Lightheaded

Chapter 2 - Trains That Just Aren't Coming

Early September, 2013

Hangovers had never really been an issue for Jillian. She’d wake up and throw up in the toilet and that was it, it’d be over with. Until the morning after Zayn’s party.

Alcohol was one of the few things that shut off Jillian’s mind and let her sleep through the night (which wasn’t at all healthy, but it was true), so she was confused and disoriented when she woke up to light just barely filtering through the cracks in her blinds. There was a warm body next to hers and she realized she had no idea where she was and suddenly her body felt overwhelmed.

When her eyes flew open, her head was pounding and her stomach was churning. The realization that she was in her and Harry’s apartment hit her quickly, enough that she had time to kick the covers off and make a run for the bathroom. She didn’t quite get that far though.

Her feet landed on the icy, hardwood floor for maybe half a second before she found her knees buckling underneath her, her vision off for some reason.

Jilly?!”

There was the sound of sheets rustling and someone shuffling. She realized she couldn’t see at all, all of a sudden, but her head was too foggy to determine if her eyes had shut again or not. She almost felt submerged in water, her limbs heavy and slow, not quite drowning but trapped below the surface for some unknown reason.

Jillian.”

The voice registered, low and tired but filled with concern, though she knew it was Harry and that had to mean she was okay. Harry would never let anything happen to her.

“Jillian, look at me.”

The longer she stayed in her little heap on the floor, the less intense everything seemed to be. Eventually she realized the floor was cold and there was a warm body huddled in front of her. She still felt like she needed to vomit but maybe not as immediately as she’d once thought, and her head felt like it was attached to her body again.

It took her a few seconds to blink her eyes into focus, she was still unsure if they’d been open or shut, but when they did all she saw was the terrified look splashed over Harry’s features.

“S-sorry.”

She could see he was scared, she was scared too (particularly because he was scared), and she felt guilty. She wanted to understand what was happening, what her body was doing. She wanted to tell him she was okay. But she couldn’t think straight to assure herself, let alone speak and tell him.

“Why’re you apologizing?” his eyes widened even more, “Are you alright?”

She nodded slowly, “I-I need to throw up I think.”

His tired eyes nearly popped out of his head, “D-do you want me to get something? Or take you to the bathroom?”

She wasn’t sure she’d be able to make it to the bathroom if she started to move, but she didn’t really want Harry to be stuck with a bowl of her vomit. She’d just put him through enough.

“C-can you just help me to the bathroom?” she blinked harshly, trying to focus her head and her eyes, “Please?”

She didn’t need to ask twice. One arm was tightly wound around her waist and the other was steadying his own weight as he hauled them both off the floor, as carefully as possible. As soon as Jillian was upright though, everything was just as terrible and overwhelming as before. She shut her eyes and rested herself against him, willing her stomach not to empty itself before they made it to the bathroom.

The tile of their cramped bathroom was even colder than the hardwood throughout the rest of the apartment but Jillian welcomed it. She felt like her body was on fire. As soon as she was on her knees in front of the toilet, she couldn’t hold herself together anymore and her stomach was emptying itself over and over again.

Harry’s soothing voice was in her ear, telling her sweet things she couldn’t really decipher, and his hands were gently brushing up and down her spine as her body shook. She was scared. She never threw up unless something was really wrong and she’d never thrown up like this because she’d gotten a little too drunk. And from what she remembered, which she was sure was most of the night, she hadn’t been particularly incapacitated. Maybe a little too drunk to go home with someone or make good decisions, but she hadn’t been blackout drunk. Not so much that her throat should be on fire and her world on its side.

“W-what’s wrong with me?” she was able to ask finally, swiping the back of her hand across her mouth, feeling utterly disgusting, as welled up tears began to spill.

“You had a lot to drink last night, Jilly,” but the crease in between his brows told her differently. He was trying to reassure the both of them while his brain worked, while it turned things over and over and collected minute details and finally came up with a rational conclusion.

“I-I never puke like this, Harry,” she cried, the fear and dizziness a little too much, though the nausea had died down a bit with her stomach empty.

“I know,” he smiled sadly at her and reached his hand out to rest the back of it against her forehead, testing her temperature, “You’re gonna be alright.”

She wanted to believe him.

He helped her to her feet and let her use his Listerine and when she thought he was going to put her back to bed, he brought her out to the living room. It’d become homier in the past few weeks, filled with mismatched furniture and blankets from IKEA and thrift stores, framed pictures, thrifted knick knacks. She was beginning to love it.

“What’re you doing?” she sniffled still a little shivery and feeling off.

“This is closer to the toilet,” he sat her on the couch, “‘M gonna go get more pillows and blankets.”

Jillian felt like everything had been drained out of her body as she nodded, pulling her knees up to her chest. She felt miserable, worse than all the times she’d had the flu combined. Worse than when a boy in middle school gave her mono.

Harry returned quickly, now dressed in an old pair of sweatpants and a tee shirt, nearly out of breath with his arms piled high with pillows and blankets. She wanted to giggle with how ridiculous he looked but she couldn’t find the energy. Instead she let him build a cocoon on the sofa and help her into it.

“Where’re you going?” she pouted, still sniffling, when she realized he wasn’t sliding in next to her. He’d scooped up an old pair of Converse at some point and was shoving his feet into them, sat on the edge of the sofa next to her.

“The drugstore,” he turned his head to smile at her softly, worry lines still tucked neatly between his brows, “Don’t want you to get proper sick, do we?”

Jillian’s heart fluttered. She loved him so much, for putting up with her drunk ass and for taking care of her and for being her absolute best friend.

“No. Guess not.”

*

Jillian recovered quickly, almost miraculously if her or Harry had believed in those sorts of things. Whether it was the bag filled with vitamins and supplements and fever reducers that Harry had picked up so early in the morning or not, by that Saturday afternoon she was back to normal.

Sunday morning she was back to work, despite Harry’s protests. He’d begged and pleaded, told her he needed her help looking for more (paying) jobs to apply for (which wasn’t true, he had an interview on Monday afternoon and another on Tuesday morning). But she refused. She knew she needed the money and the fresh air, and she vaguely remembered making a bet with Zayn the night before that he wouldn’t come in.

The air was turning crisper in the morning and evening, though the leaves weren’t changing yet, and by the time Jillian made it the short distance toy shop she wished she’d worn a jacket.

“There she is!” Zayn’s voice rang through the small shop as soon as he unlocked it for her, “In the flesh! On her own two feet! Ten minutes late as usual!”

“Oh, fuck off,” she mumbled, rubbing her hands up and down her biceps in an attempt to warm herself up, “All you had to do was get dressed and come downstairs. I certainly wasn’t going to lose to you when you had such an unfair advantage”

He grinned brightly, a sight Jillian had learned to be rare for most people, “Nor I you. I’ll make you a deal, if you wipe down the counters, I’ll run out for coffee. My treat, yeah?”

Jillian screwed up her face, convinced there must be a catch, “But we both lost.”

“I know,” he smirked, walking over to the counter to shove a bookmark in the worn book he’d been reading while he waited for her to show, “But you’re no use to me if you’re complaining of hypothermia. Who’ll do all my dirty work?”

She giggled, “No catch?”

He smiled, softly and warmly, “No catch, Jillian.”

It was a busy Sunday, unusually busy for the time of year Zayn told her, but they fell into the rhythm they’d found in the past few weeks easily. She found Zayn easy to be around, easy to get along with. He was an English major, always a book in his hand, which meant the conversation was never boring. To others he was hard and quiet and difficult to read, but Jillian had melted his exterior easily.

By the time closing came around, six on Sunday, Jillian wasn’t sure where most of the day had gone. Zayn was going on about some friend in a band and Jillian was half listening, nodding and humming neutral reactions as she reorganized a display of stuffed animals.

“So you’ll come?”

Jillian pulled herself out of her head, away from what her and Harry would have for dinner and what boxes her paints and brushes were in, and glanced over at him to blink obliviously.

“Wednesday night? To the gig?” he prodded, a half smile on his face as he looked back to the dishevelled table of picture books he was reorganizing, “You can bring Harry along, I suppose. So long as he doesn’t cockblock you again.”

She rolled her eyes, remembering how she’d ranted about it to him via text while she was stuck on the sofa the previous day, “I’ll talk to him.”

“Do you two ever make a decision without consulting each other?” there was a teasing tone to his voice, though his words struck a chord, “I think you two were meant to be twins rather than best mates.”

For some reason it stuck. It dug its way under her skin and made it itch. She never wanted to come off as codependent or needy, but her and Harry had always been that way. They’d always done everything together, they’d always been a unit, and a hell of a lot closer than her and her actual brother.

She wondered if that was a part of her problem, the reason she couldn’t fully and wholly find and love herself or be happy as her own person. Not because she’d lived in a suffocating suburb her whole life or because she’d attached herself to all the wrong people. Maybe it was because she’d attached herself a little too tightly to the right person. And even more concerning, maybe that was obvious from the outside looking in, even here in a brand new city with brand new friends who hadn’t watched her and Harry’s roots grow and tangle themselves together.

She swallowed harshly and ignored the itch under her skin, for then at least, “I’ll come. Whether Harry does or not.”

Zayn’s face lit up with one of those grins again, which made it a bit easier to forget the feeling forming, “Brilliant.”

Jillian walked back to the apartment with a funny feeling in the pit of her stomach, under her skin, in her fingers. The sun wasn’t quite setting yet but the sky looked different and there was a chill to the air and everything just felt off. Like the world was on its side and she was stuck in somebody else’s body. It was something she hadn’t felt in a while, since long before they’d left for New York and she’d thought she’d crushed it.

She didn’t particularly want to go home. She didn’t even want to check her phone. She knew there would be messages from Harry, links to stupid Buzzfeed quizzes and questions about what she wanted for dinner, emails from her mom, they’d become a daily occurrence because their schedules never seemed to line up for a phone call, and social media notifications from her old friends who she didn’t really know anymore mixed with her new friends that she didn’t know at all yet either. Everything was different in the biggest and slightest ways and it made everything feel a little unreal.

She stopped at the first corner store she saw and bought a cheap pack of cigarettes. She didn’t like to smoke, she hated cigarettes in fact. It had been ingrained in her, with her mother being a nurse and all. But sometimes when she got that feeling under her skin, she needed to do something stupid and impulsive. Sometimes it was as simple as tearing up a painting she’d worked on for months, sometimes it was as reckless as going to a party and getting shitfaced after turning her phone off. Right then it was smaller and less harmful, but she knew in the back of her head it was still a setback. She was meant to be getting better.

She walked another block with a lit cigarette in one hand and her phone still on Do Not Disturb in the other, her hair blowing around her. The more she walked and the more her cigarette burned, the shitter she felt. She wasn’t supposed to be filled with angst and anxiety, set off by something insignificant anymore.

When she caught a crosswalk at the wrong time, a hoard of people waiting impatiently for a break in traffic in front of her, the bubbling guilt was too much. She scraped the cigarette out on the side of a building and shoved the butt in her back pocket and her phone in her bag, leaving the brand new pack on a windowsill. Someone else could use them more. She just hoped she didn’t smell bad enough for Harry to notice.

Before she unlocked the front door, she tried to slap a smile on her face. She didn’t want to worry him for not answering his texts or for smelling a little like cheap tobacco. She didn’t want to talk. She wanted to paint. For the first time in weeks.

“Jilly?” his voice rang through the apartment as soon as she shoved the door open, less echoey now that they had some real furniture.

“‘M home,” she kept her voice as light as she could. She could smell something drifting across the living room from the kitchen. She kicked her shoes off and followed it.

“Hey,” he spun around with a genuine smile on his face and held his arms out, “How was work?”

He was still dressed in the same pair of sweatpants he had been all weekend but now with a clean shirt and an apron Jillian’s mom had bought her when she was going through a baking phase. It was white with a purple floral print all over it. That was enough to make a hint of a real smile crack on her face.

“Alright,” she shrugged, wrapping her arms around him and quickly changing the subject, “What’re you cooking, chef?”

He hugged her tightly, chest rumbling under her ear with a laugh, “Um, well, not exactly sure yet. Throwing a few things I found together. I’ll let you know when I figure it out.”

“Sounds perfect,” she leaned up and left a light kiss on his cheek before pulling away and disappearing to her room, knowing he’d chalk it up to some idea whirling around in her head rather than something actually wrong. She was grateful, she wasn’t sure what was wrong or if anything actually was. She just knew she needed to get rid of the itch and the words in her head.

Her room was still a disaster area. There were dirty clothes strewn everywhere, cut open (but still unpacked) boxes along every wall, her mattress still on the floor and unmade. She stood in the middle of it all for a minute, hands curled into fists, trying to ground herself, remind herself this was her room and her life now. This was the choice she had made, this was the life she had chosen, whether it felt real or like she fit into it yet or not.

And then she tore into the first box she saw marked ‘JILLY’S ART SHIT’ in Harry’s big, boxy letters.

Jillian knew her art never fit into a perfect little box, and neither did she. She knew what she liked to make and what she liked to look at but she wasn’t ever sure what she made or what she was good at. She knew she was an artist, just as simply as she knew her own name. She knew she preferred acrylics over watercolors as naturally as she knew she was right handed. But she just didn’t have a niche, or maybe she hadn’t found it yet (which was what most people tried to assure her).

Usually she was all over the place, which had been fine in middle school and acceptable in high school but now she was in college. She liked to paint still life with eerie elements tied in, she liked to create hyper-realistic portraits before defacing them in some way. She liked to journal and collage and doodle over everything. She wanted to do everything. She wanted to be everything.

When she had sat down at her desk, she hadn’t unpacked more than her current journal, a set of paints, a few necessary brushes, a binder of magazine clippings, and a few more odds and ends. She wasn’t ready to tackle anything bigger, that usually meant untangling whatever web had spun itself in her head that week. A few journal pages would be enough to get the itch out from under the skin and make the feeling in her stomach, that hadn’t left since she’d closed shop, dissolve.

She worked until it was dark out, until the images in her head had been played out as closely as she could get them on the page. She worked until her fingers were sticky and the joints of them ached and her stomach was growling and there was an incessant tapping on her bedroom door.

“Come in,” she called, blinking harshly at the dim light she’d let herself slip into, wondering briefly how long he’d been knocking.

“How is it?” he asked with a hopeful smile and she shrugged, still pulling herself back down to earth again, “Dinner’s ready.”

Dinner had turned out to be some sort of casserole Harry had found a recipe for online that only required things they already had. Neither of them had mastered grocery shopping or cooking yet, but their options (and budget) were running low, so Harry had clearly taken it upon himself to make sure they didn’t starve.

Mostly, she listened to Harry talk and fill her in on everything she’d missed. He told her about the jobs he applied for and what their old friends were complaining about on Facebook. She listened diligently, nodding when appropriate but not contributing much. That funny feeling hadn’t left like it was supposed to. It was still there, just like Zayn’s words in her head.

“Zayn invited us to his friend’s show,” she was hesitant to bring it up for some reason, she was never hesitant to speak her mind around Harry and she didn’t like it, “Wednesday night.”

Harry’s fork had been halfway to his mouth but his hand paused, “Us?”

“Yeah, us,” she rolled her eyes, trying to brush it off and not let it spark that feeling up just a little more, “Why’re you saying it like that?”

Harry shrugged, “He’s your friend.”

“I met him first,” she clarified, “That doesn’t mean he can’t be your friend too.”

Harry eyed her and shoved his forkful into his mouth, chewing slowly before swallowing, “What kinda show?”

Jillian nearly sighed audibly. She’d be able to convince him to come, Harry loved music almost as much as writing. She just needed to get rid of the words in her head and the uneasy feeling all over.

*

They met up outside of Zayn’s apartment, and the toy shop. Jillian had that electric feeling flowing through her, the same on she’d had the night of Zayn’s party, but this time it was different, with one arm linked through Harry’s and the other through Kelsie’s. She was nervous. From what she remembered of Zayn’s party, his friends were a lot like him. Cool and collected, a hard group to break into with their upturned chins and eccentric style. But she liked them, from what she remembered. She liked their stories and their pretentious taste in drinks. She wanted to fit in with them. She wanted them to like her back.

They were all congregated under a street light on Zayn’s corner, smoking, when Jillian spotted them. They were even more intimidating in the dim light, all dark clothes and tall bodies and sharp laughs. She wanted to be a part of it, with her cream, tunic dress and tan boots and shaky knees. (x)

“Jillian!” Zayn spotted them first, a smirk on his face and a lit cigarette dangling between his fingers. He was standing on the fringe of the rest of the group, clearly waiting for them.

“Hey,” she smiled letting him pull her into a hug as the nerves in her stomach intensified. He greeted Harry and Kelsie before turning to introduce them to the rest of his group.

Their clique was an eclectic one. The core consisted of Zayn and his on-again off-again girlfriend, Nina with her short dark hair, red lips, and leather jackets; Jade and her witchy aesthetic, all plum lips, long black hair, and wide brimmed hats (even at night); finished out with Ryan the quietest of them all, tall and broad with red hair and never seen without vintage wire rimmed glasses or a collared shirt.

Jillian felt intimidated and out of place with just one look at them, despite her own eccentricity. She felt lacking and inferior, like a freshman that somehow snagged senior lunch privileges. Except these weren’t like the seniors at her old high school, they didn’t care for pep rallies or the mall, they were different but better, like her but cooler. They were an image of what she’d aspired to be when she left her suffocating hometown, but hadn’t yet reached.

They seemed to welcome all of them though, as they walked to the subway station nearest to Zayn’s apartment, in their own ways. Jade immediately sidled up to Jillian and Harry as they walked, curious as to where she found her round, vintage sunglasses, and suddenly she didn’t feel so silly for having them perched on her head when the sun had long since set. Kelsie fell into step with Ryan behind them and it was entertaining to catch pieces of their conversation (Kelsie’s mostly), with the smaller girl being so loud and bright and the larger boy being so quiet and broody.

The nervousness was gone by the time they were waiting for their train to Brooklyn, to whatever shitty little bar Zayn’s friend could get them into and that electric feeling had taken over Jillian again. It was so picturesque, just how she'd imagined it, her and a group of older, cooler, misfits that didn’t care so much about being misfits anymore, with their dark clothes and observant eyes, waiting in the dim, almost blue light. She could fit there, she thought, eventually, like a spare puzzle piece in their lopsided little jigsaw, one no one had even noticed was missing until they found it.
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Hi again, something very important happened here and I'd love to hear your thoughts on my fic blog here! The extra of the chapter can be found here. Thanks for sticking around. x