CHAPTER 5
I wake up around ten, and check my phone. There’s a text from Kate asking if I can make it. I say yes, and she sends back a smiley face.
“What time is the party tonight?” Patrick says, sitting on the couch.
“I don’t know. Like eleven or something. But you know they always like you to get there an hour after it’s started. That’s when people start showing up.” I go into the kitchen and get a bowl of cereal and plop down on the couch beside Patrick.
“That’s so stupid. I’ll never understand that. Why don’t they just say to come at twelve then?”
“I don’t know. We’re in America. It’s rude if you show up on time. You have to show up casually late to a party.”
“How many people are supposed to be there?” Patrick says, flipping through the channels.
“I think like twenty or so. It’s at her house. She graduates in December, so I think she’s trying to get all of her drinking and fucking done before she goes off into the real world and misses it.”
“I’m not going to miss it.”
“Of course not. You have Sarah. When you graduate, you and Sarah will go off and live together in a townhouse, and then get married, have babies, and then disappear off of the face of the earth.”
“She said she doesn’t want kids.” I turn to look at him.
“Didn’t you say that you wanted kids?”
“Yeah, but that was a while ago. I don’t know. I can’t see myself being a father.”
“I can see you being a father and you don’t even have a kid. You’d make a great dad.”
The TV’s on some nature show about gorillas and about how strong they are, and about how they truly are one of the deadliest animals you can run into if you ever go to the rainforest, or wherever the fuck they’re from. It’s some kid’s show, so I’m not really watching it.
“Maybe. I don’t know. I can’t force Sarah to have kids. It’s really her choice in the end.” “How the fuck does that work though?”
“Well, she’s the mother. She’d be taking care of them. She’d have to carry them around for nine months. She could always get an abortion or stay on birth control for the rest of her life, or get her tubes tied.” Patrick looks like he’s kind of upset about the topic.
“You could always adopt a kid. Or, I don’t know, steal one. They just leave them sitting there in the nursery for a while. Just go and pick one out and walk out with it.”
“Ha, I don’t want that on my record. I don’t want to be known as a kidnapper. Literally with the kid in that word.” He gets a cigarette out and starts smoking it, and I hand him the ashtray.
“I still think that’s a little messed up.”
“You know Sarah. If she doesn’t get what she wants, she goes crazy. Jesus, you should’ve heard her after we left lunch yesterday.”
“What about?”
“About how you didn’t want to go up to the mountains and about how selfish you are sometimes. I tried telling her that you’re one of the least selfish people I’ve ever met, but she just kept going on and on about it. So I just let her talk until she couldn’t talk anymore, then started talking about school.”
“That’s Sarah for you.”
“Yeah, that’s Sarah.”
“Do you think she’s been acting weird lately?” I say, cautiously.
“A little. Yeah. She blows up at the smallest things that I do now. Like if I go to sleep too soon or if I’m a little late to meet her. She’s probably just stressed about school.”
“It’s only the first week.”
“She’ll get over it once she’s settled in her schoolwork.”
There’s a long pause as the show starts talking about anacondas, and about how long they are, and about how they’re one of the largest snakes in the world, and about how they can eat basically anything they want to. I start thinking that they shouldn’t show kids this stuff in the morning while they’re eating breakfast.
“I forgot to ask, how did the date go last night?”
“Really well, actually. I like her.”
“See, I told you. All you needed to do was go on a date and you’d forget all about what’s her name. I think it starts with a J…jezebel. That’s the one.”
“You were right. Again. For the millionth time in a row. See, this is why you’d make a good dad.”
“Fuck this show. It’s freaking me out.” He changes the channel just as an anaconda is swallowing a Capybara whole.
I spend the rest of the morning watching TV with Patrick, until he wants to get something to eat. I tell him as long as it’s not the coffee shop, that I’m down for it. We go to this hole in the wall Chinese place that’s popular on campus, but it’s dead because it’s a Saturday and it’s three in the afternoon. We sit down and wait for our food to come and he seems a little spacey. Patrick is usually very well connected. Very concentrated. But he just seems out of it. Like he got hit on the head with a log.
“What’s wrong?”
“What do you mean?” He says, defensively.
“I don’t know. You just seem…not yourself.”
“Sarah texted me and said she doesn’t want to go to the party. That she wants to spend the night studying at her place.”
“The hell with her then. We’ll just go together.”
“I’m trying to convince her to go with us, but she’s getting frustrated with me.” He hands me the phone and shows me the texts, and she’s being really bitchy. Very unlike Sarah.
“Maybe she’s on the rag?”
“No, I know when that happens. I prepare myself for that week.” I laugh and he just goes back to texting her.
“I’ll text her and tell her to make sure she dresses real slutty for the party so all of the guys can hit on her, and you can be there to ward them off when they do.” I say.
“That would probably get you killed.”
“She doesn’t scare me. Tell her she can study and then meet us there when she’s done. I mean, tomorrow’s Sunday. There’s absolutely nothing going on that she needs to be concerned with and she can study all day if she wants.”
“Okay, I’ll try that. See if it works. I’ll cross my fingers.”
We finish eating and Sarah eventually agrees to meet us there after she’s studied for nine hours of her life. Patrick heads back to the apartment and I go walking around campus, and collecting myself a little. I run into a girl I used to know, and I can’t remember her name or anything she does with her life, so I just sit and nod, and say it was good running into her, and she tells me to text her sometime, then I nod and walk away. I need to realize that these girls probably remember me, even though I don’t remember them. Not because I’m great in bed, or because I’m extremely good looking, but because they’re girls, and they remember everything that’s ever happened on every day that it’s happened down to a tick.
I sit on a bench outside of the commons and try to relax, but my mind doesn’t let me relax. My mind is only relaxed when it knows there’s nothing going on. And I have a party to go to tonight, and I’m thinking of what happens if I run into a girl that thinks I’m cute, and I’m drunk and she’s drunk, and if I should fuck her or not. But then I start thinking about Ashley, and the thought flees my head very quickly. I don’t want word getting around that I fucked some slut at a party before we go fishing. That would ruin everything, and she would probably think I’m some sort of dick hole who just goes on dates with girls frivolously, and that I’m really only looking for a good lay. The perception that people have of you is never what you see. I hate that. I wish everyone could look at me through my eyes. Then they would understand why I do the things that I do and why I am the way I am. But that’s an empty dream, and nothing could ever fill that space. Sitting there on the bench, I close my eyes and let the sunlight that’s creeping through the trees fall against my eyelids, and I just think about what I’ll do when I’m out of here. When I no longer have this comfort zone to fall back on. I’ll no longer have class or friends around me all the time. I’ll just have work, and work, and work, and then I’ll be bored out of my mind. I start wondering if that’s the life I want to live. If maybe I’ll live a better life just wandering around the world, doing absolutely nothing but what I want, until I run out of money, and then I’m screwed.
Patrick and I get to the party at about eleven forty five and I bring a bottle of whiskey for Kate as a present. It’s not the best whiskey, but the best whiskey that I can afford, and the only whiskey I like to drink. Patrick is looking a little better, and he says that Sarah would be there at one or so, so we go inside and there are about fifteen people there, most of them hanging around, lounging on her couches.
“I’m glad you came.” Kate says, and runs up to me and gives me and Patrick a hug.
“I got you a present.” I hand her the bottle of whiskey, and she hugs me again.
“You’re the only person who brought any alcohol. Everyone else is expecting me to be a fucking distillery or something. But I’ve got some beer and liquor in the kitchen if you want any.” I tell her thanks and she goes and puts the whiskey in the kitchen and goes back to being a hostess.
The people on the couches are all people that I know, but that I don’t know well enough to care about. They know my name, and I know theirs, but outside of that, there’s really no connection. Patrick is talking to some guy who is in one of his classes about how the professor was out of it last class, and how he thinks he’s high on something. Patrick says he thinks he saw him slip acid before he walked in, and the guy laughs, and Patrick walks away.
“This is cool, I guess. Better than the goddamn mountains.” Patrick says and I’m following him into the kitchen to get a drink.
“A concentration camp would be better than the mountains.” He grabs a beer, and I pour myself a glass of my own whiskey, because I know that no one else there is probably going to touch it.
We walk back in and sit on the couch, and a couple more people show up. One of them being the same girl I had ran into earlier today, so she comes over to me when she spots me.
“Funny running into you twice in the same day.” She says, and she’s wearing a really revealing shirt and she’s got her red hair down and it’s all straightened.
“That is funny. Patrick, I’d like you to meet…” and he gets up to shake her hand.
“Caroline. Nice to meet you.” She says, and the name registers in my brain, but I can’t remember anything else. Anything about her outside of her name and what she looks like.
“How do you know Kate?” I ask, trying to make small talk.
“We had a class together a couple of semesters ago. We were in a group and her and I ended up being the only two people who did any work. After that, we just became friends. Funny how things happen like that.”
“Real funny.” I’m already bored and Patrick is just sitting beside me drinking his beer, not really caring about anything in the entire world.
“Well, I’m going to head outside and get some air.” She turns around and walks out to the porch and I sip my glass of whiskey.
“Who was that?”
“Some girl I fucked a while ago. I’m glad I had you here to introduce her, because I couldn’t remember her name.”
“You should’ve started calling them by numbers. Might’ve helped you remember them better.”
“She was number twenty I think. Maybe twenty two.” “Out of how many?”
“I can’t remember.”
The party starts to get crowded and it’s twelve thirty. My friend Josh comes and sits down for a bit and he’s talking about this place he went to last week where he was skateboarding, and he’s telling the story like he’s a total badass, and then he ends it by saying he ate shit doing some trick and busted up his legs and everyone laughs. Kate comes and tells Patrick and me that we should come outside and smoke with her, and we get up and follow, while Josh is in the middle of another story that doesn’t end well for him.
Patrick pulls out a cigarette, and Kate is smoking a bowl and there are a couple of kids smoking weed outside, and she offers me some but I turn her down and hold up my glass of whiskey and say I’m still working on it, but maybe when I finish.
“What do you think would happen if a gorilla just popped out of nowhere and came on the porch and started tearing apart these guys?” Patrick says to me and Kate, who’s listening in on the conversation.
“I think they would freak out. Just a little. If they were on LSD, they might try to jump on the gorilla and ride him though.” I take another sip of my whiskey.
“If a gorilla came to this party, I think it would ruin the night.” Kate says, and then she has a small case of the giggles that goes on for about a minute. Some guy sitting down overhears the gorilla part and starts asking if someone actually saw a gorilla, and about how he couldn’t deal with that right now.
“They aren’t the smartest bunch, are they?” I turn and say to Kate.
“Those are just my brother’s friends. They’re dumb as shit.” Kate finishes smoking the bowl and offers it to me again and I turn it down a second time, and she goes back inside and it’s just me, Patrick, and the dumbasses behind us now.
“Shouldn’t Sarah be here by now?” I check my phone and it’s one twenty.
“She should be. But unlike the gorilla, she can’t appear out of thin air.”
Everyone that was inside decides to come out on the porch, and there are about thirty people out here right now, and I’m worrying that the porch is going to snap underneath the weight of everyone. Most of the people are drunk now, and I still haven’t finished my glass of whiskey, and Patrick is still working on his beer from two hours ago. There are a lot of cute girls here, but none of them worth remembering. Caroline is sitting on the lap of some guy, and he’s got his hands all over her and she’s too drunk to care and he’s too drunk to know that she’s fucked eighty guys. But that’s a double standard. Girls are sluts if they fuck a lot of guys, and guys are guys if they fuck a lot of girls.
Sarah shows up and she looks like shit, but I don’t say anything about it. Her hair is a mess, and she looks like she just woke up from a coma.
“Hey, I thought you might not show up.” Patrick says to her, putting his arm around her.
“I’m here now, aren’t I?” She snaps back.
“Yes, you are.”
“Jesus, the mountains would’ve been a lot better than this shit party.” She says and Kate is standing right behind her and I hope to God she doesn’t hear what she said.
“It’s okay. Do you want something to drink?” She nods, and Patrick goes inside and grabs a beer for her.
“Sorry about turning down the mountains. I just wasn’t feeling it.”
“Whatever. Molly’s at some party now anyway getting shitfaced, so everyone’s happy but me.”
“That’s good. Maybe you can get drunk too, and then not have a stick up your ass.”
“Fuck off.” She takes the top off of the beer and drinks half of it without pausing.
“I’m glad we’re all in good moods today.” I say to Patrick and he looks at me and shrugs.
One of the guys who was smoking weed pulls a chair up and gets on top of the railing and he pauses for a moment, because everyone’s looking at him.
“Who wants to see me do a backflip?” He looks around, waiting for everyone to say yes, but nobody says anything, and they’re all just staring at him. Except for Patrick who is opening a new beer, and doesn’t seem to care about this guy and his backflips.
“I said, who wants to see me do a backflip?” He yells it this time.
“Just do it already.” One of his friends say.
He gets ready to do the flip, but he loses his balance and falls on his back off the porch and he’s lying there, screaming in pain, saying he thinks he broke his arm. But everyone’s just laughing at him, except for me and Patrick, and Patrick starts to get through the crowd of people to actually go down and help him and I follow. Patrick would make a great dad. We get down there, and nobody really seems to care anymore, and their attention is turned elsewhere.
“Hey, are you okay? Do you need me to call an ambulance?” Patrick says to the guy, genuinely concerned.
“Fuck off, dipshit. I’m trying to get one of the girls to come down here.”
Patrick looks at him for a moment, and then just turns away, like nothing was said, like nothing even happened, and he just walks back up to the porch beside Sarah, who is now drunk and talking to some girl she knew.
“What a jackass.” I pick my glass of whiskey back up and it’s not even half done.
“He was just being stupid. That’s it.” “I kind of want to get out of here.”
“Me too.” Patrick turns and apologizes for interrupting Sarah’s conversation and asks if she wants to leave. She says no, and that she’s talking to someone. He says he’s going to drive me home and then come back for her, and she just turns back and continues on.
We get in the car and drive back to the apartment and Patrick doesn’t say anything the entire ride there, and I don’t say anything either, because I don’t know what to say. I want to ask him why Sarah’s being such a twat, but he’ll just say that she’s stressed from school again, and pass it off like it’s not a big deal. I get a text from Ashley asking how the party is. I text her back.
“Pointless.”