“Not bad.” Derek hummed, bobbing his head from side to side.
“Thank you,” Tommy responded sharply, turning the camera back on Calla and John and snapping three quick shots.
-click click click!-
“Just don’t aim that thing at me anymore, okay?” Derek grumbled, looking around. He saw Julie Peterson and smiled at her. She waved back.
“Why not?”
Derek turned back to him, his face serious for a moment, then grinned. “I’ve seen your room, with all the pictures around. I don’t want you looking at me while you’re stroking your moke.”
“Fuck you,” Tommy laughed, punching him in the arm.
Derek punched back, smirking so big that his earlobes moved. He nodded, then turned and started in the direction of the drink cooler.
Tommy turned and watched him go, then raised his camera and took another shot of him.
-click!-
Grendel stood on his balcony with his arms folded across his chest, nodding triumphantly at the amassed students. Sud sat next to him on a plastic lawn chair, his drink balanced precariously between his legs.
“This is what I wanted,” Grendel said, stretching his arms out to encompass the yard. “This is what this class really needed! This party is going to go down in history!”
Sud grunted softly in response.
Grendel turned to look at him, his face drawn tight in a scowl so deep that the folds of his skin looked like cracks in the pavement after an earthquake. He shook his head, then squat down to be face-to-face with Tommy, who had his camera pressed to his face and was waiting for the opportune moment to snap a picture of Julie Peterson.
“What’s his problem?” he asked, sticking his thumb over his shoulder at Sud.
“Liz Tyler kicked him in the balls after he got a little too grabby during the last song.”
Grendel stood up and looked at Sud’s drink, only now noticing that it was filled with ice and had no liquid in it whatsoever.
“Get up!” he barked, kicking the side of the chair and forcing Sud out of it. “You’re supposed to be helping, not sitting there and licking your wounds like some --”
He stopped.
They all had, every person in attendance. Someone had even turned down the music as all eyes turned toward the orange-hued western sky.
The sun was starting to go down, and that meant one thing. Seven o’clock. They moved the party inside Grendel’s house, where a lot of the first people grabbed couches to sit on.
Cathy snagged the love seat. Mike was about to sit down next to her, when a voice traveled over the crowd.
“Hey, Mike!” Sud called, unnecessarily loud. “Come help us with the speaker.”
Mike’s stomach turned.
You know that feeling in your side when you know something bad in going to happen? That sickness which ebbs its way up from your bowels and into your throat at the mere mention of a word? Right now, Mike was getting that feeling.
He turned and looked at Sud, Tommy and Derek from across the hall.
“Sure. Just a sec,” he drawled, then turned back and looked at Cathy, sitting on the love seat. He leaned over and kissed her lightly on the lips, then stood back up and looked at her.
“I’ll be back in a sec.” He smiled, then walked over to help Sud and the others.
Somehow he just had to say that. That feeling... the last time he gotten it, it had almost been the last time he had ever seen her. He put his hand to his side and squeezed his stitches a little, wincing in pain.
It’s just the painkillers kicking in, he assured himself as he walked over and started to pick up a speaker.
Grendel’s downstairs bathroom was a large step up from the Factory’s, but it was still far from the Ritz.
It was a half-bath that his father used only to shit and shave in the morning, and was fairly utilitarian. There were no pictures or candles or decorative soaps. There was just a toilet and a sink, crammed in a space so small that most people wouldn’t have used it for a closet.
Sara sat on the toilet with her arms hugging into her knees. Her jeans were down around her ankles but her underpants were still up, and the toilet lid was down. It was cold against the exposed flesh of her calves and made her shiver fiercely.
She was crying in big cartoon tears, praying that the music outside was loud enough to drown it out. Every so often she let out a wretched sob, some so powerful that they made her throat feel like it was being stabbed with a large knitting needle.
She’d come in to use the bathroom, but found that once the door was closed the urge had gone away and was replaced by this new one, which was much more powerful. She could have held her pee, she thought, but the water streaming down her bright red cheeks had come out like a tsunami. She wasn’t even quite sure where it had come from. She hadn’t been thinking about Jamie, at least not when she’d started. She hadn’t been thinking about much at all. Now his image was frozen in front of her, like he was trapped in a bubble in her mind that she couldn’t shake loose.
“Oh, God...” she wailed, although if anyone had heard it they wouldn’t have recognized the words.
She reached down into the crumpled pockets of her jeans pocket with her thumb and forefinger. After a moment of fishing around, she withdrew a small blue tablet with an indentation on one side.
This time she pushed it past her lips with no reservations, swallowing
