Boys, Beers and Bad Behavior

“These stars are beautiful,” Tessa, my best friend says, her chin to the sky and she’s spinning around, her cowboy boots spraying dust onto the both of us. Her red hair is blowing wildly in the Californian breeze and she’s holding a virtually empty bottle of vodka in one hand and her other hand is flapping wildly towards the sky. I tip my head up but I can’t make out anything but the fuzzy way my brain reminds me that I am constantly making bad decisions, so I frown. “Tess,” I drop my head back down and blink, trying to clear some of the fog that permanently seeps across my eyes. “We’re lost in like, the desert,” I say, although if I’m honest, I wouldn’t have a clue right now if this was the desert or freaking Walmart. Tess grins at me. “Well, sorry,” she holds her hands up in defense. “Here’s me looking on the bright side,” but she interrupts herself with a hiccup which quickly turns into laughter. I observe her, fascinated as her face changes into a cackling laugh, her head thrown back and her chest vibrating as the laughter consumes her body. “I don’t get it,” I shrug, although I know I’m grinning. Tess is like this – infectious. She has the kind of light around her that makes me want to jump headfirst into who knows what and be all in, who cares about the consequences. The girl has been my best friend for only around a year, just after the beginning of my family’s f****d up problems and without even knowing it, the girl pulled me back from the brink. She’s the rock every person deserves to have, and by God, I am never letting her go. “The bright side,” she exaggerates, flapping her hands up to the sky, to the stars. “You get it?” I do, but I shake my head at her and reach out to take the bottle of vodka from her grasp. “Now, don’t go drinking it all.” I warn, teasingly. Tessa throws her arms over my shoulders and pulls me in. I can smell her strawberry body wash and the mixture of cigarettes and vodka. I would hate the smell on anyone else, but because it’s her, I think it’s up there as being one of my most favorite smells. And that’s the thing about familiarity. Once you have it, once you’re used to it, life without it can never be the same. I chug down the remaining vodka even though my throat burns and my eyes are starting to severely water. I can feel it churning already in my nearly empty stomach and I rush over to the bushes to throw up a little of what I just drank. “Oh, Neve,” Tessa giggles. “What a waste.” I hear her stumble over to me and I don’t have to be a genius to know she is fiddling with the back of my black hair and is trying to pull it out of my face. I puke once and now I can’t stop. I retch until my stomach pulls and my throat burns – now from the taste of puke rather than the coating of vodka. My head is spinning as I crash onto the floor and Tessa joins me. “We really need to find out where we are.” I think I hear her say but my head is already doing a three-sixty to concentrate for a few seconds. I am distantly aware she is on the phone and in what feels like no time at all, a car pulls up and we both get in. I don’t know who is driving, perhaps she’s called a cab though knowing Tessa it’s probably whoever she has on speed dial at the moment. I am tucked up on Tessa’s lap with my best friend stroking my hair when she starts to shake me, telling me we’re home. There’s something about the phrase I’m home that makes me want to head back to the nearest store and find someone else to buy us another bottle of alcohol. This is the last place on earth I want to be and if another bottle of vodka can make me forget this place exists, so be it. “I’ll help you inside,” Tessa pulls on my arm and she unlocks the front door using the spare key hidden under a plant pot. Not the safest thing considering we live in a wealthy area on the outskirts of LA. But my parents are blind to the rise in crime like they about pretty much everything else. Once Tessa has figured out the lock, we enter the house. It’s dark and quiet and although I suspect my parents know I have been out all night, neither of them will bother to reprimand me until tomorrow morning (okay, more like afternoon) and even if they do bother to say anything, they know it does nothing but go in one ear and out the other. Somehow we manage the stairs right to the top where my bedroom is located. Despite the large house, I moved from my original bedroom a year ago to the converted attic room. Tessa tucks me into bed, tossing my comforter over me before leaning down to kiss my cheek and fleeing through my notorious open window. I barely spare another thought before I am completely knocked out. * “The corpse is awake, Steven. Look, here is she is in the flesh.” I don’t even bother to respond to her. Mom is sitting on the island with an apple in one hand, her phone in the other. She has a newspaper in front of her and is circling all the articles she finds on death. It’s one of her weird quirks we all pretend not to notice but still do. Dad is pouring coffee into a mug that he immediately hands to me. “I don’t think copses look as bad as that,” he’s trying to be funny. Like this is a usual Saturday morning in the Thomas household. Cracking jokes and drinking expensive coffee. “You’re both literally so annoying.” I hear them both laugh and I glare. They don’t need to keep the charade up when it’s only the three of us here. “I mean, seriously, don’t you both have something to do on a Saturday morning than comment on my appearance?” I haven’t got a clue what time I got in last night, but it can’t have been too late because I have woken up before noon on the weekend which I don’t think has ever happened since I was fourteen. I crash down onto another stall around the kitchen island and put my head in my hands. I am hanging out my ass and my head is banging as if I have my own version of a symphony going on inside my head. “The wedding reception for Amy is later,” I watch as Mom eyes me warily, ignoring my remark. “You need to be ready to leave at five.” I roll my eyes. My cousin is on her, what, third marriage now and she’s twenty-nine. I have all the respect in the world for doing what you wanna do, but getting married three times? No thanks. I don’t understand how she can be bothered with the hassle. “Why do I have to go?” I shoot a look at Dad because this might be the single thing in the world we agree on right now. “We don’t even like her.” Dad raises an eyebrow as Mom interjects. “Oh, for Christ sake Nevaeh, she’s your family.” Well we all know how little that means in this house, is what I’m desperate to fire back at her. But the last time I said something, they kicked me out for a week and Tess and I had to bunk up in her Mom’s druggie apartment downtown. It was not good. Dad jumps in. “Just try to look happy, darling. That’s all we want. We’re only going to the reception, so you have skipped the boring bit.” I know what he’s trying to do. Good cop, bad cop and maybe it would work if my twin sister wasn’t dead and it wasn’t all their fault. Maybe it would work if mom would finally get her eyes tested and know dad’s work trips are for seeing his girlfriend of three years and not because he’s fascinated with the trade market in f*****g Nebraska. “Emotions are messy,” I shoot a dagger to him and place down my drained coffee mug. “It’s why I tend to not have them.” “You sure you don’t want to go to theatre school?” Dad smiles and I want to punch his face. Being on stage and acting was her thing. I almost wish I still had a full mug of coffee to throw into his smug face. “I think you’re thinking of paint, darling,” Mom smirks. It takes every ounce of strength in me to not roll my eyes again. I feel like I am stuck in a permanent cycle of eye-rolling and glaring. If I wasn’t already short-sighted, I would guarantee my lack of vision would be caused by the constant state of my eyes are in whenever I am in close proximity to my parents. “I’m going to bed,” I announce after a moment and grab a brown looking banana from the fruit bowl. “But you’ve just got up,” “Yeah, well…” I look around the kitchen and pull a face. “I think my bed is better company.” And with that, I trot away, not knowing that later that night, my life would literally go up in flames.