“Yeah, but just wait. We’ll be flying through the clouds here in about twenty minutes.” I pick the chunks of powder from my back teeth and wipe them on my tongue, then wash it all down with the rest of my orange juice. There’s an immediate rush of adrenaline and dopamine from the acid, continuing to open itself up like a flower in the hidden sunshine in my mind. The golden, smoky waves wash through me, and I yawn again.
Eve yawns, too. “Why does it make you yawn?”
“I have no clue, but come on, we have some exploring to do.”
We head around the side of the cabin to the back door, where tables are set up with coolers of OJ and water, and a chained, metal box that says “don’t be an ass: make a donation for this badass party,” with a slit in the top. I dig a five-dollar bill from my purse, fold it up, and slip it through. “Want any more?” I point to the stacks of cups near the cooler marked “OJ.”
“I’m okay for now.” She finishes her last sip, and we toss our empty cups into the trash can. “More than okay.”
Up the steps we slither to the back door of the cabin, angelic reptiles through thick clouds. The temperature changes when we go inside, to a satin tundra breeze. Along the walls are ice fountains, and behind them are vents that blow these cool winds. Fans twirl above us, with sparkling streamers hanging from them, twinkling as they spin. And when we cross the threshold into the purple glow of blacklights, the dancers beneath them swirl and glow like the cosmos, neon lips and bracelets, fingernails, clothes, and shoelaces; space-children, held together by a Milky Way of love.
Eve spins around, eyes half-closed, and grinds her body against mine, with a tug at my lower lip with her teeth. And then her hands are beneath my clothes and I want to take her somewhere we can be alone again. I spot a staircase and guide her to it. There have to be bedrooms up here somewhere. The stairs are lined with pale purple Christmas lights, and dotted with overflow from the assumed bedrooms upstairs. At the top of the stairs are two people fucking—utter disregard for anything but pleasure. We pass them and Eve grins as we try the first door.
There’s a couple on the bed, and one on the floor, and the next room is taken, as well. But when we get to the third, two guys walk out. “It’s all yours, honey,” says a black dude with the coolest throwback shades I’ve ever seen.
I lock the door behind us, swipe the top blanket off the mattress, then pick Eve up and lie her down on it. I unzip her hoodie and take off her bra, going straight for those pale, pink pearls. I suck on one and slide two fingers inside of her wet hole, and everything else in the world disappears.
“I love you,” she says, breathless.
“I love you, too, baby. I want to make you come.”
I kiss her from her lips all the way down her slender, silky stomach, dotted with an assortment of freckles. And when I arrive at that sweet heaven between her legs, I lift up her skirt and spread it open, tasting every fold, every sweet piece of her perfection.
“You first,” she says.
With a mischievous grin, she guides me up to take her place, inserting her delicate fingers into me. I gasp, and I’m water when she licks me like a lollipop for a heavenly moment before fingering me hard and deep. “You taste so good,” she says.
“Come here,” I pant and guide her with gentle tugs to her long, silky hair.
She dips down and I kiss her, tasting myself in her mouth, and I’m turned on all over again. I kiss her chest, her neck, her nipples, her face, her mouth; I’d put her whole body inside of mine forever if I could.
For now, I start with my fingers, a gentle insertion, followed by a lick, a thrust, and Eve moaning with delight. I finger her faster, deeper, harder, until my hand is covered in her juices again, and she’s crying out and moaning . . .
Outside, the music changes, and it’s ice to our warm bath.
I sit up so I can hear better, thrown off by the sudden shift in mood.
There it is again: tat-tat-tat—tat-tat-tat.
Offbeat with the background music.
tat-tat-tat-tat-tat—tat-tat
I bolt upright. “That’s not music, Evie.”
“What?”
I stumble to the window and hear it again, louder. Then, I see them: people with assault rifles, fire sparking at the tips of the barrels as they shoot into the crowd of dancers.
“Oh fuck, Eve, they’re shooting!”
“Oh my God, are you serious?”
Downstairs, gunfire over the music, heavy footsteps, coming up the stairs.
“What do we do?” Eve starts to panic.
No way out, besides that door. And the window.
“The window.”
We climb out onto the narrow ledge beneath the window and I shut it behind me. We slide along the tiered roof, shingles scraping our knees, and crawl around until there’s a space to climb up to the very top part. I push Eve up, then she helps me climb up, and we lie on our backs, staring into the night sky.
Everyone below us, they’re being massacred.
Eve starts to cry, and I pull her to me to keep us both steady.
What started as the best night of my life just became something else.
“What just happened?” Eve says in my ear. “What the fuck just happened?”
TWELVE
We lie on the roof for at least three hours after the last human sound, following our trip south. Eve tells me things she sees and hears, and though I’m not in much better state, I’m aware enough to reassure her that it’s just the drugs and they’ll wear off soon.
“Was that real?” she asks me. “The shooting? Or was it the drugs, Ophelia?”
Her words are scissored, blown to me on fan blades, echoed through a corridor.
“Yes.”
“No . . .”
The tree branches pull back, the sky opens up, and we’re sucked into it, floating among the stars, Eve in my arms as we peak. “Shh . . . just roll with the waves, baby,” I whisper when she cries. “We’re together, we’re alive,” I reassure her. “We’re safe.”
We are candy-flipping cosmic balls.
We float there for a while, in a state of fragmented bliss, because some things even Grade-A Liquid LSD and pure MDMA taken simultaneously can’t erase. Maybe if we would’ve waited the suggested four hours before eating the X . . . ?
I never was good at following the rules.
We’re in that timeless space, spiraling into forever and the unknown, until our track rewinds, and we start the journey back. Once we’re on the rooftop cabin again, and I can make sense of my thoughts and observations, and form words, I hug Eve closer to me.
“Thank you, Goddess, for keeping us safe,” I say.
If not for our love, we wouldn’t have been in that room, near our window to life. We should be dead like the rest of them, but we’re not.
The euphoria dies down enough for me to begin calm, reasonable judgment, at least a little. Should we climb down now, notify the police? My bladder’s about to explode, but I’m terrified to move, and I still clutch Eve tight, afraid to let her go.
“I have to pee,” she whispers with a shaky voice and a sniffle.
“Me, too.” I take a deep breath and sit up. From where we are, I see at least four bodies lying in bloody pools. Stuart’s out there, somewhere. DJ Asyd Rayne. The rainbow-face girl who gave us love and free X. The dude with the cool throwback shades. They’re probably all dead, and going down there, we’ll see them. But we can’t stay on this rooftop forever.
“Come on.” I inch toward the edge where we came up, and peek over. After thirty seconds of hearing no signs of living humans anywhere, I help Eve down onto the next tier of roof, by the window. She peeks inside, then climbs in, and I follow behind. The bed has been shoved out of the way, and the door’s standing wide open. We move through the room, collecting our shirts from the ground and yanking them back on.
Outside the door, there’s a man sprawled in the hallway, legs still in the room he was trying to escape from. We hurry past ro
oms filled with the lovers we’d seen on the way to ours—now dead.
At the top of the stairs, the naked couple lies just how we saw them before, but with dark, dripping circles on his back, down his side, and onto her. Another still couple is slumped at the bottom of the stairs.
When we get to the main room, the universe of love has drowned. The things that glow are wrong now. Shining, purple lips. Gleaming shoelaces and neon mesh shirts . . . dotted with red. The dude with the shades is slumped over his boyfriend in the corner, no longer wearing his shades. But his Adidas swoop still shines green in the blacklight.
Outside, it’s rainbow girl we see first, by the front door, on her side in a pool of red, neck bent awkwardly. Eve grips my hand so tight, and I pull her closer. Pockets of the dead are pulled inside out, various belongings strewn about the dirt floor: Chapstick, Visine, Vicks Vapor Rub, condoms, and gum . . . I scan the area for a body that resembles our friend’s, but don’t see high-water pants anywhere. DJ Asyd Rayne isn’t by her turntables, so maybe she got away.
“They . . . just . . . wanted to rob everyone?” Eve asks.
I kick a wallet, stripped of its goods. “That’s what it looks like. They wanted drugs and money, I bet.”
We’re surrounded by the sea of faces we’d been floating in only moments before everyone was murdered. Music still pumps a faint heartbeat through splattered speakers, and we’re dancing with the dead as we pass through them, as we leave them to survive.
“Maybe he went to the car.” Eve tugs my clothes. “We should go there.”
We hurry down the path, toward the tree line, and I take my phone out to light our way, though I’m so numb I can’t feel it in my hand. “It’s five a.m.,” I say in a low voice. “If he made it to the car, he’s definitely gone by now.”
After we clear the bridge, all of the cars we saw when we got here are still parked in the same spots, including Stuart’s, but the doors are open, windows smashed. A body lies a few feet from Stuart’s car, and when I see black-and-white Converse and high-water jeans, there’s a jab in my heart.
“Oh my God.” Eve covers her mouth and sobs, and I tremble with emotion and fear as we step around his body.
He almost made it.
I pick up his keys, and check his pockets for the acid. His mom will be devastated enough. I can at least remove the drugs so her name isn’t stained with that stigma. In his left pocket, I find the bottle full of acid and drop it down into my purse, then I guide Eve over to the passenger side and open the door for her to get in.
I jump into the driver’s seat and the car starts right up. I put it in reverse, holding my breath as we turn around, and after flipping on the headlight, I tear ass down the dirt road. We need to get the hell out of here and never look back.
“Grab our guns,” I say.
She leans back to collect Suki and Jesse, then places them in our laps.
“Good thing they didn’t look under the seat.”
“We have to go to the police, right?” she asks.
“We don’t know who those people were, and the cops are corrupt.” I catch her eyes for a moment. “You know that.”
“Right.”
“We stay as far away from them as possible.”
She takes two cigarettes from my purse and lights one for each of us, then hands me one. “But what do we do with Stuart’s car?”
“We have to ditch it.”
“Where?”
I think for a second, taking a long, hard drag. “The culvert by your house. It’s still dark so no one will see us. We can park it on the slope, put it in neutral, and push.”
“Okay. You sure that’s the right thing to do?” She peers up at me with pleading eyes.
“No, I’m not. Who knows what’s right anymore, Evie? I’m not even sure if there is such a thing.”
By the time we get to the culvert, the sky is a light grayish-blue, and the stars have all faded. I grab Stuart’s school ID from the dash and check his glove box. His Smith and Wesson is there, but unless he got ammo some time recently, that thing has been empty for months. After one last look around at the empty road, I put his car in neutral and we give it a push. It catches momentum, rolling down the grass-and-mud hill, and the brown P.O.S. with one headlight, a busted rear window patched up with a garbage bag and duct tape, and one green door, crashes into the rushing waters below.
It got us home after all. Most of us.
Once the top of the car has sunken below the water’s surface, we jog across the road-bridge, and down into the grass, away from the main road. We travel in silence all the way to her block, then slow to a more inconspicuous pace as we get to her street, and step up onto the sidewalk.
As we smoke another cigarette, we do our best to pretend we haven’t spent the last few hours candy-flipping on a roof, with over a hundred slaughtered people below us. The last thing we want is to be involved with the law in any way.
We see a cop car, and I hold brief eye contact with the officer to appear confident that we have nothing to fear, though we have everything to fear right now.
When they pass, I let out my held breath, and we cross the yard to Eve’s door and open it quietly. I check my phone. Five-forty a.m. Not a sound from the living room, so her parents must still be asleep. We take turns relieving our bladders and gulping water from the sink, then kick off our muddy shoes and collapse onto her bed.
We lie there for a moment before she speaks.
“I can’t believe that just happened.”
“I can’t, either. And we survived.” I glance down at Aislynn’s spirit board. “Out of all of those people . . .” I bend over and pick up the box, placing it on the bed beside us.
“What do you think it was, Phelia?”
Coming down from LSD and X, trying to make sense out of this isn’t going to work. “No clue.” I shrug. “My brain can’t compute this right now. I’m just glad we’re alive.”
“Me, too.”
We curl up together on the bed, our arms wrapped around each other. She kisses my eyebrow. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.” I kiss her chin. “So much.”
THIRTEEN
There’s a continuous, shrill beep coming from somewhere. It wakes Eve first, then me, and I move to let her out of bed. “What is that?”
Eve picks up her phone to check the time. “It sounds like . . . the weather alert.” She stumbles to her door, and I follow. “Like the practice ones they do every Wednesday at noon? But it’s eight a.m. It’s not Wednesday, and it’s not noon.”
We walk out into her hallway, and her parents are there, shuffling ahead of us. The television blares the emergency alert, with what sounds like static words in another language behind it.
“Mom?” Eve says.
But her mother doesn’t budge.
“Dad?”
They stand before the TV, motionless, hands to their sides.
“Hey!” Eve yells.
“Yes, Lucy?” her mom says in a monotone voice that is more than a little creepy.
“Um, what the hell is wrong with the TV? And . . . you guys? You’re acting strange.”
Her dad kneels, pushing a slow finger toward the power button, when the TV spits out an electrical current that jumps through the air, into his pointer finger. He retracts, dropping his hand to his side.
As if Eve hadn’t said a word, her mom kneels beside her dad, reaches for the button, and it shocks her, too. But there’s no register of pain, only a slow drawback of her hand, which drops to her side.
“Uh, mom? What the fuck?”
Neither of them scold her cursing, so it’s obvious something weird is going on. An acid-induced PTSD flashback-hallucination thing, maybe?
No, we’re both seeing this . . . This is actually happening.
Eve approaches her parents, and I stand in her hallway, kind of in shock.
Why are these people bowing before a television sounding some kind of crazy emergency warning? What is going on in my
life right now?
When Eve gets a few feet from them the sound cuts off. Her parents look at each other, then around behind them, apparently confused. Emergency weather sirens blaring outside take the place of the shrill beep from the television.
“What are you doing?” Eve asks, cupping her hands to her mouth. “What’s going on?”
Her mom shoots a concerned look to her dad. “Why are we here, Marcus?”
“Uh . . .” He stands and helps his wife up from the floor. “The . . . the TV. There was a . . . a noise. Right? And—and the sirens outside?”
As soon as he says it, the sirens shut off. Eve clutches her hands at her chest.
“I need to lie down.” Her mom sways, steadies herself on the couch, before her dad escorts her down the hall, past me, and into their bedroom. In a daze, Eve returns to me. I close the door, guide her to her bed, but when I open my mouth to speak, no words come out.
“What . . . the fuck . . . was that?” Eve mumbles.
“I have no idea. That was one of the strangest things I’ve ever witnessed.”
“Did you see the electricity shoot out of the TV? Like it lured them to it to shock them. That sounds so crazy—”
“Yeah, but you’re right.”
We sit in silence for a while longer before a seed of worry sprouts in my stomach. “The injections, Evie.”
“What about them?”
“What if this has to do with those, somehow?”
“Okay . . . but why? I mean, what’s with the TV thing?”
I shrug, shake my head. My thoughts spin out until they land on Eileen and Henry. “I need to go to my house, and . . . make sure they’re okay.”
“Want me to go with you?”
“Of course.”
I gather my things and in minutes, we’re headed out of the room. “Wait here.” Eve tiptoes down the hallway to her parent’s room and taps on the door. “I’m going to Ophelia’s. I’ll be back soon.”
There’s a mumble from the other side, then she’s heading toward me.
“What’d they say?” I ask.
“What they always say: be safe, Lucy.”
Dysphoria and Grace Page 6
