“See you then.”
He hung up and I groaned, flopping back down on my bed. If I could get out of this, I needed to. I had plans with Mitchell tonight; there was an extra-large pizza and a list of horror movies waiting for us. Oh, for the love of God. I forgot Mitchell. So—because why not?—I started a third phone call. “Mitchell?” I asked when he picked up.
“Yeah?”
“You have to come to a party tonight, and you have to bring Sierra. Please.”
“You’re going to Brady’s party? I thought we had a date with chess and movies.”
“I don’t have a choice.”
He hesitated, but gave in eventually. That was one of the perks of having best friends; they generally had to go along with whatever stupid plans I had. “Alright, I’ll tell her.”
“Okay. See you there. Come pick me up at five or something, alright?”
“Sure.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
I closed my eyes. Hopefully I didn’t need to make any more phone calls. What was I going to do about a dress, though? Maybe I didn’t need one. There were some cute partyish shirts in my closet somewhere, and I probably had a pair of jeans without a hole in them somewhere. Ha. Try telling me to be hot. Like that’ll happen. Rolling myself out of bed, I decided that I should probably start looking for an outfit now if there was a chance in hell of me finding one. Even though there were probably metric tons of clothing throughout my house, I’d have to sort through the pile of clothes in my closet to find a decent party shirt, and then I’d probably have to wash it if I did somehow manage to find it in the depths of Narnia.
Wonderful.
***
I looked at myself in the mirror. The only pair of jeans I could find without holes in them were black skinny jeans that didn’t come as high up on my hips as I would have liked them to. My shirt was pretty simple. I wore just a loose gray crop top with a white tank top on underneath it to avoid showing my stomach. One sleeve was hanging lazily off of my shoulder. Because of the tank top underneath, I didn’t really care. Still, I pulled it back up to sit properly on my shoulder and picked a pair of sandals out.
I looked at the black strappy shoes hesitantly, turning them over in my hand a couple of times and watching them glitter faintly. What were the chances of there being vomit or beer on the floor and that I would walk through it? Immediately, I changed my mind and snagged my combat boots. They were comfortable, and they covered my feet.
Finally, I looked at the mess that was my hair. It was falling in messy waves down my back to my waist, and I sighed, pulling it up into my usual messy bun. My makeup was nice; the only thing I enjoyed about dressing up was the portion that involved me doing my makeup. I had eyeliner and smoky gray eyeshadow encircling my blue eyes to make them look lighter in color and larger in size, and I had a little bit of glitter in the inner corners. I had put pale pink lip gloss on, and even a tiny bit of blush. Brady had better be thankful I had gone through this hassle; it was almost three and I had only just finished getting ready for his stupid party. Between the shower and the cleaning my clothes and the drying my hair, I had wasted four and a half hours pretty easily. Now I was just standing in front of my mirror and wishing I didn’t have to go to his house.
There was a knock on my bedroom door.
I turned and Mitchell slipped through the door. His eyes widened when he saw me. “Um… wow. Hi, Anika.” He blushed a little and averted his eyes. “Your sleeve is down. I can see your bra strap.”
“Oh, God. The world is ending because I, a teenager with boobs, am exposing the strap of a bra that no one must know I’m wearing. No one shall know that I own one; it is against the rules that a female should wear these and I should be punished to the full extent of the law.” I rolled my eyes at him. “Either calm down or shut up, if you don’t mind.” I fixed my sleeve and looked him over. He was in a casual shirt and a decent pair of jeans. “You look pretty good. Do you have hair gel in your hair?”
He nodded as his eyes wandered back over to me. Mitchell’s hair was indeed spiked with hair gel, a welcome change to the fluffy mess it had been for most of our lives. Not that I didn’t like his hair messy; that’s how he always wore it, and it was very… Mitchell of him. But change was good once in a while.
I smiled. “It looks good.”
Mitchell smiled at me and gestured. “You do too.”
“Why are you here so early, though?”
“Sierra said that if I didn’t come check on you now, you’d probably give up on trying to get dressed and go back to bed. Then she explained exactly how she would kill me without leaving evidence if I let you miss the party.” He grinned. “She’s kinda scary, but we gotta love her. Also, forensically, she didn’t make any major errors in her explanation so I think she might actually have gotten away with it. I didn’t want to take that chance.”
I rolled my eyes. “Sierra is a kitten.”
He smiled and shook his head. “Whatever. Do you wanna go meet up with her before the party? I was thinking we could go eat something beforehand so you don’t get hungry from all the acting you’re gonna do tonight.”
I nodded. “Makes sense.”
We drove to a fast food place after Mitchell texted Sierra. She met us there late, and her look was… surprising.
She had very dark makeup, and I was pretty sure she had tried contouring. Her outfit was mostly black, except for the exposed skin of her lower back and some of her stomach showing through the lacy bottom of the shirt she was wearing. Sierra grinned at me and Mitchell when she walked in and half jogged toward us, stumbling a little in her black sandals. Side note: this is the girl who I thought only owned pink clothes, high heels and light-colored makeup. “Hey! You guys look great. Why does Mitchell look like a porcupine, though?”
He blushed, irritated, and glared at her.
I laughed a little harder than I probably should have. “It’s hair gel. I happen to think it looks very nice. You took four years to get here, though, so he and I already ate. Party starts in, like, half an hour, so you can eat in the car if you still want to get something here.”
She shook her head. “I’ll eat there, I guess. Besides, Mitchell didn’t even text me to meet you guys until, like, six minutes ago.”
I looked at Mitchell for an answer, raising my eyebrow, but he shrugged it off and I dismissed it as his forgetfulness. Honestly, it wasn’t all that uncommon for him to forget to invite Sierra to the things we did; half the time when it was meant to be all three of us, it ended up being just him and me because Sierra never got the memo.
I got into the car with Mitchell. As we pulled up to Brady’s house, I was unable to suppress the groan that escaped my lips. The house was practically shaking from how loud the music was, and there were already drunks staggering around in the front yard. This was going to be absolutely miserable. “We have a plan, right?” I asked, turning my head to face Mitchell with a subtle look of desperation.
“Yeah. Rule one?”
“Don’t drink anything that we didn’t bring ourselves,” I recited. We’d formed this plan on the way here, and I held up one of the water bottles Mitchell had brought so as to punctuate my statement.
“Rule two?”
“Don’t eat anything.”
“Rule three?”
“If either of us says the word ‘lemon’, we leave the party immediately.”
“Okay, that’s all of them. Let’s go.”
I reached to push open my door, but it opened before I had the chance to do it myself. Foster offered his hand and I got out of the car without taking it. He smirked, then his eyes traveled over me slowly. “You look good, Anika,” he breathed huskily as he looked me over.
“Lemon,” I muttered.
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing. I thought you weren’t coming.”
“You said you were coming. So I came.”
I shrugged and walked around
him into the house. Truthfully, I didn’t want to go into the house yet, especially without Mitchell going in at the same time, but I wanted to escape Foster as quickly as I could, and that meant going inside. Music erupted around me and, as a crowd of people flooded around me, I felt my pulse quicken. There were way too many people for my liking.
My grip tightened on my water bottle and I kept my head down, walking toward where I hoped the back door was.
When I reached it, I went outside and panted lightly. It was hard to breathe in the house, and I’d basically ended up jogging to the back door. I looked warily at the pool. I couldn’t swim and the pool was making me a little nervous. There were probably twelve people in the pool, and I could tell none of them could touch the bottom of it. If I couldn’t stand up in a pool, I’d drown, end of story.
An arm slipped around my shoulders and I stiffened.
“You like the party so far?” Brady asked. He was yelling directly into my ear but, because of our proximity to the stereos, I could still barely hear him.
“I’ve been here for, like, three minutes,” I yelled back.
He offered me a soda. I looked at the can and hesitated, biting my lip slightly. Mitchell and I had agreed not to drink anything while we were here, and I wasn’t exactly in the mood to be drugged and killed and found in the woods a hundred miles from the last place I was seen. Brady waited but when I didn’t take it, he looked kind of offended and annoyed. He glared at me and made a point of raising the can to his lips and drinking from it. His hand slipped from my shoulders to my hand and he started pulling me toward the pool.
I put on the brakes immediately, leaning away from him and digging my heels down in an attempt to stop him from dragging me.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“I can’t… um…” I looked at the pool, then Brady.
He waited briefly as he thought. “You can’t swim?”
“No.”
Brady sighed and changed direction, pulling me inside and back through the horde of people. When we got to the living room, he pulled me down so I was sitting on the couch next to him and put my water bottle on the table next to me. I turned my body to face him and he smirked at me. “I’m guessing parties aren’t exactly your thing, Anika.”
“No. I have… problems when it comes to crowds of people. It makes it hard to breathe and I get dizzy.”
“Is that why you’ve never been to any of mine?”
Well, that and the fact that I just don’t like you. “Yeah.”
He nodded and his eyes trailed around me to look at something behind me. Suddenly, Brady yanked me toward him a little roughly and put his lips right next to my ear. “Foster is looking. Either kiss me or pretend to.” He pulled back his face and left it mere centimeters from mine, his hand slipping to cup my cheek as he did so. We just stared at each other. I could feel the warmth of his skin radiating lightly against mine and I shivered slightly. I hadn’t expected him to actually let me choose whether I kissed him or not, but he didn’t kiss me. Instead, he waited patiently for about five seconds before pulling back and smirking. “He looked pissed. It was kinda funny.”
I nodded mutely.
Brady chuckled quietly. “You’re blushing.”
“No, I’m not. That’s makeup.”
“You poured red paint all over your face and called it makeup?”
“Shut up, Brady,” I sighed.
He laughed and turned my body so my back was to him, then pulled me against him so that I was leaning lightly against his chest. I stiffened, and he noticed. “Calm down, Anika,” he muttered. “You’re acting like I’m just gonna have sex with you right here. If you didn’t notice, I’m exercising self-control and haven’t even actually kissed you. So I’d appreciate it if you calmed down and stopped treating me like I’m a murderer.”
I nodded and forced myself to relax against him. Suddenly, I realized what he was doing. By being on the couch, there was no one else against me, and I was actually a lot calmer than I would have been outside or just standing in the living room. Because of the way my body was angled now, there was no room for anyone else on the couch but him and me. Surely that wasn’t his intention, though. This had to be part of his stupid plan. There was no reason for him to be nice to me. Why would Brady Morrison do something kind for me?
We sat there for a while and eventually, I ended up really relaxing, just watching the other people at the party.
Brady leaned down to talk into my ear again. “I bet the first person to throw up will be him,” he said, pointing subtly to a boy with red hair who was grimacing a little and touching his stomach.
“I think it’s gonna be her,” I contradicted, pointing to a girl.
“Are you serious? She looks fine.”
I didn’t say anything.
He paused. “I bet five bucks it’ll be the guy.”
“Deal.”
Roughly ten minutes later, there was a chorus of protests as the girl I had pointed out doubled over and threw up. Brady groaned and shifted his body, searching for his wallet. He handed me a five dollar bill. “How could you tell?”
“I guess I’m just more used to remembering drunks than you are,” I muttered.
“I doubt that.”
“You’d be wrong again if you did.”
Brady pushed me lightly. “We’re gonna go dance.”
“No… we’re not.”
“Look. It’s my party. I’m gonna dance, and if it’s not with you, it’s gonna be with some random girl. That’s gonna put you in danger, not me. So it’s your choice.”
I sighed.
He looked at me expectantly.
“Fine.”
Chapter 4
Brady led me by the hand to the backyard again, and several people brushed up against me as we passed them. As soon as we were in the backyard, I noticed that most of the people from the party had now migrated there as well. They were all talking loudly, and at least two people were touching me at all times because of the crowd. My breathing quickened and my hand tightened on Brady’s unintentionally.
He looked at me in confusion and I refused to meet his gaze, ashamed that I was being affected this heavily by something as common and basic as a crowd of people. Finally, he looked away from me again and released my hand, turning to face me. “Do you know how to dance?”
“No.” My pulse sped up as I felt someone bump into me again and I clenched my teeth. They were all loud and my head was starting to hurt from all of the noise.
Brady looked at me for a long time. “Go sit down in that chair. I’m gonna go get your water bottle.”
I looked at the chair he was pointing at. It was relatively far away from people, and I nodded before walking over to it and sitting down. I brought my knees to my chest and tried to be as small as possible to avoid anyone else bumping into me. Taking a deep breath, I began to calm down a little. As long as I wasn’t exposed to more of the pushing and shoving, I should be okay, I remember thinking. A boy approached me and grinned, clearly drunk.
“You wanna swim?” he slurred.
I shook my head immediately. “No.”
He grabbed my hand anyway and pulled me out of the chair. “Come on, it’ll be fun.” The boy yanked me toward him and grinned down at me. I tried to pull away from him, but he was strong. Suddenly, he threw me over his shoulder and I screamed. He laughed as I started thrashing and screeching and carried me toward the pool. I was going to drown. He was going to throw me, and I was going to drown. I kneed him as hard as I could but he didn’t respond to it, so I kicked him, hard. This time he groaned sharply in pain and flinched, his body curling defensively.
This almost sent me into the water.
Suddenly, the boy and I were both yanked roughly away from the pool. The boy’s hand was gone from my waist, and though I started to fall immediately, another set of hands grabbed me and pulled me off him. Brady pushed me lightly behind him—toward the pool, to m
y dismay—and turned to face me, guiding me back toward the chair he had originally told me to go settle in.
I sat down, pulled my legs back up to my chest, and immediately began freaking out. Sure, some people called them panic attacks, but I’d never liked the term. My breathing was fast and shallow, and I couldn’t uncurl my body from how I’d positioned myself defensively.
Brady’s eyes were wide. “Holy Hell, are you dying or something?”
I shook my head the best I could and tried desperately to control my breathing.
He clearly had no idea what to do.
I inhaled and held my breath, then released it, and continued doing that for about five minutes before I was taking reasonable breaths. Brady looked relieved when I was breathing normally again and he offered me my water bottle. I took it gratefully and slowly drank from it, leaning my head forward so it rested on my knees. “Sorry.”
Brady’s voice was surprised and kind of angry. “Sorry?”
“Yeah.”
“Why are you sorry?”
“Because I panicked like that.”
“It wasn’t your fault, it was his, and I’m damn near ready to go back over there and beat him for it.” Brady’s voice shook a little in anger.
“He didn’t know I can’t swim.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
I rested my chin on my knee so I could look at Brady, and I was surprised by the intense anger on his face. “Calm down, okay?” He probably was angry at me for panicking and almost causing a scene in the middle of his party. “I said I was sorry for reacting like that.” Brady cussed under his breath and stood up.
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