Words I Might Have Ate

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“Tré, we’re leaving, let’s go!” Mike shouts, slamming the trunk of the Volvo shut and sighing under his breath. He sets his hands on his hips and glances at me through half-lidded eyes, whether that was because he was tired or because of the marijuana currently floating through his system, I have no idea. “I think we should just leave him here.”

“And get a deranged phone call when he crashes and realizes that he has no idea where he is?” I ask, pulling a wry face. “I don’t want to play that game again with Tré. It was terrible enough the first time.”

Our drummer comes tripping towards the Volvo presently with a dopey smile on his face. His carefully styled hair had long ago tumbled down and he’s missing the red flannel shirt that he wore open over his faded Poison t-shirt at the beginning of the night. But he looks happy—stoned out of his mind, but content.

Mike grumbles a bit under his breath good-naturedly as we watch Tré stumble at the curb. “So are we going to have to stay at home and play nursemaid all night?”

“Probably,” I answer, going forward and assisting my friend the remaining few yards to the backseat. “So what did you do tonight, Tré?”

“Pretty girls,” He titters in a high-pitched voice before he tumbles into the backseat and the cushions muffle his deranged laughter. I hesitate and then make a half-hearted attempt to put his seatbelt on before I give up and slam the door shut firmly behind him.

“He’ll be passed out by the time we hit San Pablo Avenue,” I remark to Mike as I start to walk around the car to the passenger’s seat. “He must have taken some pretty—“

“Hey Rock Star.”

Both Mike and I turn to see a cherry red Jeep Grand Cherokee idling at the curb behind us. The passenger window is rolled down and I get a glimpse of pale skin and a curtain of light hair before I realize that Abigail is sitting in the driver’s seat and she’s watching me with an impatient look on her face.

“Well aren’t you going to get in?” She raises both of her eyebrows at me and I gape at her for a second before I glance across the chipped roof of the Volvo at my best friend.

He’s watching her too, but he looks at me when he senses my stare. “Go on then,” He motions, his keys jingling in his hands. “I can take care of Tré myself tonight.”

“Are you sure?” I ask as I close my door and begin to walk backwards towards the Jeep. “I totally owe you one, man.”

Mike waves me on lazily, a smile on his face. “I know you do, which is why you can take care of Tré when you get home.”

I flip him off behind my back as I jog towards Abigail’s car. As I draw closer, I catch her eye and I notice immediately that there is an excited smile on her face. It’s the first true emotion that I’ve ever seen so clearly on her face and I realize that she has to be fighting desperately to not appear so eager to me.

My ego takes a fantastic boost as I tug open the passenger door and sit down on the leather seat. As I slam the door behind me, she starts to drive, her gaze glued on the road. Another cigarette is clamped in her lips and she wordlessly hands me her carton and lighter as we hook a left onto Camelia Street.

I light up automatically before I roll down my window and exhale. The cool night-time air feels great against my flushed, sweaty forehead and we drive in silence for a few moments, the only other noise being that of the radio. I amuse myself by watching Abigail from the corner of my eye. She looks so serious as she drives—gone is the trademark grin and flirty eyebrow raises and in their place is a calm, stoic expression.

Finally she catches me looking at her and smiles and almost immediately, all of that feisty attitude that I had come to enjoy is back on her face. “So I was thinking we could grab something to eat? And then you can hook me up.”

“So you’re using me to get to my weed?” I ask with a straight face, watching her closely.

She shrugs her thin shoulders, a lazy smirk dancing on her lips. “You’re helping a friend out, that’s all.”

“So what do I get in return?” I question as we pull into the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant and park in the closest spot to the entrance door.

Abigail shuts off the engine but leaves the keys in the ignition as she studies me carefully from her side of the vehicle. Eventually she shakes her head. “I was thinking we could maybe go back to your place, smoke a little more, talk and we can see where the night takes us.”

I’m quiet as I go over her suggestion in my head. A tiny part of me is thinking about the thick Calculus packet that is currently still lying on my bedroom floor and how I had promised myself that I’d work on my math before I went into work. And I know that if Abigail comes over, she most likely wouldn’t be leaving until tomorrow.

Finally I nod and open up the passenger door. “Sounds good to me.”

-X-

“What time is it?” Abigail asks suddenly, recovering from her fit of laughter unexpectedly. Her eyes are wide and bloodshot but that was just because we spent nearly two hours on the beach with her last dime bag.

For some reason she looked different in the moonlight—more wild, more captivating. She still had the same dry, snarky sense of humor that attracted me to her in the first place, but she quickly became someone new and exciting for me to explore and get to know.

Now it was just past one in the morning and we were eventually making our way up the stairs to my apartment. At first we had attempted to be quiet, but after I missed a step and nearly face planted, we both were overcome with intense bouts of laughter. Obviously we weren’t going to be sneaking into my room anytime soon as surely the majority of the building knew we were on the premises by now.

I squint up at her and shrug, pursing my lips attractively. “I don’t know; I guess we’ll find out soon enough, won’t we?” I don’t wait for an answer as I lumber down the hallway to the apartment. Tonight I don’t have keys as I planned on riding back with Mike so hopefully he remembered to keep the locks undone for me.

I jiggle the knob experimentally and thankfully the door swings open. “Mi casa,” I begin with a bit of a flourish but then I stop, floundering for the rest of the phrase. “Is your home too, or however that goes. Don’t be too—“

The door is wrenched out of my grasp and I nearly tumble into the living room except Mike grabs onto my forearms and straightens me out. “Finally! We’ve been waiting for you all night!”

“What are you talking about?” I ask, stepping into the apartment and looking around curiously.

Tré is sitting on the sofa with a beer in one hand and what appears to be a homemade hat made out of newspaper perched lopsidedly on his head. All of the lights are on, which is strange considering the fact that Mike has to work at ten the next morning so I had thought that he would be in bed by now.

“They called,” Mike looks like he’s going to burst from excitement and for just a moment, I stare at him bewilderedly. I hadn’t thought I smoked that much down on the beach with Abigail—maybe he and Tré dipped into something when they got home? Because that would explain—

“Wait, what?!” My head snaps around to look at my best friend again and this time I study him closely, as if he would really joke about something this serious or important to us.

His eyes are twinkling as he presses an ice cold beer into my hands and claps me on the back. “They called and we need to go see Dale tomorrow at the office to sign before it’s official. Reprise Records wants us and they agreed to our new contract.”

It all happens so fast. One moment I’m staring dumbfounded at my band-mates and the next, I’m shouting and trying to hug everyone in the room. By the looks of things, the two had been celebrating for quite some time already without me. There’s an open case of beer on the coffee table and the heady scent of weed hung thick in the air. Tré cranks up the stereo and I recognize the song as “Too Drunk to Fuck”—a Dead Kennedys classic.

Tré passes me a freshly packed bowl and a lighter and before I can even comprehend what’s going on, I’m down on the sofa with Tré next to me and Mike mixing drinks in the kitchen. Judging by the amount of noise that seems to be coming from that particular room, he seems to be making more of a mess than anything else.

Eventually, however, he comes back into the living room with a few glasses and he delegates them before collapsing into the armchair. The furniture wheezes in protest and I watch in amusement as a cloud of dust showers across the room before I pass Mike the bowl.

“So the message was on the machine when you got home from Gilman’s?” I ask interestedly, balancing my beer can on my kneecap.

Tré nods, his eyes glazed over. “I just remember Mike shouting about our record deal; I was passed out on the sofa.”

“You seem to have recovered from your stupor earlier,” Mike retorts, handing Tré the bowl and tossing the lighter at him. “The message was on the machine from Dale and he just said that we got the contract and that we should show up at his offices tomorrow to sign the papers. I’ve already called off work; signing this is more important than any job.”

“I have to call Rosie too,” I muse thoughtfully, rubbing at my forehead. “I’ll call her tomorrow morning.”

There’s a bit of a silence around the apartment which I spend thinking about how much of my future was going to change tomorrow once the ink dried on the contract. But then Mike coughs and looks up at me, suddenly serious.

“What did you do with Abigail tonight?”

“Fuck,” I hiss, standing up and looking around me quickly. Of course the room was empty. “Did either one of you see Abigail walk into the room?”

Tré wrinkles his nose, a steady stream of smoke pouring out of his nostrils as he shakes his head. “Was she with you in the hallway?”

“Yes,” I groan, wrenching open the front door and peering down the hallway. It was late at night, obviously everyone was in bed asleep or out partying, so the corridor remains dark and uninhabited. I close the door and groan, fisting a chunk of hair in my hands. “I can’t believe she just left like that.”

“Well you were practically ignoring her,” Tré supplies helpfully as he takes another hit from the bowl. His voice becomes strained and thin as he struggles to speak before he exhales. “She doesn’t strike me as the type to wait around for someone to acknowledge her.”

“Because you know so much about her,” I snap, throwing myself back onto the sofa. The springs groan in protest and a stony silence thunders down upon the apartment. I knew I was ruining our celebration by getting caught up on this one girl, but at this point, I didn’t care. Abigail and I had been having a good time and the minute I don’t get to shower all of my attention on her, she runs away.

Maybe she’s just getting back at you, like when you ditched her at Gilman’s for dinner with Rob. A little voice announces in the back of my head. I’m stupefied by this sudden revelation and I briefly consider the fact that perhaps she was trying to get back at me.

But then the more rational sane part of me interrupts. Can I really see Abigail stooping to such a petty level? She probably wasn’t even that bothered when I didn’t show up in the alleyway; she has guys hanging off of her left and right. Knowing her, she most likely just moved on to her next prey of the night and I was the last thing on her mind.

This disgusts me. I like to think that I’m the only one who can capture her attention so completely and effortlessly. It makes me feel better to rationalize her disappearance like this in my mind, though I’m fully aware of the fact that it may or may not be true.

I realize with a sudden jolt in my stomach that I don’t know a lot about Abigail. She was difficult for me to read, which was a rarity when it comes to girls. Normally I’m fairly good at being able to pick out their moods or thoughts on their faces. But she was a complete mystery to me. She was sarcastic and biting and cool but she intrigued me. Honestly she was the first girl in the longest time that presented any sort of challenge for me. And I wanted to rise to the occasion and take the bait. I wanted to make Abigail my own.

Mike breaks the silence awkwardly. “You know Beej, we’re going back to play at Gilman’s tomorrow night like normal. She’ll most likely be there; you can explain what happened and apologize to her then.”

“You’re right,” I murmur quietly, reaching for my beer on the coffee table. “I’ll make things right then.”