Chapter 15 #2
Heat crawls up my neck, thick and sticky. I fan myself with my free hand, frowning. Jesus, when did it get so hot in here? The air’s syrup-thick in my throat. I blink hard, trying to clear the blur, but everything stays fuzzy around the edges.
The music warps—underwater and far away—while my heartbeat climbs too.
Oh shit.
My skin’s on overdrive, every brush of fabric feeling too intense. I lift my hand to my head.
The walls are… moving. Breathing in and out like lungs.
What the fuck?
This isn’t just drunk. I’ve been drunk before. Smashed, even.
This is something else.
Something wrong.
The realization splashes like ice water through the warm haze.
The strobing lights jab needles into my eyes. My pulse hammers too fast, out of rhythm with the music.
Honey, what’d you take? That Mitski lyric loops in my head. What’d you take?
Nothing. I didn’t take anything. Just drinks from that guy at the counter, and—
Oh fuck.
A hand grabs my ass—hard—and I spin, ready to break someone’s nose, but the movement sends the whole house lurching sideways. I catch myself on the wall, except the wall feels wrong—too soft or too hard or both at once.
“Easy there, baby.” The voice is warped, dragging up from the bottom of a well. There’s a guy in front of me—I don’t know him, can’t focus on him—but his grin stretches too wide. His face bends in ways faces shouldn’t bend. “Looking a little unsteady.”
I open my mouth to tell him to fuck off, but my tongue’s a brick. My words come out slurred, incomprehensible even to me.
He laughs. The sound is morphed and ugly, echoing wrong in my skull.
Cold panic slices through the fake warmth in my veins.
Oh shit oh shit oh shit.
I know what this is. Not from personal experience—until right fucking now—but I’ve seen girls go under like this at parties back home. Too fast, too far to just be booze. I always tried to get them home or at least, away from everybody else and babysit them until I could find a DD.
One of these fucking fuckers spiked my fucking drink.
The thought detonates in my chest. My lungs lock up. I can’t breathe right.
And the worst part? I can already feel the trap closing in. My body’s slowing down, movements turning to molasses, while my brain speeds off in the opposite direction, thoughts racing and fragmenting.
Ha ha ha. Try to escape thinking about one trap for a night, run smack into another.
There’s a stranger in front of me with his hands getting closer.
Big house. Loud music. Nobody watching.
Nobody knows I’m here.
Nobody’s coming.
I am so completely fucked.
Move.
I have to move. Get out. Get somewhere safer, somewhere quieter. Somewhere that isn’t pressing in on me from every direction with faces that melt and reform like wax.
But my legs are assholes.
Every step is through thick, wet sand. The floor keeps shifting like a ship’s deck underneath me. People press against me, their faces distorting, smiles stretching into grotesque rubber-band Polaroids before snapping back.
I push. I shove.
My hands slide over slick arms and sequined dresses, and I can’t tell if the burning on my skin is from them or from something inside me trying to claw its way out.
The fog machine belches chemical death into my lungs. I taste the chemicals. Am the chemicals.
Then—somehow—I’m standing outside.
How? No idea.
One second, I’m drowning in bodies, the next I’m gulping air under a sky strung with swaying fairy lights.
The cool breeze feels like needles against my overheated skin, but I could cry with relief. I gulp air like it can flush whatever’s in me right out.
The pool glows in front of me—too blue, toxic blue, a glowing wound carved into the night. I stare, and it stares back.
What the fuck did they give me?
Music drills into my skull from inside the house. The beat’s wrong now—off-tempo, jagged, like the world’s skipping frames.
Focus. I need to focus on something. Anything. The pool lights. The sound of water lapping. The smell of chlorine.
But it all keeps shifting, morphing. The pool light turns green. Purple. Splits into rainbow oil slicks writhing across the surface.
And then I see him.
A shape by the pool. Backlit by that blue that isn’t blue anymore. Still, not looking at me, looking down into the water like it holds secrets.
“Caleb?”
My voice sounds strange in my own ears—too loud and too quiet at once.
He turns.
The spinning slows. Just a little. Just enough. I can’t make his face hold still—it melts, reforms, pixels rearranging—but the idea of him anchors me.
He’s gravity, and I’m a balloon drifting toward the stratosphere.
My feet move without permission. I reach for him because I don’t know what else to do, because my mouth’s too dry for words, because he’s the only solid thing in a world that’s turned to dripping watercolors.
He hesitates.
No. Don’t go. Please don’t. I’m drowning.
Then—contact.
Palm to palm. Holy palmer’s kiss. Is that how the line goes? Shakespeare won’t write this tragedy. I was always meant to end this way.
His touch shoots through my arm, electricity and anchor, grounding me just enough to believe I’m still here, still real.
I laugh—sort of. It comes out raw and jagged.
Because of course. Of course, this is me. The girl who gets drugged at parties. The girl whose own mother called her a bitch and meant it. The girl who ruins everything she touches.
You can’t escape what you are. Darlene’s voice coils through my head, wrapping around the beat and the lights and my pounding heart.
The pool light ripples over my companion’s face, shadowing his eyes into black pits that see straight through me to all the broken parts I’m trying to forget.
Then we’re moving—how did that happen?—together under the string lights. The tilt of the world is still there, but he’s solid beside me, real, the only fixed point.
I’m burning again. Inside-out burning. The sun lodged in my ribs, incinerating me from the inside.
I claw at my jacket. He helps peel it off, hands gentle, but it’s still too hot, too tight. I’m going to crawl out of my skin if I don’t—
The crowd whoops. Cheers? Screams? I can’t tell anymore.
He leans in, breath warm, words scraping across my ear and down into my bloodstream, but they’re just sounds without meaning.
I look up, trying to focus—
His face shifts again.
Suddenly, I know.
It’s not Caleb.
The knowledge slices clean through the haze. My heart jackhammers against my ribs.
I’m not safe with this man.
I don’t know who this is. I don’t know where I am or how much time I’ve lost or what I’ve already done. I just know I’m eighteen years old in two days, high on something I didn’t choose, and standing in front of someone I can’t trust.
Fear floods in, cold and clarifying. My brain shrieks move, but the heat is louder.
I’m so hot. Unbearably hot. If I don’t cool down, I’m going to spontaneously combust right here.
The pool glitters like salvation. Blue and cool and promising relief.
I tear away from the guy with black-pit eyes.
I dive.
The last thing I hear before the blue swallows me whole is my own scream, stretching thin and then cutting off as the water closes over my head like a mouth swallowing me down.