“Do you have any more of those?”
Lottie’s left palm clasped together at the sound of the question. In hand was her tiny orange bottle of pills–labelled Loxapine–and the singular one she’d managed to tip out through shaking hands into her right palm. Correction, the singular of the bottle at all. Standing in front of her was Shauna Shipman, looking straight at her, ready to make a deal.
Lottie’s head tilted to the side as Shauna shook her own. “Not for me, it’s for Jackie. She forgot to ask Jeff to ask Kevyn about getting some, you know–stuff for tonight. She’s been complaining about it all night.” She gestured to the nearby corner of the overgrown backyard of Randy Walsh.
Lottie followed her gaze. In said corner, Jackie stood with her big blue bug eyes and a White Claw in hand. She flashed the quickest smile to the two before returning her eyes right back to Jeff, making a clear effort that she was so not listening. Lottie had known the honey blonde girl since grade school, never close enough to truly know her, not like Shauna did, but she could always tell when she was listening in.
“You do know these are just sedatives, right? Not the funnest thing I could imagine taking at a party,” says Lottie, dryly. She’d know after all, she took them every day of her life. It had been anything but a party for her.
“It’s whatever. Better than being sober at a Randy Walsh party, right?” Shauna shrugs.
“I couldn’t imagine anything worse,” Lottie lies.
Thanks to her so-called best friend Laura Lee cancelling the moment Lottie finished getting ready for the party (sorry–Church service is starting early tomorrow!) Lottie was left with two choices: take a quick trip to the liquor store alone (boring) or hope that some guy or girl would see her standing all alone and offer her something (a little less boring). She decided the latter would be a little more fun.
She’d already taken one of her pills, which is one more than her usual daily dose. The one still dangling in her hand, embracing her palm ever so slightly, was so she could feel at least a bit less in her body than she did on the daily. The buzzing of racing thoughts in her head just hadn’t stopped today. Although she was used to it, it’s all she wanted right now.
Staring at Lottie and her contemplation in tow, Shauna rolled her eyes. She dug briskly into the back pocket of her Levi’s boyfriend jeans. A crumpled twenty dollar note was thrust into Lottie’s right hand, squeezed tight by the Shipman girl.
There was an irony to all this. Her wealthy parents had always warned her inside of her white picket fence prison cell to never take candy from strangers. But here she was, handing out pills like it was just a little game.
But Shauna had batted her eyes, and how could she say no to that?
“Alright, if you say so,” Lottie murmured. She took the orange bottle in her hand, tipping the final one into her hand. She slipped it into Shauna’s hand for Jackie.
“Geez, I’m like a full blown drug dealer now,” Lottie huffs with a muffled laugh. Her dainty hands found themselves falling into the pockets of her brown corduroy jackets, she slumped into herself.
Shauna’s lips curved upwards with a small smile. She put the last dose of Lottie’s prescribed medication into her pocket, and Lottie put the now empty bottle in her pocket.
“I really owe you, thank you so much Lottie,” Shauna exhales.
“It’s nothing. Just don’t blame me when it doesn’t turn out exactly how you–”
“Lottie! Shaunaaaaa!”
Lottie sighed. Jackie was nothing if not a dog with a bone.
Her arms collapsed over the top of Lottie. She could almost smell the giddiness of the girl through the bouncing up and down of her golden Tiffany heart necklace. Yay, drugs.
“Thank you very much for this,” Jackie practically sang. She found herself dipping her freshly manicured hand into Shauna’s back pocket herself.
Lottie narrowed her eyes. Maybe Jackie truly was the better recipient of a dose of 150mg of Loxapine over Lottie. Maybe it would be just the thing to take the edge off, say, her six standard drinks she’d had that night? Lottie was unsure of what to make of her decision of giving in to Shauna and Jackie’s request, but Jackie thrusting the remainder of her canned alcoholic beverage into her hand caused it to slip her mind.
“You should try this, it’s like, so watermelon,” Jackie smiles, gleefully. Lottie couldn’t help but feel a smile spreading across her face. She chugged it in a deep gulp and returned it to Jackie.
“Also, if you wanna find some stuff to replace these little things, go find Natalie. She’s the one with the bleach fucked hair, probably surrounded by a cloud of Malboro Red flavoured smoke,” Jackie says.
Lottie’s brows furrowed. “Why didn’t you just go to her yourself?”
Jackie’s laugh could probably be heard by everybody at the party. “Oh, she just doesn’t like me. For no reason at all.” Right.
Playing with the pill in her palm, Jackie eyes it eagerly. She washes it down with the final drops of her drink not taken by Lottie, and puts the empty can and grasps onto Shauna’s hand. Shauna’s gaze returns to Jackie with an eager eyed stare.
“I need to find a trash can, let’s go Shauna,” Jackie says–tells her friend. Shauna exhales.
“Thanks again, Lot,” she says. “If I ever need to find myself a dealer with the really good shit, you know who I’ll be coming to.”
Jackie drags her away before Lottie could even say that she’s sure she would.
Armed with nothing but a blood alcohol level of 0.01%, Lottie sets out to find herself a Natalie. It had taken about a moment without her medication to realise why she was wanting to take the other in the first place. With Shauna and Jackie nowhere in sight now, she could feel her prescribed mask wearing off.
Placebo effect or not–she yearned for a quiet mind. Why she even came to this thing when she knew she was going to be alone was beside her. She supposed it was because she thought she’d at least get to watch people like she wanted to, but it’s a bit harder when your head starts to get louder and reality begins to explode.
“If you wanna find some stuff to replace these little things, go find Natalie.”
And so she would.
Randy Walsh’s house had really fucking high ceilings. Stepping indoors, it made her feel like a teeny little ant just waiting to be crushed. She drifts through the halls of people, bumping into the shoulders of her fellow peers at Wiskayok High and the surrounding schools. Every time she would, she’d mutter a quick ‘sorry’ so they wouldn’t step on her. Like an ant.
Lottie would have tried to follow the trail of cigarette smoke outside if she hadn’t already seen everybody outside for the past hour. There had been no sign of a fried blonde hair girl, and no other clues to go off of. She hunted for the sight of Natalie as if she was her prey.
After scavenging around the house, she deemed it nearly hopeless. Nearly.
Her spot on the bench outside was calling her name. Maybe she could’ve just called Laura Lee, surely she would’ve picked up? Then she would’ve been able to skip the embarrassment of calling her parents or the inconvenience of figuring out how to get the bus back to her home.
As the cold air hits her harshly, Lottie catches sight of the girl.
Jackie wasn’t wrong, her hair really was fucked up. Her bangs looked tailor made with kitchen scissors by a teenage girl having a depressive episode. Her features were even sharper than kitchen scissors–with collarbones honed in carefully and her cheekbones carefully cut by the gods.
Natalie’s storm cloud of smoke was there too. Lottie didn’t think they were Marlboros though, sensing a hint of Newport’s classic scent instead. The smoke clouds floated around Natalie, who had been dressed in straight leg denim wash jeans, a scruffy top, and a well worn black leather jacket. Her feet sported fake Doc Martens 1460’s. Lottie could tell because they didn’t have the yellow thread peeking out through the bottom.
Lottie steps out of her body and takes a look at herself, up and down. She didn’t seem like the person that would talk to someone like Natalie. For Christ’s sake, she was wearing a lacy white sundress at a high school party. It’s not like it mattered anyway. People asked people for drugs all the time, right?
Lottie breathed in, and began her way up to the girl with a Jackie Taylor inspired pep in her step.
Natalie noticed her almost immediately, looking up at Lottie with widened eyes. Lottie felt like a deer in headlines with the way Nat is holding her cigarette like it’s going somewhere and nursing a red solo cup nearly out of what Lottie assumes is some type of tap beer.
“Natalie?” Lottie asks.
She stares at her.
“Nat,” she corrects, narrowing her eyes with a smile.
Lottie shifts in her stance, a sense of awkwardness shifting from leg to leg.
“Nat, sorry,” Lottie says, almost beginning to sit down before she quickly changes her mind. Was sitting down beside someone who must be a drug dealer a bit too casual? Would she sense that she wasn’t the type of girl who had asked for drugs before?
“Are you… are you the one who’s got stuff?” she asks, voice trailing off weakly at the end of her sentence. Nat’s smile stays spread across her face.
“Sure, I could be,” Nat says, beckoning her head over to the spot on the bench beside her. Lottie’s startled, but quickly plants herself beside the girl. “What kind of stuff are you looking for, sweetheart?”
“Lottie,” she blurts, quickly.
“Lottie,” Nat smiles, tilting her head to the side.
In the scenario in her mind, Lottie hadn’t exactly gotten this far. She’d never taken anything that wasn’t prescribed straight from her best friends at the Wiskayok Dispensary Clinic so she wasn’t really too sure what stuff was good and what stuff wasn’t. Fuck, what would Jackie Taylor have done in the situation?
Thinking about it again, it probably wasn’t the best to do whatever Jackie would do. She’d probably had tried to seduce whoever it was to get what she wanted. Besides, Jackie said Nat didn’t like her very much. To Jackie, her saying someone not liking her very much was as close to hatred as one could get without saying the word itself.
“Um, just whatever, I guess. Something good?” Lottie hesitates, fidgeting with the bottle in her jacket pocket.
Nat doesn’t break her eye contact as she brings her cigarette to her lips. She breathes in the smoke deeply, turning away from Lottie as she goes to exhale. Lottie watches with a timid stance as Nat turns back to her, her eyes glancing from Lottie’s pocket and back to her.
“So, what’s with the pill bottle? You on meds or something?” Nat asks, eyes locking in to Lottie’s fidgeting hand.
There’s a new tone in Nat’s voice. It’s not judgemental, Lottie thinks, it’s more of a considerate one.
“Oh, it’s nothing. It’s just for like, anxiety and stuff,” Lottie blabbers.
Nat leans forward to her ever so slightly. “And stuff?”
Lottie shrugs. She hangs her head low at the thought of the question, inching back away from Nat in case she can hear her heart beat start to speed up from the closeness of the shaggy haired girl. Nat doesn’t break eye contact, clearly waiting for some sort of answer to satisfy her.
“It’s just Loxapine,” Lottie admits.
“Oh, I see,” Nat snickers. “So you’re one of those crazy bitches, right?”
Lottie glares as the buzzing returns to her head. The weight of Nat’s words lingers for a moment. She then rose to her feet with tightly pursed lips and her breath hitched. “Just forget it–”.
She turns her back to Nat, the cold air hitting her hard in her face. Her thoughts build up and her body tightens. She’s been telling herself all along that it was fine, that she’d be fine. It was all just a dream.
“Hey, I didn’t mean it like that–” Nat says.
Her tone, it's not unkind. Although in a way, Lottie can’t think to figure it out with the millions of things going on in her mind. Her thoughts are travelling, they’re racing.
“I don’t care,” Lottie smiles, sharply. “It’s fine, just forget about it Nat.”
“Lottie.”
She whips back around to the lover of leather jackets, the user of black eyeliner with a tendency to smudge it on the sides. Nat hadn’t looked away for even a moment.
“I really didn’t mean it like that. It’s just, you don’t know how dangerous it is to mix pills with those kinds of pills. You just don’t seem like the kind of girl who would need to take pills like that, let alone do something like that, you know,” Nat began.
She looked up at the taller girl with forgivable beady eyes. Lottie isn’t sure what to make of any of that.
“You don’t even know me, Natalie,” Lottie says.
Scratching at the back of her neck, Nat lets out a small, yet rough laugh.
“Sheesh, I guess you’re right.”
Lottie continues to stare.
Nat gets to her feet, flicking away the remainder of her cigarette onto the floor. Her left shoe to her knockoff Doc Martens 1460’s stomps onto the cigarette buff, putting it out in an instant.
“But I do know I might have something you’d like,” Nat says, raising her voice the slightest. She gives a smile to Lottie, who feels her throat swallow at the closeness the two have come to be again.
“Mhm,” Lottie mumbles, interested to hear what she has to say. Nat reaches slightly to her jacket pocket, and then to the brown tuft of hair by Lottie’s face. She pushes it behind her ear. And then she leans in closer. And closer.
With her same hand, Nat draws a line down Lottie’s bare arm. It brings a shiver to Lottie, who compares her arm to as if it had become cold like the wind. who looks into Nat’s eyes. She’s focussed, and she just keeps drawing that fucking line. The buzzing in her head had begun to slow. Lottie’s curious.
Nat grips Lottie’s hand hard and fast, leading to lightly letting it go after but Lottie’s palm becomes locked. She opens it, so see that Nat had produced a small white pill just for her. It lingers in the palm of her hand. She looks back up at Nat with her wide open eyes.
“What is it?” Lottie hesitates, her heart picking up a bit. Nat shakes her head.
“Trust me, it’ll help with everything that’s going on in your head.”
Another second left Lottie biting at her lower lip, she looked back to Nat, who was looking her up and down and up and down.
Lottie hated to admit it, but she felt almost glad Laura Lee wasn’t here right now.
Temptation is such a sin.
Eyes locked, she threw back her head as she swallowed the small pill dry. A small smile plays at the sides of Nat’s lips.
A faint buzz turns from Lottie’s head to the blues, indigos, and violets of her veins. She couldn’t decipher the difference between her day to day anxiety to the anxiety she felt from anticipation as she waited eagerly for something to hit. She sinks into herself, exhaling as she does so. Nat watches over.
A minute passes. And then another. And then Lottie’s wondering how long this shit takes to work.
“Nat? I don’t think I feel anything yet,” Lottie says. She’s not sure since when, but the two girls had been inching closer to each other on the damn bench for awhile now whilst Lottie waited for the pill to hit.
Nat put her hand to Lottie’s hair as she petted it softly, humming a sweet soothing sound as she did so. Lottie wasn’t complaining.
“It’ll take a second, give it some time, sweetheart,” Nat shushed. The two girls continued staring out into the illuminated backyard, which had been taken over by the glow of the moonlight.
“I’ve never done anything like this before, Nat, are you sure it’s working?” Lottie asks.
Her eyes had begun to flutter close as she laid against Nat’s shoulder. She felt so at peace that she almost felt like the pill had worked but she had a feeling other things were to blame for that.
Nat’s gaze softens as she turns to Lottie. “I assumed so, Lottie. I don’t think you’re the kind of girl who would ask for something like this either. But you did, so just wait a little longer and you’ll feel it. Don’t second guess this.”
If Lottie were to write down every thought she’d ever had in a journal like she knew Shauna did, she’d have easily assumed that Nat would have read every single page of it.
Don’t second guess this.
She needed to hear that, in more ways than one.
Reality began to blur again. Not in the way it usually does, but Lottie felt like the chasing in her head had stopped. Not completely, nothing could fix that, of course. But it felt less like a race and more like one of those little fun runs schools did to fundraise for charity and stuff like that.
And the moon was really bright. It was radiant. Everything about tonight was beautiful.
Lottie took it all in, blinking as if she was wondering if the serenity in such a chaotic, foreign land was real to her. Her chest rose and deflated at a steady pace with such an ease.
“Everything okay, Lottie?” Nat asks, glancing at the brunette who had nestled into her shoulder again. The mixture of their hair was as sweet as a vanilla and chocolate ice cream mixture. Nat’s voice was knowing, it was kind. Lottie knew that for sure at this moment.
“I think I feel… something,” Lottie began, her voice falling distant. It’s not what she’d expected to feel from the mysterious small tablet she’d taken without knowing anything about it, but she felt somewhat soothed. Like a baby after being rocked in a cradle. “I didn’t think it’d feel like this, though.”
Nat laughs, her voice low. The party had become a little less like a bustling New York City on New Year’s Eve and more of a quiet town on the outskirts of it all in the bliss of a few weeks after Christmas.
“That’s what happens, usually. It never turns out exactly how you hope it will,” Nat smiles.
There’s a moment of unanimous agreement between the two as Lottie’s head leans upwards to see Nat, who’s gazing down at her. They aren’t sure what they are in agreement for, but they know they are.
“I hope I never don’t feel like this again,” Lottie says before she can stop herself. She’s too blissfully unaware of anything but the dimming of the buzzing in her head, Nat’s warmth against her, and the sky being painted by the stars coming out.
Nat looks down and laughs. She turns back to Lottie.
“Aspirin’s really good for that, isn’t it sweetheart?”
Lottie is dumbfounded.
And somehow, she doesn't mind it all.