Past: Blurry
Shelby and I kind of fell together somewhere around the end our sophomore year. I couldn’t really describe it any other way. We had art class together and as the year went on, our seats seemed to drift closer and closer together. Then we started eating lunch together. By the end of the year, we were pretty much glued to each others’ sides. I don’t think my parents ever harbored any hopes that I would end up with the head cheerleader type or the perfect girl-next-door type. But they didn’t like Shelby at all.
Maybe she was a little wrong for me. She looked like a little fairy, until you noticed all the eyeliner and the nicotine stains on her fingertips. Isaac gave me a few weird looks the first time I brought her over to his apartment, but he didn’t say a word about it. Neither did Taylor. Mom and Dad had told me not to bring Shelby over to the house, so on the weekends we would meet up at Ike and Tay’s apartment, and I don’t think they minded too much having us there. Mostly it was just them, Portia and Alex anyway, watching movies and maybe having a few drinks. Sometimes they would offer me a beer or something suspicious in a plastic cup, but I didn’t accept any of it. With the cocktail of pills I was on, I didn’t really want to know what would happen if I threw the alcohol in on top of it.
“Oh come on, Zac. It won’t hurt anything!” Shelby hissed, trying to keep her voice low. We were huddled around the kitchen counter, while the other four were busy watching some horror movie in the living room.
Shelby was clutching a big bottle of whiskey in her hand, waving it around in front of my face. She had already poured herself a drink that looked like it was mostly whiskey with just enough Coke splashed in to change the color a little. I shook my head as hard as I could, but it didn’t stop her from pulling out another glass and filling it with the same mixture, although maybe with a little less whiskey.
“No. No way,” I protested, even as she shoved the glass into my hand.
I knew it was hopeless. I couldn’t resist anything Shelby asked of me. She was already taking big sips of her drink, and wincing as she did it. With a huge sigh, I put the glass to my lips and scrunched up my face in anticipation. The first sip I took was tiny, just enough to get the bitter taste in my mouth. The second was bigger, and once the bitterness was gone, I felt this big, warm feeling creeping down my spine. I liked it.
We downed the rest of our drinks in the kitchen and rinsed out the glasses. Shelby hadn’t asked Isaac for permission, and I didn’t want him to be mad. But when we walked back into the living room, he didn’t seem to notice us at all. He was cozied up with Portia on the couch. Tay and Alex had gone missing, but I was too warm and dizzy to worry too much about that.
I was practically holding Shelby up, or maybe it was the other way around. Whatever it was, we couldn’t quite make it onto the couch, so we just sort of toppled into the floor in front of it. Ike and Portia were still too absorbed in each other to notice, and I don’t think they noticed when Shelby picked up the bottle of vodka on the table and started taking sips right from it. She offered it to me, practically pouring it into my mouth, and I was already feeling too gone to refuse.
Everything around me went blurry and the room tilted and wobbled back and forth. I was glad to be planted firmly in the floor or it would have felt even more like riding a roller coaster. Shelby was pressed against my side, making my skin tingle and burn, in a way kind of like the liquor did but not quite the same. I could feel her lips against my neck, not kissing it but just kind of resting there.
We sat on the floor for what felt like a really long time, but it probably wasn’t. With some effort, Shelby stood up, grabbing my hand as she did it, and pulling me up with her. She giggled a little as we both struggled to balance ourselves and I couldn’t help but laugh a little, too. Everything went red and black for a minute, and the whole room faded out of focus. When it came back, Shelby had her fingers laced into mine and she was pulling me down the hallway.
My other arm and shoulder banged against the wall as I tried to keep steady. Shelby had been drunk plenty more than me and she was moving faster than I could. Beneath the haze in my head, I thought to myself that she really didn’t need to move so fast since the hallway was pretty short anyway. She pushed her way into Taylor’s room, tossing her tiny frame right against the door and forcing it open. I tumbled in almost on top of her, and for a second we were both in danger of falling into the floor. It didn’t take me longer to realize why Shelby had frozen on the spot. I had forgotten that Taylor and Alex were missing, but there they were on Taylor’s bed. My vision was still blurry, and it didn’t help that the lights were off. It looked like Alex didn’t have a shirt on and I didn’t even want to see how much clothing Taylor was or wasn’t wearing.
Shelby turned on her heel and pushed me back out of the room. I leaned back against the wall outside his room, willing the walls to stop moving so I could hold on a little better. I wasn’t against the wall for long, though, before I felt Shelby’s hands creeping up my sides, and her face nuzzling against my cheek. I was pretty sure she had to be standing on her tiptoes to do it and part of me was afraid she would fall over. She didn’t seem to mind though, and she started placing sloppy kisses all over my face.
Standing out in the middle of the halfway made me feel really exposed, so I mustered up all the balance I had and wrapped my arms around her waist. She took this as encouragement, I guess, and started kissing me harder, pressing her lips against mine and slipping her tongue between them. With my hands on her hips, I walked us into the bathroom, moving one hand off Shelby’s waist just long enough to push the door open. Altogether, I was pretty proud of myself that I had managed the maneuver.
We fell against the wall next to the sink, this time with Shelby pushed up against the dirty wallpaper, and my palms pressed against it to hold myself up. I kissed down her neck, the alcohol buzzing through my system giving me the courage to dip down a little lower than I normally would. When I was sure I wasn’t going to fall, I placed one hand on her hip again and played with the lacy fabric of her tank top. My teeth nipped at the skin around the tank top’s strap before returning to Shelby’s mouth, kissing her harder and faster than I ever remembered doing before.
Shelby started to kind of mirror my moves, kissing down the side of my face and onto my neck, her fingers tugging at the collar of the worn out t-shirt I was wearing. Her hands ran up the back of my shirt, fingernails raking across my skin and sending icy tingles down my spine. It was a weird contrast with the warm tingles still coursing through my veins from the alcohol.
Then she ran her hands back down my sides and started to fumble with my belt buckle. I couldn’t figure out what she was doing at first, until she worked her way down onto her knees. Even in my very drunken state, I knew what that meant. And it was something we had never done before, at least not together. I was pretty sure Shelby knew more about that kind of stuff than I did, but I also knew it wasn’t the time to be asking about it. I just steadied my hands against the wall and tried my best to plant my feet firmly on the floor, even though I could still feel myself trembling and wobbling.
The next thing I knew, I was feeling the cold linoleum floor on my hands. I was down on my knees and I could hear voices above me. Or maybe just one voice. My vision was all gray and blurry, and I had to blink several times to bring it into focus. Someone was brushing my hair back off my face and shoulders.
“Jesus, Zac! How much did you have to drink?” the person attached to the hands said, and I realized it was Taylor.
I managed to lean myself back against the tub and my vision finally fixed itself so that I could see Taylor on the floor next to me and Shelby sitting with her back to the wall. I couldn’t remember how I got from the wall to the floor, but I was glad to realize that my pants were pulled up and buttoned, but my belt was nowhere to be seen. I figured I had bigger concerns than that, though. I tried to focus myself on what Taylor and Shelby were saying.
“We didn’t have that much!”
“He’s not supposed to drink with all the meds Mom and Dad have him on!”
My stomach did what felt like a very impressive back flip and I lunged for the toilet, reaching it just in time. The rest of Taylor and Shelby’s argument was lost to my ears as I clutched at the sides of the toilet until my knuckles were white and my stomach felt completely empty. I was shaking all over and I could feel a layer of icy cold sweat covering my body.
A little, annoying voice in the back of my head wanted to ask Taylor about what I had seen in his bedroom. But my tongue felt too big for my mouth, and something told me that even if I could speak, I shouldn’t. So I just laid my head back against the cold, hard surface of the tub and closed my eyes, trying to shut out the bathroom light and the nausea. I had a feeling that a long nap was just what I needed to empty to my head and get rid of all the questions in it.