sedan slows, the sound of tires crunching over rock nears closer, then it’s rolling up beside us, the buzz of a window following.
And I wonder if I should feel something. Perhaps fear, uncertainty, but when my vision blurs, the trees swirling around me, reminding me how inebriated I am, I feel nothing but a wash of relief.
Jade’s bleeding hand latches onto the handle of the back door, hauling it open. Her bony fingers curl around my wrist, dragging me into the back seat. She slides across the leather, reaching forward to tap the random guy behind the wheel on the shoulder.
“Please, just don’t kill us tonight,” she slurs before falling into the seat with a sigh.
She is shit-faced, and so am I, and when she closes her eyes, checks out for the night, I know it’s on me to get us home safely tonight.
I slam the door behind me.
The driver clears his throat and adjusts the rearview mirror until the white sclera of his eyes touch mine.
And an icy shiver races through me.
They weren’t hard or soft. They didn’t tell a story. They were just ordinary.
A black ski mask covers his face, and I work to convince myself that he’s been to, and left, the same party we had. That the uncomfortable tilt of my stomach means nothing.
He watches me for a moment and with a click of his tongue, followed by a sinuous crack of his neck, he asks, “Where are we headed?”
And on a croak, I tell him, “The trailer park in Devil’s Peak.”
I shoulder the belt behind me, pull it across my torso, battling blindly with the opening of a buckle I couldn’t seem to place.
He nods, then reaches toward the stereo.
“Solway Firth” by Slipknot pushes through the speakers and he raises the volume, making it impossible for me to hear my own thoughts.
I choose not to fight against it, giving the eerie tempo permission to lull me instead. Sinking into the sticky leather seat, my skull reclining against the headrest. I level my gaze to my side, seeing that Jade has passed out soundly against me.
I chuckle beneath my breath when her mouth pops open.
Smoothing my hand through the top strands of her dark hair, I twirl the ribbon Nan had made for us both, around my finger when I feel my eyelids soften too, teasing me with sleep, only I do my best to blink the pillowing away, rubbing at the thin piece of skin.
Jade was out, and I had to make sure this guy didn’t put us out.
The thought was morbid, I know. But that was the way of being a girl.
The sharp scent of mint drifts beneath my nose and I watch the guy behind the wheel drive with his knees when he opens a pack of breath strips, slipping the dissolvable piece of paper-like freshness onto his tongue.
The song continues, the lyrics dark and harrowing and I find myself asking, “Can we put something a little less…invasive on?”
Silence stretches.
He doesn’t reply, in fact, he reaches toward the dial and amplifies the volume, taking an invisible bat to my request and knocking it out.
The skin on my arms prickle with a shiver.
I rub it away.
“Okay then…” I draw both words out and roll my eyes, turning to stare out the fogged window at my side. I latch onto the pitch-black hole of the night.
That’s when it dawns on me that we’ve been driving for a little too long and something deep in the bowels of my stomach shifts at that.
The music continues to blare and I kind of want to scratch my ears off. It sobers me, and the force of our decision weighs down heavier now.
My palms have turned clammy.
And my stomach feels as if it’s sitting at the base of my throat.
I kind of want to get out.
I kind of think walking the rest of the way might be better.
I kind of don’t want to be here anymore.
It was a feeling. One that turned my gut upside down, and my mother had once told me that, as a woman, as a girl, if you felt it, you weren’t to ignore it.
Jade’s head has fallen into my lap and as I stroke her hair behind her ear, I curl over, whisper for only her to hear, “Jade, wake up.”
When she doesn’t, I pinch her arm, and she groans, eyes blinking, annoyance contorting the beautiful features of her diamond-shaped face. “Bitch.”
Where I would usually snort or laugh or swing her words back at her, tonight, I don’t.
Jade peels herself off my bare legs. The lines of her face are imprinted into my thighs, red and splotchy and messy. She sits up, holding a hand to her mouth, and with that, hope hits me.
My palm is on Jade’s back as she groans, “Oh god, I’m gonna be sick.”
This was our savior.
I flick my eyes to the guy in the front and yell over the blaring music, “Hey, pull over!”
It’s then that I notice his foot pushes the accelerator to the floor, the wheels beneath us grinding harder and faster against the road.
Annoyance blazes through me and I reel my hand back, beating my palm into the rear of his headrest.
“Hey, did you hear me, pull the fuck over, she’s about to be sick all over your shit!”