Now it’s a commercial break and neither of us has taken a sip when, halfway through a commercial for the new Medal of Honor game, Eric downs his. Like, chugs the whole thing in one go as I have only seen my brother and his friends do in the backyard with beers before and after screaming “CASE RACE!” Eric belches righteously.
“You really can’t taste it,” Eric says. “That is deeply, deeply evil.”
It now falls on me to down mine, so I do, before the movie is back on, though not half as fast as Eric did.
“Yech. I want to throw up. Not, like, because I’m nauseous, but because I know what’s like. In my stomach right now.”
“Affirmative. But throwing up would be…”
“Unscientific.”
We watch the frat boys struggle to build a three-stage rocket, which I really don’t get, and I don’t feel any different. Then, suddenly, everything gets heavy. Not me, everything else. With a lot of effort I make it to my very heavy bed.
I wake up to Eric punching me in the arm. His punches do not hurt as much as my head. My head hurts a whole lot.
“Ow. Dude! What?”
Eric slumps back against the wall, his eyes splitting the difference between open and closed. It’s sort of like when I saw him in his room, that day he told me to go away. Except that day he looked wired and now he looks, well, drugged.
“Lissenathat,” he says.
“What?”
“Listen to that!”
I prop my head up. From the next room there are sounds of my brother and some girl doing whatever.
“While you’ve been… asleep,” Eric drones out. He is, like, cartoon drunk. It’s nighttime outside. I have this headache and I’m starving and still tired, but I do not feel anything like Eric looks and acts like he feels.
Eric raps on the wall with his knuckle, the wall through which you can hear my brother and some girl, at it. “When is it my turn?” he says. “When is it…” and he turns his head toward me, which takes an endless seven seconds, “my turn?”
“Did you sleep, dude?”
“Did not.”
“You sure?”
“Yes! I have NEVER. SLEPT. I would KNOW. Every second kept following every other second. Sequentially.”
“So… that’s good?”
“I dunno! You’re the one that wanted to do this… is it good? I tried to watch… TV. Couldn’t follow anything. No, like, fun drug amusement. Just. A lack of understanding. And then… an hour or whenever ago. This!” Eric knocks on the wall again.
“Is it going away? At all?”
“No.” Eric seems mystified. “What if I never come out of it?”
“You’ll come out of it.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know that. We don’t any of us know. You said that. And now I’m never gonna come out of it.”
“Dude, you are.”
Eric nods like a toddler, emphatic.
“You are. When my brother and his friends do drugs, Tits always freaks out, and my brother says they always take him to IHOP and feed him coffee and pancakes and he’s fine. Do you want to go to IHOP?”
“Well, if it works for
“C’mon, let’s go to IHOP.”
“I mean, just do for me whatever you would do for Tits.”
I get up, which makes my head really thunder, and reach out to help Eric up.
“Whatever you’d do in this situation for a really good friend. Someone like Tits.”
I finally pull him up and his full weight falls on me. I am still half-narcotized and not super-strong to begin with, and we almost collapse into the Xbox.
“Sorry, forgot,” Eric says. “My legs barely work.”
Supporting a roofied Eric it takes twelve minutes to get to the bus stop. “We’ve got fifteen minutes until the bus comes,” Eric says. “Take your time.” We get there with three minutes to spare, so I get three minutes of Eric, his head resting on my shoulder, saying, “Tits is a class act. Real pillar of the community,” et cetera.
The bus pulls up and I drag Eric on.
“Eulalio!”
“Eric, what’s up, man?” Eulalio says.
At IHOP it’s just us, a big table full of kids from our school, and a table with a Native American family. I recognize some of the kids from school as kids who put a lot of effort into everything. I’m worried they’ll see Eric, sloshed-looking, dangling off me, and think, I don’t know what. But they are way too self-involved to notice us. Their food is almost all consumed and now they’re each getting up and making a little speech, it seems like. I don’t get it but it seems too weirdly healthy and I have no doubt they will all get into their first-choice colleges.
We slouch into a booth and Eric tells me he’s not hungry and I can order whatever I want, but when the waitress comes I order us both “The Delicious Dozen,” which is a lot of food, and two cups of coffee, which are “bottomless.”
“I’m not hungry,” Eric says when the waitress leaves.
“You should eat,” I say.
Eric says, “I thought about
I laugh at that.
“I’m the only one. Thought about that, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“Of me. Of people with my thing.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Sure we do. If there were others, they wouldn’t have kept it quiet. They wouldn’t keep it secret like I did.”
I think of Brendan Tyler and his left-nut-worthy car and how if anybody else had what Eric had they would probably change their Namespot status to “Nicole Allgraden HAS SUPERPOWERZ YOU GUYS!!!”
“Or if there were, we didn’t hear about it ’cause they all got…”
I think we both think of The Man again.
“Someday, when you have kids, you’ll pass it on, and there will be more. It’s a total genetic advantage. Someday, we’ll all be like you.”
“Wouldn’t want that, necessarily,” Eric says. “It’s Crossfire.”
I laugh and look away because Eric’s made me sad. Over at the overachiever table, everyone is packing up. A girl tells another girl that she forgot her balloons. I see the girl, the one reminding the other girl, and she sees me. She has her hair tied back elaborately with ribbons and stuff. She’s gone before I think to smile.
“She’s pretty,” Eric says.
“You mean that Navajo mom?” I say.
“Oh yeah, her. Just hook me up with whoever you think Tits would like.”
When the food shows up, Eric makes it further into his Delicious Dozen than I do into mine. He drinks coffee before I would necessarily deem it a drinkable temperature. When the bill comes, I pay it, and think about how it’s fine because it’s all money I had allotted in my mind to paying my brother for whatever chemical solution to Eric’s thing we were going to try. So I am paying for this meal with money I saved by getting free roofies. Eric is not the weirdest thing in my life, I think. I am.
Outside IHOP, on the sidewalk, Eric insists he’s totally walking-capable.
