Places No One Knows (5 page)

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.

I've stopped counting down, but I don't remember when that happened. Voices echo from far away, getting closer. Everything feels cold.

When I open my eyes, I'm standing at the edge of a cement slab, surrounded by a horde of people. The yard is filthy. It has that ambience of total neglect that only frat houses and meth labs can sustain. The whole patio is awash in spilled beer.

The crowd presses in on me, boys in trucker caps and wifebeaters, the girls caked in makeup and squeezed into disastrously short daisy dukes.

There's nothing worse than the realization that everyone around you is adhering to some kind of unifying principle, and you're dressed in two-piece flannel pajamas. I clasp my hands under my chin and tuck my elbows close, gripped by the horrifying idea that I've been sleepwalking and have wandered into someone's yard.

No one seems to find my presence remarkable, though.

They don't even look in my direction, and as time wears on, I'm more and more convinced that they're not going to. This is the functional opposite of dreams about delivering speeches to packed auditoriums while naked. It's like my subconscious is underscoring all the ways the world consists of tightly knit social biomes, and I am on the outside.

Everyone's drinking and laughing. I recognize a few of them from school, but mostly from the chatter and chaos of the passing periods. Everyone else is college age, but none of them really look like they're in college. Something a little too adult in their faces, a little too tired.

Close by, one of the boys is talking to a guy in his twenties, who's holding a bottle of beer and sporting facial hair that could use the delicate attention of a weed-whacker.

The boy is named Ollie Poe and he's in my Spanish class. He has lank, dark hair that comes down to his chin, and a nervous way of touching his collarbone before he talks. I had PE with him last year, and his crap badminton skills were rivaled only by his chronic inability to run the mile in under twelve minutes.

He's moving his hands too quickly, touching his forehead, his chin. “Look, is Mars gonna be cool or what? I mean, maybe you think this is
funny
or something, but he's down under that table picking at himself like a fucking tweaker.”

The other guy nods and finishes his beer in a long swallow. He scrubs his mangy little beard with the back of his hand before answering. “He's okay. That blotter shit comes on big, but it peaks fast. Just don't bother him, he'll be fine.”

Ollie twitches like a marionette, sticking a cigarette behind his ear, taking it back down again. “What if he gets cold? He's just in that beater. Shouldn't somebody check on him, maybe take him a blanket or something?”

The other guy shrugs, swinging his empty bottle in a meditative circle. “You go messing with him now, he's just going to flip his shit. Leave him alone, he'll work it out.”

“He was rough tonight, though. Like, cut-up. Look, is something going on at your house, or what?”

The guy clenches his jaw like a nervous tic—one quick beat. Then he shakes his head, peering around the yard. “This
is
my house.”

Ollie sticks the cigarette in the corner of his mouth. “Don't be a dumbass. You know what I mean.”

The guy shrugs, scratching the back of his neck. I can't tell which parts of his sketchy ensemble are a costume and which aren't. “It's no big deal. My dad just got approved for long-term disability. Like, last week. Whatever. Untwist your panties. Mars is fine.”

Ollie nods, looking unconvinced. He keeps glancing in the direction of the back fence, where lawn chairs sit piled between a picnic table and a rusting barbecue grill. The chairs look serviceable but the grill tilts halfheartedly on a missing wheel. It's a glance that says Ollie will watch out for his friend anyway, because he's just that kind of guy.

Across the patio, a pair of girls with way too much eye makeup are looking sleepy and drunk together, sharing a battered armchair and a can of PBR.

One of them looks over, and for a second, I'm nearly certain that she sees me. Her eyes go wide in recognition. Then a boy with a drawn-on neck tattoo and a pornstache—either real or fake—starts toward them and she jumps up, flinging herself past me and into his arms.

I turn away from them, and almost smack right into Ollie Poe.

He just stares through me like everyone else, eyes going back to the fence, back to where the table sits battered and forlorn, and a boy without a jacket is feeling rough tonight.

The yard is grassless, packed with dirt and wet, putrid leaves. They ooze sickly between my toes as I start across it. When the wind blows, it cuts through my pajamas like a surgical knife.

The picnic table is the stolen-from-the-park variety, gouged with pocketknife graffiti. When I lean down to look under it, Marshall Holt is sitting on the ground with his head bent and his knees drawn up.

This is not the indifferent Marshall in Spanish class, and not the cool crossword expert from my dream. He's got his arms around himself, holding the points of his shoulders. When he looks at me, his pupils seem to be swallowing his irises like spilled ink.

With a quick, electric pulse beating time behind my breastbone, I move closer. “Hey. What are you doing?”

His breath comes out in a strangled gasp, but he doesn't answer. His eyes are locked on mine.

I scoot up against the table, leaning farther into the dark. “Marshall, why are you under there?”

He flinches and turns his face hard against his shoulder.

“Hey,” I whisper. My voice sounds careful and slow. I can almost feel myself sinking deeper into the dream. Letting it wash over me. I would never be so gentle or so forward in real life. “Hey, Marshall, look at me. Why won't you look at me?”

When he speaks, his voice is hoarse and cracking, barely audible. “You're not real.”

I prop my elbows on the bench. “You should come out from there.”

“No,” he whispers, keeping his face turned away. Then, without warning, he swings around, eyes huge and dark in the shadow of the table. “It's bad—it's so bad. The ground is falling apart, it's peeling up all over the place. The moon's like a death's-head.”

I sit in the dirt and look up. Above the trees, the moon is low, glowing orchid-white against the sky. Wispy clouds feather out, drifting in front of it, but in the dark, they appear to be reaching from behind it like spectral fingers. Or bones.

I keep expecting the scene to shift, the way things do in dreams, mutating from raucous house party to something else. Maybe, if I'm following Marshall's train of thought, a history lesson on Nazi insignia throughout World War II?

But the ground underneath me seems solid enough, and when I glance up again, the moon is just a moon. “It looks okay to me. Really.”

He doesn't answer, working at the dirt with the toe of his sneaker.

“Marshall, relax. It's going to be fine.”

“Please,” he whispers. “Stop saying my name.”

I nod, trying to look reassuring. “Okay, I won't say your name.”

For a long time, neither of us says anything. He sits with his arms around himself, breathing in long, whining gasps. Then he closes his eyes and wets his lips. “If you're real, then touch me.”

I reach under the table, into the blue-black shadow, and after a second, he reaches back.

His fingers are warm, softer and more cautious than I expected, tangling with mine, and then he yanks his hand back, twisting away from me, covering his head with his arms. His breath sounds tight and panicked.

In my mom's clinician handbook, it advises that when people are operating under the influence of psychoactive drugs, you should ask them simple, manageable questions that will help you make their surrounding environment more comfortable. The bonus is that sometimes this lets you evaluate their mental state without sounding like you're interrogating them.

I stay right there in the dirt, leaning close, and don't say his name. The ground is wet and there's a soggy residue soaking through my pajamas. “Are you cold?”

He buries his face in the crook of his elbow. His shirt seems to glow up out of the dark like a lit bulb. All I can see is the curve of his back, the outline of his head. He's rocking now, swaying back and forth. His shoulders are shaking. His breathing sounds strangled.

“Do you feel sad?”

He keeps his face hidden against the crook of his arm. “Go away.
Please
go away.”

I scrub my hands off on the tops of my thighs and stand up. “Okay, fine. Fine. If you want to wallow in the dirt, that's completely up to you.”

I start back toward the cracked patio and the naked light. In the middle of the yard, I stop. Ollie Poe is coming toward me, elbowing his way through the crowd and carrying a gray army blanket. As he passes, his arm brushes my shoulder but he doesn't seem to notice. As soon as he touches me, though, a tight, creeping sensation blooms on my face and my bare legs, like something is very wrong.

Above me, the moon is smiling in its luminous, pockmarked skin. I shiver and wrap my arms around myself. Something about the moment is getting thinner, but I can't tell if it's me or everyone else. The feeling on my skin is chilly and squirming. Then it's nothing.

The light on my ceiling is unsteady. When I toss the blankets back, I do it so aggressively that the candle gutters out.

In the dark, I'm not entirely sure where I am.

The dream is still alarmingly vivid. Marshall Holt, with his bare arms, his bent back. The warmth of his touch as I reached under the picnic table for his hand.

It's difficult to hold on to these things, though, and the harder I try to inventory my surroundings, the more disoriented I feel, until I'm not sure of anything anymore, apart from a cold, scratching sensation whenever I move.

I flail toward the nightstand, fumbling for my lamp, then sit frozen in the circle of light, staring down at myself.

There are dead leaves plastered all over my feet like leeches.