Bess makes a really good point. I'm going to follow her lead and tell stories...plus I haven't been posting enough, my personal life is too raw and real right now to be writing about it on the Interweb, so I'm going to start telling stories. I've lived some good ones, as has she. I hope she follows my lead. I got the idea for this one from her.
We got into raving the latter part of our junior year. I'm not sure how we did it...I told my mom it was an all-night concert (with plenty of security and supervision) and therefore got approval, and all the other girls just told their parents they were staying at my house. Which they did, if by staying you mean straggling in at 5:30 AM all wide-eyed and talkative. From the dancing. I think the guys manuvered the same way through Carl.
We would roll to the mall Friday after school, buying 26-inch JNCOs if we'd saved enough or $10 tanktops from Wet Seal if we hadn't. It was a new pseudo-outfit every weekend, but we'd reserve enough cash for candy and
candy, if you get my drift. The candy went in the communal red Adidas mini-backpack we all shared; we handed it out to great appreciation once the
candy had kicked in.
I was going home to Alaska for the summer, and my flight left super early on a Wednesday, I believe. Tuesday night was jungle night at Vinylized. Jungle was the sophisticated raver music that none of us had really gotten a taste for, but we knew it was cool. So the plan was: go to Vinylized, do drugs, dance all night and then head for the airport in the morning. Only once we got there, just the two of us ended up doing drugs. We had no idea who we bought them from, and I remember the name had the word Strawberry in it, and they looked like those natural vitamin C tablets, kind of an off-white with red specks in them. But it wasn't the same. We got all wierd, and our heads were heavy and we couldn't think and we definitely couldn't dance. Someone mentioned "H-bomb" and I think we both laughed about it. But it's entirely possible. The night went slowly, and eventually we abandoned the club and drove up to Minnie's on Broadway. Everyone else was eating, but she and I just kept looking at each other with heavy-lidded eyes and shaking our heads; we were completely out of commission. People were telling jokes and ripping escort ads out of
The Stranger and eating the world's best tomato-basil soup and all we could do was gaze at each other with tunnel-vision and bee-stung lips.
Before we left for the airport I needed to go to the bathroom. The floor through the hall was moving underneath me as I walked, I had to hold both arms out to trace support beams down the walls, and it was impossible to push open the bathroom door. I trudged my way into the stall; it felt like water was swirling around my feet. I sat down unsteadily on the toilet and came to a realization: water
was swirling around my feet. There was at least two inches of standing water from an overflowing head, and I was wading in it. I stood up, zipped up, and tried to hurry out to the group, to tell them what had just happened to me, how insanely random and weird it was. She was standing in the hall as I left; apparently she had just been in there and experienced it as well. We clutched onto each other and left in disbelief.
They were clustered in front of the entrance, smoking cigarettes and talking about how they couldn't wait to get into bed. I rushed up, incredulous and incapacitated by this event, this torture I had just been through. But as I opened my mouth, expecting to translate the urgency and enormity of the situation I was met with blank stares; some even had a hint of pity in their eyes. "We know, Bailee," they said. "We were talking about how gross it was the entire time we were in there."
Moral of the story: drugs are bad. I stopped over in Ketchikan for a couple days on my way home, and slept for 24 hours straight. I was able to hang out with my friend I had come to see for a total of about 12 hours...Just Say No.
