LJ Idol, Season 10 Week 22: Turn Back or Forge Ahead?
She drove like she was being chased by the police. There was a handle above the passenger-side window, and I held onto it as if I were the only thing keeping the car from flipping over-a real concern, given her turns and the high center of gravity on her beat-up 2001 Chamberlain Anaconda.
The car wasn't really hers. It belonged to her mother, who apparently didn't mind her fourteen-year-old daughter zipping around town, carefree and a little crazed.
I was older than she, and I should have been the one driving-but I was only fifteen, so it didn't really make that much of a difference.
While half-watching the road, Heather opened up the console between us and pulled out a CD, which she inserted into the car's slot. The music blasted out of the speakers behind us: Flesh Throne, some of the earlier stuff. Hardcore.
“Awesome!” I shouted.
“You mean Flesh Throne?” she shouted back. “Way cooler back in the day, before Johnny left!”
“Yeah, they should have just broken up when Johnny left! He was what made the band the band!”
“What do you think of Vengynce?
I wasn't that into that band. They were kind of douchebags. “They're okay!”
She took a turn into a familiar, as-industrial-as-it-gets-in-a-town-this-small neighborhood. I asked, “Where are we going?”
“The bottle factory!”
The bottle factory was where my father worked until they shut it down a few years ago, plunging the town into economic chaos. Nowadays it was where the homeless sleep. “Why? It's abandoned!”
“I want you to meet Spencer!”
“Who's Spencer!”
“You'll see!”
She pulled the car around back of the building to hide it from the street, and she hopped out confidently, striding across a small empty field to a pried-open door. “Come on!” she called back to me.
I didn't have to go. I could just stay in the car and get her to drive me home. But instead I followed, tip-toeing the whole way. If she noticed how cowardly I was being, she didn't let on. The slight glow of street lights and the moon made a world of difference, because inside was utterly dark. I froze.
“Come on, silly,” she whispered as she grabbed my hand and pulled me along.
“Are we being quiet?” I whispered back.
“Yeah. More people than Spencer live here.”
Great. I was a dead kid. I was going to be killed by an ax murderer in a building I was told never to go into. Written on my gravestone will be, “He had it coming.”
She guided me across the floor, over to a corner to where a faint light was coming from. The light belonged to a book lamp attached to a battered hardcover of Ulysses. The book belonged to a man with long limbs in loose clothing sitting next to a rolled-up blanket. The man, whose spotty facial hair I could now see clearly, closed Ulysses and put it on the floor. He stood up, revealing that he was taller than my friend Hakim, which put him over six feet, four inches. His lip curled impatiently. “What do you want, Heather?”
“I want an eighth,” she replied.
“Jesus, dude, you just bought one!”
“And I smoked it all.”
I grabbed her arm and pulled her aside, gesturing with a finger to the man that we were going to be a moment. “What is going on? Who is that? What are you smoking?”
As if addressing a small child, she told me, “Spencer is my pot dealer. I'm smoking pot. You are too.”
I released her to return to her transaction while I contemplated this. My friends were all a bunch of thugs, thieves, and delinquents, but we never did drugs. So many things could go wrong with drugs. On the other hand, Heather seemed to be doing fine. Maybe they weren't that bad. Was I really considering trying drugs? Had I gone completely crazy?
Heather waved a sandwich bag full of something green and crumbled in front of my face. “Let's get out of here.”
We made it to her car quickly, and with the doors closed, she rummaged through the center console. It took her a minute or two, but eventually she sat up, brandishing something small and metal, shaped like the letter L.
“What is that?” is what my expression must have said, because she giggled and informed me, “It's a pipe, you big virgin!”
Yes, I was a virgin, but I failed to see what that had to do with anything. “For the pot?”
She stuffed some of the crumbling green stuff-which smelled so bad, it was like a two-day-old dead rodent packed in chalk-into one end of the pipe, then she wrapped her lips around the other side while setting the green stuff on fire with a disposable cigarette lighter. One deep, held breath later, she coughed violently, which did not add to the appeal. “Your turn,” she croaked, handing the pipe and lighter to me.
I took them and studied them for a minute. Once I did this, there was no going back. I would become addicted and find myself sitting in the bottle factory like Spencer, reading impenetrable literature.
“Have you ever smoked pot before?” she asked me.
“No,” I confessed.
“Well if you're scared to, I'll just drive you home. It's okay,” she said with more finality than I was prepared to deal with.
I shook my head and put the pipe in my mouth the same way that she did. Also like her, I touched the other end with the lighter while inhaling. I broke out in a painful cough that continued until suddenly I didn't care anymore. A cloud had descended onto my brain, hollowing it out. I was more focused, as thoughts came to my head, ten at a time, and I had to follow every one to its inevitable conclusion. But they didn't have conclusions, because every time I figured I understood what I was thinking about, there was more to unravel.
And maybe hours passed when I became aware of activity coming from the driver's seat. What could it be? Well, considering that the last person I saw there was Heather, it must be her. To confirm this, I turned my head, which was tough because my neck muscles had been replaced by Jell-O. But I persevered.
Heather was repositioning herself so she was facing the headrest and her butt was against the steering wheel.
“Heather!” I whispered. “You can't drive like that!”
She stopped moving and glared at me.
“I mean,” I added, “you can try, but I don't want to be in the car when you do.”
She kicked me in the thigh. I was about to protest when it became apparent that she wasn't assaulting me on purpose. She was actually stretching her leg over me. The rest of her body slid away from the steering wheel until she was straddling my lap.
The heat of her took my breath away. My heart pounded.
She grabbed the side of my face and raised it so it pointed directly at hers. Without a word she kissed me-though “kissing” barely describes it. This wasn't my first kiss, not by a long shot, but it was the most ravenous. It felt like she was eating my face.
Jesus. Was she eating my face? What would happen if she was? Was she going to stop at my face? Was she going to eat the rest of me? What if she was eating my face and that's all? Was she going to leave me alive? Without a face?
I laughed into her mouth, causing her to pull away, giggling. “What?” she demanded.
I tried to talk, but the expression of confusion she held only made me want to laugh more.
Calming down much more quickly than I, she slapped my chest. “What's so funny about making out with me?”
“I'm not going to have a face!” I tried to explain. And the image of trying to eat without lips, while gross, sent me into spasms.
“Stop laughing!”
I brought it under control somehow-every time my thoughts tried to wander back to facelessness, I grabbed them by the collar and yanked them back to the present, where I was sitting in a foggy car with the cutest girl in the ninth grade. I cleared my throat. “Sorry.”
“Are you sure you're done?”
I pulled her to me and kissed her. She moaned and melted into my arms. One thing I realized about my current condition is that my senses were heightened, making every touch of her skin soothing fire.
She disconnected our lips.
I sighed, feeling like I was drifting away.
“Max,” she said.
I didn't respond.
“Max!” she repeated.
I still didn't respond.
“Max!” She slapped my cheek gently.
I blinked. “Sorry. I was just in the moment.”
“Max, I need you to listen to me,” she insisted. “Are you listening to me?”
“Sure.”
“I'm serious.”
I focused to the best of my ability. “Okay, I'm listening.”
She looked me deep in the eyes. “Max, I know you're a player.”
“I wouldn't go that far.”
“You made out with eight girls so far this year, and it's only October.”
“That's not that bad.”
She shook her head. “That's pretty bad.”
“Am I supposed to apologize?”
“No,” she replied, “but if you want to keep making out with me, you need to stop.”
Well, that was a dilemma.
On one hand, there was the open field. And when I ran out of girls to kiss at my Catholic school, I just had to go to the public school too. And there was a Protestant school too if I got desperate. That variety of lips inspired me to be a better young man.
On the other hand, there was Heather. She was amazing. And this pot was pretty good too. If I denied her, I was saying goodbye to all these things forever. And frankly all the hoops I had to jump through to kiss a new girl were exhausting. Saying yes to her meant guaranteed lips.
“Okay,” I concluded.
She pumped her fist. “Yes!” After kissing me again briefly, she added, “If I catch you with another girl, I'm cutting your nuts off.”
“Fair enough,” I agreed.
The car wasn't really hers. It belonged to her mother, who apparently didn't mind her fourteen-year-old daughter zipping around town, carefree and a little crazed.
I was older than she, and I should have been the one driving-but I was only fifteen, so it didn't really make that much of a difference.
While half-watching the road, Heather opened up the console between us and pulled out a CD, which she inserted into the car's slot. The music blasted out of the speakers behind us: Flesh Throne, some of the earlier stuff. Hardcore.
“Awesome!” I shouted.
“You mean Flesh Throne?” she shouted back. “Way cooler back in the day, before Johnny left!”
“Yeah, they should have just broken up when Johnny left! He was what made the band the band!”
“What do you think of Vengynce?
I wasn't that into that band. They were kind of douchebags. “They're okay!”
She took a turn into a familiar, as-industrial-as-it-gets-in-a-town-this-small neighborhood. I asked, “Where are we going?”
“The bottle factory!”
The bottle factory was where my father worked until they shut it down a few years ago, plunging the town into economic chaos. Nowadays it was where the homeless sleep. “Why? It's abandoned!”
“I want you to meet Spencer!”
“Who's Spencer!”
“You'll see!”
She pulled the car around back of the building to hide it from the street, and she hopped out confidently, striding across a small empty field to a pried-open door. “Come on!” she called back to me.
I didn't have to go. I could just stay in the car and get her to drive me home. But instead I followed, tip-toeing the whole way. If she noticed how cowardly I was being, she didn't let on. The slight glow of street lights and the moon made a world of difference, because inside was utterly dark. I froze.
“Come on, silly,” she whispered as she grabbed my hand and pulled me along.
“Are we being quiet?” I whispered back.
“Yeah. More people than Spencer live here.”
Great. I was a dead kid. I was going to be killed by an ax murderer in a building I was told never to go into. Written on my gravestone will be, “He had it coming.”
She guided me across the floor, over to a corner to where a faint light was coming from. The light belonged to a book lamp attached to a battered hardcover of Ulysses. The book belonged to a man with long limbs in loose clothing sitting next to a rolled-up blanket. The man, whose spotty facial hair I could now see clearly, closed Ulysses and put it on the floor. He stood up, revealing that he was taller than my friend Hakim, which put him over six feet, four inches. His lip curled impatiently. “What do you want, Heather?”
“I want an eighth,” she replied.
“Jesus, dude, you just bought one!”
“And I smoked it all.”
I grabbed her arm and pulled her aside, gesturing with a finger to the man that we were going to be a moment. “What is going on? Who is that? What are you smoking?”
As if addressing a small child, she told me, “Spencer is my pot dealer. I'm smoking pot. You are too.”
I released her to return to her transaction while I contemplated this. My friends were all a bunch of thugs, thieves, and delinquents, but we never did drugs. So many things could go wrong with drugs. On the other hand, Heather seemed to be doing fine. Maybe they weren't that bad. Was I really considering trying drugs? Had I gone completely crazy?
Heather waved a sandwich bag full of something green and crumbled in front of my face. “Let's get out of here.”
We made it to her car quickly, and with the doors closed, she rummaged through the center console. It took her a minute or two, but eventually she sat up, brandishing something small and metal, shaped like the letter L.
“What is that?” is what my expression must have said, because she giggled and informed me, “It's a pipe, you big virgin!”
Yes, I was a virgin, but I failed to see what that had to do with anything. “For the pot?”
She stuffed some of the crumbling green stuff-which smelled so bad, it was like a two-day-old dead rodent packed in chalk-into one end of the pipe, then she wrapped her lips around the other side while setting the green stuff on fire with a disposable cigarette lighter. One deep, held breath later, she coughed violently, which did not add to the appeal. “Your turn,” she croaked, handing the pipe and lighter to me.
I took them and studied them for a minute. Once I did this, there was no going back. I would become addicted and find myself sitting in the bottle factory like Spencer, reading impenetrable literature.
“Have you ever smoked pot before?” she asked me.
“No,” I confessed.
“Well if you're scared to, I'll just drive you home. It's okay,” she said with more finality than I was prepared to deal with.
I shook my head and put the pipe in my mouth the same way that she did. Also like her, I touched the other end with the lighter while inhaling. I broke out in a painful cough that continued until suddenly I didn't care anymore. A cloud had descended onto my brain, hollowing it out. I was more focused, as thoughts came to my head, ten at a time, and I had to follow every one to its inevitable conclusion. But they didn't have conclusions, because every time I figured I understood what I was thinking about, there was more to unravel.
And maybe hours passed when I became aware of activity coming from the driver's seat. What could it be? Well, considering that the last person I saw there was Heather, it must be her. To confirm this, I turned my head, which was tough because my neck muscles had been replaced by Jell-O. But I persevered.
Heather was repositioning herself so she was facing the headrest and her butt was against the steering wheel.
“Heather!” I whispered. “You can't drive like that!”
She stopped moving and glared at me.
“I mean,” I added, “you can try, but I don't want to be in the car when you do.”
She kicked me in the thigh. I was about to protest when it became apparent that she wasn't assaulting me on purpose. She was actually stretching her leg over me. The rest of her body slid away from the steering wheel until she was straddling my lap.
The heat of her took my breath away. My heart pounded.
She grabbed the side of my face and raised it so it pointed directly at hers. Without a word she kissed me-though “kissing” barely describes it. This wasn't my first kiss, not by a long shot, but it was the most ravenous. It felt like she was eating my face.
Jesus. Was she eating my face? What would happen if she was? Was she going to stop at my face? Was she going to eat the rest of me? What if she was eating my face and that's all? Was she going to leave me alive? Without a face?
I laughed into her mouth, causing her to pull away, giggling. “What?” she demanded.
I tried to talk, but the expression of confusion she held only made me want to laugh more.
Calming down much more quickly than I, she slapped my chest. “What's so funny about making out with me?”
“I'm not going to have a face!” I tried to explain. And the image of trying to eat without lips, while gross, sent me into spasms.
“Stop laughing!”
I brought it under control somehow-every time my thoughts tried to wander back to facelessness, I grabbed them by the collar and yanked them back to the present, where I was sitting in a foggy car with the cutest girl in the ninth grade. I cleared my throat. “Sorry.”
“Are you sure you're done?”
I pulled her to me and kissed her. She moaned and melted into my arms. One thing I realized about my current condition is that my senses were heightened, making every touch of her skin soothing fire.
She disconnected our lips.
I sighed, feeling like I was drifting away.
“Max,” she said.
I didn't respond.
“Max!” she repeated.
I still didn't respond.
“Max!” She slapped my cheek gently.
I blinked. “Sorry. I was just in the moment.”
“Max, I need you to listen to me,” she insisted. “Are you listening to me?”
“Sure.”
“I'm serious.”
I focused to the best of my ability. “Okay, I'm listening.”
She looked me deep in the eyes. “Max, I know you're a player.”
“I wouldn't go that far.”
“You made out with eight girls so far this year, and it's only October.”
“That's not that bad.”
She shook her head. “That's pretty bad.”
“Am I supposed to apologize?”
“No,” she replied, “but if you want to keep making out with me, you need to stop.”
Well, that was a dilemma.
On one hand, there was the open field. And when I ran out of girls to kiss at my Catholic school, I just had to go to the public school too. And there was a Protestant school too if I got desperate. That variety of lips inspired me to be a better young man.
On the other hand, there was Heather. She was amazing. And this pot was pretty good too. If I denied her, I was saying goodbye to all these things forever. And frankly all the hoops I had to jump through to kiss a new girl were exhausting. Saying yes to her meant guaranteed lips.
“Okay,” I concluded.
She pumped her fist. “Yes!” After kissing me again briefly, she added, “If I catch you with another girl, I'm cutting your nuts off.”
“Fair enough,” I agreed.