That moment of confusion when she woke up in the morning and didn’t know where she was had lessened as the new furniture and the boxes with her stuff finally got there and she was once again surrounded by the same books and posters as back home.
She turned off her alarm and stretched and yawned on the last Friday of October. She tried to convince herself that she needed to get out of bed, but her heart wasn’t in it. Breakfast, she reminded herself. If she got out of this warm and soft bed there would be breakfast.
Five minutes later she was fast asleep, dreaming of bacon. She didn’t wake up again until her mother threw open her door and informed her that she only had fifteen minutes to get ready for school.
All in all it had not been the best way to start her day, Sofia reflected twenty minutes later as she bit into her sandwich and tried not to get squashed against the bus window. Jock had had an early practice this morning so she’d had to take the bus.
Sitting crammed up against the window by a guy she vaguely recognized from the school’s football team, was not her idea of a nice morning. The guy was man-spreading so wide he could have straddled a brontosaurus. His massive shoulders were half-way on her seat and he kept winking at her whenever she told him to shift over. Sofia swallowed the rest of the sandwich and tried to wrestle him for some room.
When she finally got off the bus she was not in a good mood. Needless to say, when Denise came running towards her, practically jumping with excitement over some idiot’s party that evening, Sofia was not receptive.
“Is this the guy whose parties always end with the police busting the place up?” she asked Denise.
“And with firefighters hosing the place down! Don’t you realize how cool it is to be invited to a party like this?”
“Only yesterday you told Marlene that you didn’t care about being cool,” Sofia said, checking her calendar
Denise cringed. “Yeah, I know, and I don’t, but can’t you see what a once in a lifetime opportunity this is?”
Sofia, who had just discovered that she had forgotten to finish her English essay that was due that morning, did not.
“Aargh! Do you think Mr. Emerson will let me hand it in late if I tell him my computer broke down last night?” she asked Denise hopefully.
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Denise replied. “He can be a real jerk. So are you coming or what?”
“Where?” Sofia asked confused.
“To the party, where else?” Denise asked rolling her eyes. “And don’t even think of saying no.”
“You said that you had been invited, not me,” Sofia replied and tried to come up with a good excuse for not going.
She didn’t like parties, didn’t like crowds. She also had a faint memory of Jock telling her they should go to this party and her replying something along the lines of “not in a million years”. She thought it over. Yes, that did sound exactly like what she would say in response to going to a Halloween party packed with people she didn’t know.
Denise grinned. “Yeah, but you’re my friend, see, so that means you’re invited too. Besides, everyone thinks you’re crazy and sexy so you’d be invited anyway.”
“Perfect,” Sofia muttered. Crazy and sexy were precisely the adjectives she wanted to be associated with.
“Come on! It will be fun! Good music, hot guys…”
“Can’t you ask Claire or Marlene?” Sofia cut in.
“I have and they’re coming! I’m sure Jock is going as well.”
“Excellent,” Sofia said quickly. “In that case you don’t need me to…”
Denise grabbed hold of Sofia’s arms and looked her straight in the eyes.
“Sofia Hansson, you are coming with me to Michael’s party and if I have to drag you there by your pretty red hair, then so be it.”
Sofia frowned, but nodded, deciding it would be easier to agree and find a way out of it later.
“And don’t you try to wriggle out of this later, do you hear?” Denise added, her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “We are going to this party and that’s it. You can see it as part of your American experience.”
“I don’t care if your dad turns you into a slimy clot of…slime, Jefferson. We’re going out tonight. You’ve been sulking for a week and, besides, it’s Halloween!”
Thomas frowned at Wayne and jogged faster to try to shake him off. It didn’t work. “I promised I wouldn’t.”
He had tried to convince his dad that going to this party would be a good way to socialize with his peers. Yeah, that hadn’t worked at all.
“You were forced to promise you wouldn’t or he wouldn’t have let you out of your room for the next ten years. Promises given under duress don’t count,” Wayne protested haughtily.
Thomas snorted. Wayne’s moral guidelines were shady at best and when it came to parties all bets were off. Besides, Thomas knew he shouldn't be doing anything but practice his swing. The previous week’s game had been humiliating.
“Come on, your dad would never find out. Besides, you told me Rachel will be there,” Wayne continued when Thomas didn’t reply.
The mentioning of Rachel set the fluttery creatures nowadays permanently residing in his stomach into an uproar. Something must have shown on his face because Wayne suddenly grinned cunningly.
“You don’t want to leave her there alone with all those college guys, do you?”
“She won’t be alone, you will be there,” Thomas pointed out and increased his speed again. He didn’t know how things were standing between him and Rachel. She’d been distant this last week and he wasn’t sure if she was disappointed with him or if she wanted to, like she'd said, give him room to practice.
“Yeah, but I will be violently drunk and completely unable to take care of myself or anyone else,” Wayne said truthfully. “So will Jock, and he’s bringing my future ex-wife.”
“Haven’t you given that up yet?” Thomas asked, surprised. “They seem… serious.”
He’d never seen Jock stick around the same girl for this long. Of course, Jock wasn’t talking to him right now so he didn’t know exactly what was going on in that big head of his.
Thomas bit his lip and pushed harder. Jock wanted him to apologize and he should. He had behaved badly. But she had been in the wrong first and just thinking of apologizing to Sofia Hansson made his stomach turn.
“I never give up,” Wayne panted. “She won’t call herself his girlfriend so I reckon I still have a chance.”
“A very small chance.”
“Nothing about me is small,” Wayne said with a wink and ducked in anticipation of Thomas’s punch. “You need to pick me up at eight.”
“I’m not going.”
“Yes you are. I need a designated driver. You don’t want me to drive drunk and crash into a tree, do you?”
Thomas scowled at Wayne who scowled right back and in the end it was Thomas who looked away.
“Alright, I might look in to drop you off and say hi to Rach, but I’m not staying,” Thomas said, defeated. Wayne did a whooping noise and thumped him in the back.
“Excellent! In that case I can stop trying to keep up this crazy pace, are you trying to kill me, man?” Wayne panted as he slowed his steps.
“That is nothing compared to what I’ll do to you if my dad finds out about this,” Thomas said, slowing down as well.
“You won’t be doing anything to me if your dad finds out because you’ll never get out of the house again. Ah, the risks we take for love…” Wayne grinned and ducked as Thomas threw another punch at him.
13
Tripping
It was just like in the movies only worse because it was a five, rather than two, dimensional experience, Sofia decided twelve hours later as she let Denise lead her into the luxurious house belonging to the parents of Michael Perez.
When she was watching a movie she only had to see and hear it. Now she was also smelling, feeling and, she thought when someone pushed a glass into her hands, tasting it.
Mar
lene and Claire were following closely behind her, both looking pretty in their mermaid and insect suits. Sofia had tried to get out of this, she really had, but Denise had been anticipating her every move and with the support of Marlene and Claire, as well as Jock, Sofia hadn’t stood a chance.
Her parents had been informed that there was going to be a sleepover at Denise’s, which was technically true, and Sofia had been whisked away to first the mall and then Denise’s house to be “made presentable” for the party.
Presentable involved wearing a short, green dress and heels that were clearly not made for walking in. To top it off she’d been forced to wear an ugly hat because it went with her costume. She was supposed to be a sexy leprechaun. Her protests that she was misappropriating someone else's cultural inheritance had fallen on deaf ears.
“You've got red hair. That's Irish enough,” Denise had said.
“What? No, it's not and besides, my hair is auburn,” Sofia had said and pulled the hat off.
“Tomato, tomato,” Denise had replied and put the hat back on.
“If I'm a leprechaun then I should be a) a guy and b) wearing clogs.”
Denise shook her head. “Sexy leprechaun. You can't be sexy in clogs.”
Sofia swayed dangerously in her heels as they made their way further into the house, but hey, she already had a hundred likes on the picture Denise had taken of her before they left her house. She was sure that would be a comfort to her family and friends after she tripped over herself and broke her neck in these shoes.
She stumbled as they pressed deeper into the crowd. Denise had been right. This was certainly an experience. Whether it was a good experience was another question. There were too many people and the strange costumes they were wearing added to the surreal atmosphere.
She briefly closed her eyes against the blinking lights and tried again to come up with a way to get out of this. Denise urged her to move forward.
The music was so loud that the tastefully decorated walls surrounding them vibrated with it. Everywhere she looked people were either dancing, drinking or making out. She walked past class mates in different states of intoxication and stared in fascination as one couple dressed as zombies did the weirdest thing with their tongues. She wasn’t sure if she was more disgusted or intrigued.
Denise grabbed her hand and pulled her forward, deeper into the throng of drunken teenagers. As she was dragged through the dancing, sweating, perfumed bodies of people moving disjointedly this way and that, she felt like she was stuck inside a live kaleidoscope.
She was glad she hadn’t drunk more than half a beer or she would have been sick right there on the expensive Persian carpet. Not that it would have made much difference to the carpet. People were spilling, stepping and dropping things all over the poor thing.
The ruckus got impossibly louder the further they went until Sofia had to stop and stare in amazement at a small indoor stage that had been set up inside a giant dining room. A huge, well-polished mahogany table had been pushed against the far wall where it now served as a place for people to deposit their drinks and half smoked cigarettes. The rest of the room was filled with people screaming and moving to the music of the band on the stage.
The singer looked vaguely familiar. He had red hair the color of ketchup and both his ears were pierced, as were his eyebrows. At the moment he had his eyes closed and was moaning into the microphone. The song, if it could be called that, had no melody. From how the guys were treating their instruments it wouldn’t have mattered much if it had.
“It’s Michael’s band, you know, the guy who lives here? His band! DeMoaners. Aren’t they awesome?” Denise shouted into her ear.
Denise was dressed as a sexy lady bird and it was distracting to watch her dance, her tiny plastic wings moving in time with the... noise.
Sofia didn’t know how to reply. She managed to plaster on a smile and give Denise a thumbs up. Her friend looked happy with that and went back to watching the band, swaying to the beat.
They watched as Michael, their ketchup-haired host, got down on his knees and then his back on the floor of the stage. Denise hooted as he rolled back and forth across the stage, moaning.
Claire and Marlene had drifted away as soon as they entered the house and Sofia decided she might want to do the same. She quickly finished the rest of her beer and motioned to Denise that she was going to go look for another. Denise nodded absentmindedly, focused on what was happening up on the stage.
Sofia moved away from their as quickly as she could and hissed in surprise when someone took hold of her arm. She nearly tripped over her shoes as she was pulled into a warm body.
“Hey, beautiful. Sorry, I’m late.”
Sofia looked up into the laughing, brown eyes of Jock and down his body. He was dressed like a pirate. It suited him, she decided as she reached up and gave him a quick kiss. That was the one advantage to wearing shoes like these. She could reach things.
“What was that for?” he asked, sounding surprised.
“It’s good to see you. Being forced to take the school bus today made me realize that I should appreciate you more.”
He grinned at her. “Well in that case I think you should give me more kisses. I’ve been driving you for two months,” he said and leaned in.
His lips were soft, moving steadily against hers. He does kiss quite well, Sofia reflected. Well, they had been practicing a lot these past few weeks. She inhaled his scent without meaning to. He smelled nice. Tasted nice too. Minty.
They broke apart when someone jostled them. Sofia looked up to see Wayne standing there with a grin. The plastic vampire teeth in his mouth made that look slightly disturbing. “Sorry to break up the fun, Jock do you have a minute?”
“I’m busy,” Jock said, still looking at her lips.
“Oh, come on, I’ll let you get back to her in a minute,” Wayne said and pulled at his arm.
“It’s okay,” Sofia told him when he tried to fight Wayne off. “I’m going to get a drink.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, it’s fine.”
“Cool, I’ll ditch this baboon as soon as I can,” he said and gave her a quick kiss before he let Wayne drag him off and into the throng of dancing people.
Sofia elbowed her way through the crowd in the direction she hoped the kitchen might be, but was sidetracked by people heading the opposite way.
Suddenly she found herself standing on the patio outside the third or so living room she’d seen instead. She was glad she wasn’t a resident in this house. She’d get lost all the time.
Outside, the night was surprisingly warm. It was the end of October yet the short dress that Denise had insisted she’d be too warm. She inhaled the still air and wondered why she had agreed to come here at all.
She took a few steps away from the glass doors to admire the dimly lit, artistically sculpted bushes. All the windows were open so the music was as loud here as it was inside.
She moved closer to the bushes. One was shaped like a large swan, another like a tiger and the third sculpture had the shape of a pig. It reminded her of someone. She smiled, took a step closer to the pig sculpture and tripped over one of the tiles.
“Oh! Sorry!” she yelled when she collided with someone. A nice-smelling, muscular someone. Electrical currents traveled over her skin from where they were touching. It was such a strange feeling that she was momentarily frozen in place.
“Sorry,” he yelled back and tried to help her regain her footing.
She was glad the darkness made it impossible for him to see her blush.
“I told my friends not to make me wear heels. I'm a walking health hazard.”
“Don’t worry about it, it serves me right for hiding in the darkness behind a…is it a pig?” the guy asked before taking a step back and letting go off her arms. She wished he hadn’t and immediately felt guilty. She was in an almost-sort of-relationship with someone else, wasn’t she?
Still, she wondered who he was. Sh
e couldn’t see his face in the shadow cast by the enormous bush, and half of it was covered by a mask anyway, but even though he’d been yelling she thought he sounded strangely familiar.
“Someone must have been into their bacon,” she agreed.
”What?” he asked and bent closer.
”I said,” she yelled into his ear. ”Someone is into bacon!”
He smiled and the blinking lights from the party were reflected by his teeth. He smelled faintly of soda and an aftershave that she was sure she recognized.
“It also reminds me of one of my teachers…”
“It’s Gilmore!”
His teeth flashed again. “It’s a striking likeness, isn’t it?” he said and walked closer to the bush. “It’s something about the snout…or the legs…”
“The posture?”
“That’s it!” he shouted back at her triumphantly. “Whoever it is that went wild with the shears managed to capture Gilmore’s saggy back perfectly.”
Sofia grinned and took a step closer to him. It was impossible not to. “So why are you hiding out here behind a sculpture of Gilmore?” she shouted.
He hesitated. “I'm… I’m not supposed to be at this party. I came by to say hi to my girlfriend and now I can't find her anywhere.”
“Of course,” Sofia muttered to herself and wondered why she was disappointed.
He was also quiet for a while, before the glimmer of his teeth showed again. “What about you? What are you doing out here? The party is back in there,” he yelled and pointed.
Sofia considered coming up with a good explanation, but she didn’t have the energy for it. “Would you believe me if I told you I got lost?”
“Absolutely. You need a compass to find your way in there.”
“If only there was a compass that would point me straight to the kitchen…”
He grinned and moved closer. “I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but your voice, I feel like I’ve…”
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