A Dark Road (10 page)

“What
’s wrong?”

I
started; I hadn’t expected my expression to be so obvious.

“My brother, he’
s ah—”

“Yes?”

“Well, he’s an ass.”

James laughed and my stomach flop
ped just enough that I thought I might need to hold onto something to keep from falling over.

“You’re going to have to be more specific.”

I pointed to the driveway while brushing imaginary water from my jacket sleeve. “We have a curfew and he should have been home almost two hours ago.”

He didn’t say anything.

“It isn’t that big of a deal.” I struggled to explain, I didn’t want to sound like the worrisome loser I really was. “He’s done it once or twice before and got a hell of a headache from my parents’ lecturing—”

“But
you’re
worried?”

The lump in my throat was difficult to swallow, and even once I got it down, I felt it sit in my stomach like a rock in a river dividing two ends of a pathway. I nodded. “A little
.”

“I see
.”

I smiled
and tried to change the subject to something, anything else. “So, um—”

“
I’ll see you at school.” James turned from me and headed back down into the dirt path. I wanted to call after him, but he disappeared into the fog before my thoughts accumulated anything tangible.

Chapter 20

McKay

I went straight back through the basement and picked up a phone, locked Dog in the back room, and left. It was a few rings before Luke picked up, but when he realized it was me calling, he was more than happy to oblige.

“Luke
.”

“McKay? Dude
, what’s up?”

“You know about anything going on tonight
? Any parties or whatever?”

He barely heard me over the music
, but after he turned it down, I repeated myself.

“Uh
, hold on, man, let me ask Fuller.”

I could hear some noise, that fake kind of moaning that comes from bad pornos
, but it only took a second for him to answer. “There’s supposed to be a rave or something in Manerbarry.”

I sighed into the phone. I could practically see the gears in Luke
’s head struggling to work. “You guys over at your house right now?”

“Yeah…”

“Cool. I need a favor.”

***

It wasn’t hard to get into the party. When someone hands the douche bags at the door a baggie with drugs (even if those drugs are unidentifiable), they let you in. I mean hell, I could have given him a bag of mentos and this jerk-off wouldn’t have known the difference, but whatever. We get in and it’s hard to hear over the crappy techno music. I already gave The Stooges their mission though, so if they manage to retain any sort of short-term memory, I won’t have to talk to them again until we get out of here. The place is crowded beyond crowded, and from what I can tell it’s an old warehouse or factory or some shit that has been abandoned. There are gears and machine parts incised into the wall and I’m thinking maybe I can get them loose and use them for something. I see spots where copper has been stripped and I’m wondering if everything manmade is destructive.

A DJ is s
et up on a stage and everyone is dancing with glow sticks. A few dozen people have even taken the initiative to slather themselves in body paint that glows in the black light. But I’m not paying much attention to that, even though there are all kinds of people bumping and grinding against me (including girls who could potentially be intoxicated enough to do things to/with me). Instead, I’m focusing dead center on my mission to find the King of Asshats and get him back to his sister so she can sleep soundly and maybe, just maybe, dream of me the way I dream of her.

Yeah
, right.

I
search around, but it’s hard to tell anyone apart from anyone else and it becomes difficult to concentrate as I’m rammed with elbows, smelly armpits, and the occasional glance of girls as they take their shirts off and grind against each other and random objects. I’m half ready to give up when I remember that look on Hadley’s perfect face and her stupidity to wander back out even when I all but told her about Frank’s tenderness for gun shows. Either I hadn’t been as convincing as I thought I was, or she is an idiot. At this point I don’t care either way, but I do know I don’t want her worrying over her dumbass brother, who even The Stooges seem to harbor a reluctant respect for when they hear about his reputation with college girls.

I hope Hadley Grayson listen
s to me for a change and goes home. Ravel is hardly dangerous, but she doesn’t exactly look like she could go all Kill Bill if she had to, either. I’m throwing back elbows into stomachs and now reducing my search to Jenna instead of King Asshat. The presses are running that Simon is trying to get into her pants like they are the last two people on Earth, and I know if he didn’t buy anything from me (which he sure as hell didn’t) and he didn’t buy from Louie (don’t see how he could have so quickly) then he must have gotten a taste from Jenna.

A
shaky but large hand that could have collapsed my entire head lands on my shoulder.

I think he sa
ys something like, “McKay dude! We found him!”

I tr
y focusing on Luke’s face instead of the words coming out of his mouth but I still don’t understand any of the sounds there. Nothing but the music is understandable.

“What?” I scream. It
’s bad. 90’s movie montage bad. I can’t even hear myself.

Instead of repeating himself
, he makes a gesture for me to follow him, and though I have a harder time keeping up through the pool of bodies, somehow I managed to do just that.

At first I d
on’t see him, I only see Jenna (who is kind of hard to miss). Usually she has her hair all straight and stuff, but now it’s picked out like an afro with these weird little glitter beads in them, and she’s wearing a sequin top that doesn’t leave much to the imagination. Sam and Ryan are keeping their eyes on her instead of King Asshat, but she is close enough to him anyway that it works out.

It
’s pretty obvious that they are just as high as everyone else. Simon Grayson is wearing whatever’s left of a torn shirt and has all kinds of body paint on him with tiny finger prints. Judging by the stains on Jenna’s fingers, it looks like they have been having fun all night.

They must have been trying to talk because
their mouths are moving. The fact that they keep trying to talk even though they clearly can’t hear one another is enough indication they have no perception of reality, but when I reach for Grayson, I see how bugged his eyes are, and I know he’s fucked.

“
Let’s go!” I try to tell him. “I’m gonna take you home!”

Jenna sa
ys something, but it’s lost. She looks like she’s laughing . Then King Asshat starts laughing, and I can see her pupils are as big as the bottom of a tea cup, which actually surprises me for a second. I haven’t ever seen Jenna get out of control before. Her use was strictly medicinal; at least as far as I knew. But this is part of why I brought The Stooges. I pull Sam over to me by the collar. I would have tried to get his attention another way, but his eyes were glued to Jenna’s navel.

“We gotta get
both
of them home,” I scream it in his ear. “Help me out!”

Now I’m not claiming to be a knight in shining armor or anything, but even though my main pr
iority is getting King Asshats out of there, I sure as hell am not going to leave Jenna in there by herself either, especially high and looking…well, looking the way she does.

“Dude! Your family is looking for you!” It
’s hard to pinpoint an ear to even scream into since Grayson is bouncing around like Tigger on Ritalin, but I hope a little flush of reality might bring him back to his senses. “Simon! Simon Grayson! Your sister Hadley is looking for you!”

He just
kept laughing while rubbing up against Jenna and some other girl they were with. My patience is winding down; though maybe it’s just jealousy. The songs are merging into each other and I can hear Ryan cackling. As I turn around, I catch a glimpse of him shaking his defective little face into the cleavage of some fat girl.

I think this rescue mission is going
terrible, that seal team six would watch this and laugh. I think that even though she can’t possibly know I’m here, Hadley will somehow hate me if I don’t get her brother back to her. The expectations are unrealistic and I’m aware, but the idea of her hating me is more suffocating than facts.

“Luke!”

It is mere luck that I caught him on the one night he wasn’t drinking, or smoking, or high, or with some girl, because Sam is already gone and Ryan is just on the brink. I grab Grayson by one arm and Luke takes him by the other, for which Jenna promptly starts flipping a shit, but Luke dodges her swings easy.

Luke just pull
s her arms down and more or less carries her out the way we came in.

When Grayson s
ees how easily Jenna is scooped up and hauled out by Luke, it sobers him up enough to stop struggling. He actually seems focused enough to follow me.

Once we g
et them outside it’s like riding the top of a mountain. My ears feel like they’re about to pop from the noise difference. I ring them out, though it isn’t doing a lot of good. I can still feel the base in the pavement below us making little earthquakes, shaking the leftover glass in broken windows. I hope Hadley is all right. I hope she is sleeping soundly.

In the second I ha
ven’t been paying attention, Jenna and King Asshat got back to freaking out, and with both of them amped up, Luke is having a hard time handling them. I’m cursing out Sam and Ryan, but realize that their absence only bothers me because now if something happens to Luke, I’ll be responsible for that, too.

Though Simon Grayson isn’t
exactly big or anything, I know what it’s like to be on meth. Half the time when you’re revved up like that, you feel invincible, and besides, isn’t that why I brought Luke here in the first place? He’s the athlete, after all. So I try to grab Jenna’s wrists (it isn’t as bad it as sounds, I swear) as she aimlessly swings. It seems like Luke is having a hard time trying not to hurt her while pinning down King Asshat, but I’ll admit I’m not quite sure how to intervene here without making the situation worse.

S
he scratches me a couple of times (girls need to get a hold on their claws) before I do manage to calm her down by sort of chanting her name. Then I’m wondering if she’s taken something else with my product, and she seems so tiny it’s hard to believe she could handle anything at all.

“Jenna! Jenna
, chill the hell out!”

Her legs buckle but she blinks
with the semi-awareness of her location and stops trying to knock my head off. Once she stops, King Asshat hesitates enough for Luke to pile-drive him onto the sidewalk, pinning his arms behind him as he lands on top of him.

“Gotcha
, bitch!”

“Hey
.” I was half afraid of Simon Grayson’s lack of movement. I know almost nothing about girls, but I’m pretty sure that if Luke railed him hard enough to kill him, Hadley would never smile at me again.

Once Luke’s
initial victory wears off I see his smile lapse. He looks at the horror on Jenna’s face and then mine.

“Oh shit
,” he says.

“Simon?” Jenna’s v
oice is cracking and she starts to sniffle, and I’m thinking about manslaughter again and how long it would take to get to Mexico with Dog in the car.

I let go of Jenna and pus
h Luke off of King Asshat. I remember wrestling and throwing around with Luke when we were really little. Even then Luke hardly knew his own strength, cracking a kid’s rib one time outside of our tree house.

Now I can’t see Simon Grayson’s
face, so I can’t tell if he is conscious or not. At least I know he’s alive by the rise and fall of his shoulders. I poke him there, once, twice before he finally raises his head.

“That was awesome!” He looks
between all of us, before bouncing up on his feet. “Let’s do it again!”

Ecstasy
is dangerous for a few reasons. While it heightens mood for the first six hours or so, and alters reality, and makes sex phenomenal,
because
you’re feeling so amazing, you don’t think about your pituitary gland going haywire with all of the extra serotonin being released. You also don’t think about your core body temperature rising too high until your major organs start to shut down. And you sure as hell don’t think about the blood-salt imbalance, about getting thirsty.

Horribly
, God-awful thirsty.

If you don’t drink
, you’ll dehydrate. But another possibility (and most people don’t know this) is that you’ll end up drinking too much water. With water intoxication you can get hyponatremia, which is when your blood is so diluted it lets your brain swell.

Either way you’re in some deep shit.

It’s what people like about using, though. No thinking.

And then I’m wondering why I don’t use my own stuff again.

We get Jenna and Grayson out of there, though Luke is saying something to me about Sam and Ryan, but I think fuck it, they’re both big boys. Then again King Asshat is too, but he’s sweating and shaking, babbling and grinding his teeth together so bad I’m thinking he’s going to break his freaking jaw.

We’re in the parking lot of a 24-hour Grab-n’-Go and
they both want water, but I make them drink orange juice instead. They drink a carton between them within a few minutes and I struggle to keep them from running in and getting more.

I should just take
them home, but I know if King Asshat doesn’t get at least sober enough to stop twitching and rambling, then he won’t be able to hide this from his parents, from Hadley. Then there will be hospitals and cops. The same deal goes if I just dump them off at an emergency room somewhere. If both of them are higher than a kite and they even say my name to a nurse or an orderly, then I’m also fucked.