“And I’m not breezy?”
“El, you’re like the total opposite of breezy. Like I said, I love you more than anything, but breezy you are not. I think if you had ever been in love, you would understand better about Dax and me.”
“Would I?”
“Yes,” she said with a maddening confidence Ella couldn’t hope to argue with, “yes, I think you would. See, if you’d ever been in love, you would know that it’s the sort of thing that doesn’t always make sense. You’re so smart! Maybe too smart for this kind of thing, because it just isn’t logical. That’s it, see? You’re wanting to look at me marrying Dax from a logical standpoint and it just doesn’t apply to stuff like this.
“Someday you’ll have a boyfriend, probably even you’ll fall in love, and then you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. I’d like to promise that I won’t say I told you so, but we both know I probably will.”
“Ha,” Ella laughed half-heartedly, “that’s true, we do. So then Vegas it is, huh?”
“Vegas it is! And I swear, it’s going to be so much fun, El. I know you don’t think so, but it totally is. It’s just going to be you, me, Pam, and Kristy.”
“Ugh, but they hate me.”
“No, they don’t hate you. They just don’t really...get you. You know what would help?”
“No, but I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”
“You’re right, smartass, I am.” Jen threw a pillow at Ella, which caught her directly in the face, causing Jen to go into a laughing fit that wasn’t quite over when she delivered her piece of advice. “Maybe don’t correct them every time you hear them say something wrong. People don’t like that. And don’t be so uptight! It’s Vegas, the perfect place for you to let loose! For like, the first time in your life. And I swear to god, if you let them give you a makeover they’ll love you for the rest of their lives.”
“Oh god. This is going to be great.”
“I know!” Jen shrieked, either not detecting Ella’s sarcasm or else choosing to ignore it. “Isn’t it? Three nights in Vegas, and we leave in a week!”
Vegas. Like it or not, Ella was going to Las Vegas, Nevada. That was a sentence she had never expected to utter to anyone, even to herself, and even saying it out loud didn’t make it seem any more real. She knew, she had tried it. Almost directly after Jen had vacated her apartment (promising to take a cab after drinking most of the two bottles of wine all on her own), Ella had actually tested it out. Vegas.
She had spoken it out loud, letting the word roll around on her tongue to see if she could get used to it. She couldn’t. If there was one place on the planet where she absolutely didn’t belong, it was Las Vegas. That was a city where people went for whole days without sleeping because they were too busy to be bothered with it. Ella was pretty sure the last time she had been to a party had been in middle school.
Which, from the way Jen had made things sound, was pretty freaking obvious. How embarrassing was that? To have her best friend feel like she needed to warn her to try and act normal for a whopping three days?
And, speaking of embarrassing, there was that matter of the never having been in love. That had been a whole lot of fun to sit through. Not. What it had been was humiliating, to say the least. Ella honestly didn’t think that was what Jen had been trying to do. She didn’t think her friend would want to deliberately hurt her, even when she felt like her back was up against the wall.
She had spent too many years trying to protect and defend her “El” from the mean girls to turn on her now. What it was, well, Ella thought that she didn’t understand just how much it stung to have someone lay out so clearly her complete failure when it came to anything romantic.
Maybe Jen thought that she didn’t really care about it. She had joked on more than one occasion that Ella was too cool for men, that she was “above” the whole dating scene. Ella had always assumed Jen was just trying to make light of a touchy situation, but after tonight? After tonight, she got the impression that Jen might have really meant it all of those times before.
She had made it sound like someday Ella might decide she was interested in meeting guys, and then all of the sudden she would go out and pick up a boyfriend for herself, just as easily as if she were going to the corner store to grab a carton of milk. As if it were that easy. Scratch that. For people like Jen, her and her equally blonde and bubbly friends, it really was that easy.
They were the kinds of girls who had been in cheerleading and always made the homecoming court. They were the kinds of girls who always had more guys after them than they could possibly go through. But for Ella, it hadn’t been like that. It hadn’t been like that at all. Ella had been too shy and terrified to even consider speaking to guys in high school, let alone dating them. It had gotten a little bit better in college, but only a little. She had been forced to learn how to talk to the male species in classes that required group work, and she even had a few she could probably count as friends. But they were the kinds of friends who would ask her for help on some homework, or after they graduated, help on a solution for a problem at work they just couldn’t quite figure out.
Either that, and as she got older this was more and more likely, they were asking to be set up with one of her “hot” friends. As far as Ella was concerned, it was a pretty fantastic reason to just not have male friends, which left her right back where she had started. Thinking about this and feeling admittedly sorry for herself, Ella stood and cleared her coffee table. After that, she shyly made her way to the only full length mirror in her apartment and stood quietly in front of it.
“It’s not so bad, is it? I mean, is it?”
She didn’t even notice that she was talking to herself, a habit she had possessed since childhood and one Jen had tried repeatedly to break with limited success. She was entirely engrossed in her own image before her. She was rarely the type to indulge in her own image, but Jen’s assessment of her situation had made her insecure.
It wasn’t like she was asexual or anything like that. She’d had sex before, just not a lot, and not particularly enjoyable. For her, it had been more of a ‘we should get this out of the way’ kind of an arrangement with a male friend with whom she had occasionally hooked up with afterwards.
It had been more scientific than anything else, as pathetic as it sounded, even to her. But did that mean she wasn’t what guys wanted? That was pretty much what Jen had said, and who knew? Maybe she was right. Looking herself over thoroughly, Ella made a mental note of all of the ways in which she looked different from most of the girls she knew.
She was not blonde, was not tan, did not have that perfect yoga body that men seemed to like. Of course, she knew that not all women had these things and that many of the ones who did, didn’t have happy relationships, but it was what she herself was around most of the time and that kind of thing had a way of getting to a girl’s head.
Ella was not the athletic type. Not even close. She had actually opted out of gym class in favor of taking a third language, just to avoid those nightmare gym class situations she had seen in the movies. Jen had often described Ella as looking elf-like, which was pretty accurate. She was small, only five foot three to Jen’s almost model height of five foot ten. She had a petite frame, too, which was probably one of the reasons people never noticed the fact that she actually had an almost perfect hourglass figure.
That, and the somewhat sack-like dresses and sweaters she was in the habit of wearing.
She had creamy skin that sometimes looked powdered it was so white, but she wasn’t sickly looking or anything like that. It was the kind of skin sometimes seen on the burlesque dancers who channelled the screen sirens of old and had grown exponentially in popularity over the last few years.
It had the healthy glow that only came from lots of sunscreen, lots of water, and a balanced diet. Seeing as Ella was the picture of responsibility, those were all things she was completely on top of. Her hair was long, almost halfway down her back, and fell in
loose waves so naturally dark they were almost black.
With wide, doll-like, blue eyes peering out from beneath thick black lashes, she looked mysterious. She was pretty enough to be unapproachable to most guys, beautiful really, but she didn’t know it. She wouldn’t realize that fact about herself for a little while yet. At the moment, she was just little Ella, awkward and feeling terribly insecure.
And now she was being dragged off to Sin City, in a matter of only four days. She was going to have to ask off work for a day, something she had never in her life done. Even worse, she was going to have to figure out how to pack, and how to deal with the whole ordeal of getting on a plane. There were very few secrets Ella had kept from Jen, but the fact that she had never been on a plane was one of them.
The fact that she was actually terrified of the very idea of flying was another one of them. And it wasn’t like she could tell her now, was it? No, not at all. If she tried to tell her now, Jen would only think she was doing it to try and get out of going on a trip she clearly didn’t want to go on.
Not an option. Ella took one last forlorn look at her own image, sighed an even more heavy sigh than the one she had let out when she left the sanctuary of her couch, and trudged off to her room to begin the arduous task of packing a suitcase. She was not looking forward to this at all. It was going to be a long, long weekend.
* * *
“What’s the matter, Ella bear, you afraid to fly?”
Ella, who was nervously chewing on the end of a pen while simultaneously tapping her foot in time to music that wasn’t there, stared at Pamela in surprise. Ella bear? Where the hell had that come from? Ella looked suspiciously towards Jen, who was happily talking a mile a minute to Kristy with a K.
She had a pretty good idea that Jen had gathered her other two friends together for a powwow in which she instructed them both to be NICE, to be on their best behavior with the sometimes odd Ella, who wasn’t going to go away.
This must have been Pamela’s attempt at being nice, and strangely, Ella found it touching. She was too freaked out to consider that there might be any malice in it, and it was nice to think maybe she wouldn’t feel like a total outsider on this bachelorette extravaganza. For these reasons, Ella didn’t even consider telling Pamela that “Ella bear” was not one of her chosen nicknames. She just smiled, trying very hard not to chew on her lip and failing miserably.
“Um, actually, yes. I know it’s a stupid thing to be afraid of. You’re much more likely to die in a car crash than to die in a plane crash. Even so, the very idea of it is pretty nauseating to me. Like I said, I know it’s stupid.”
“Nope,” Pamela said with an easy friendliness that made Ella think she wasn’t quite so bad after all, “doesn’t seem stupid to me at all. I hate flying. I only got used to it because my parents were always dragging me and my sister off to some country or other.”
“So you just got used to it? It’s one of those things where the more you do it, the easier it gets?”
“Well, sort of. That, and I’ve got my little helpers.”
Pamela pulled a little prescription bottle out of her purse and shook it merrily in Ella’s direction. Ella let out a little gasp of surprise, which made Pamela roll her eyes and laugh.
“Relax, Ella, it’s not like I’ve got a big ‘ol bottle of heroin. It’s Xanax, and I’ve got a prescription for it. See? Totally legit.”
Ella squinted at the bottle’s label and saw that it was, indeed, legit. That was all well and good for Pamela, but what the hell did it have to do with her? As if Pamela could read her mind, she palmed one of the pills and pressed it into Ella’s before she could protest.
“Take it. If you say no, I’ll pry your mouth open and make you take it. It’ll make the flight easier for you, which will make it easier for all of us. And believe me, nobody wants to deal with a chick who is completely freaking out on a flight. These days, it’ll probably get you kicked off, and then you’ll ruin everything. Do you want that?”
No, she didn’t. Under extreme pressure and getting more and more afraid by the second, Ella took the Xanax. Very shortly afterwards, the world began to feel fuzzy and by the time she was in her seat, she was already most of the way asleep. When she woke up, she was in Vegas, the city of sin.
CHAPTER TWO
Vegas was everything Ella had expected it to be and more. For most people, she realized, that would be a positive statement. For Ella, in this particular situation, that was not the case. It was not the case at all. The worst thing was, she knew it before she even got off the plane. The Xanax Pamela had given her had done its job, alright.
In Ella’s humble opinion, it had done its job a little bit too well. Even opening her eyes once the plane had landed had felt like the most monumental struggle. Maybe if she had done a little bit more partying in college it wouldn’t have been that way, but she had been as close to what she remembered a certain crowd in high school calling “straight edge” as possible without ever committing to the movement.
Consequently, her virgin system was not at all prepared for the hit it took. And what an idiot she had been! She hadn’t even thought to question Pamela about the pill before she swallowed it down! She hadn’t asked which doctor the prescription had come from or how long it had been in Pamela’s possession. Most importantly, she hadn’t thought to ask how high of a dosage it was.
No wonder it had knocked her on her ass. Even the smallest dosage possible would have made her feel pretty weird, and something told Ella that what she had taken was not the smallest out there.
So, the trouble (the trouble she had known would come with this trip; if she had thought there was someone she could say I told you so to without pissing them off, she would have) started before she even got off of the plane. She had been unceremoniously shaken until her eyes had flown open to find Jen, Pamela, and Kristy staring at her with various looks of disapproval.
Kristy really looked more bored than anything, while Jen looked completely astounded and a little bit hurt. Pamela was the only one who wore some kind of a smile, and it was one that had pity in it. Had she done this all on purpose? Had she planned this thing out, crafted a situation that would make Ella look silly and square and like someone you definitely would NOT want to have on your impromptu bachelorette party?
But no, that couldn’t have happened. That was too devious, and Ella was dimly aware of how insane that sounded. It was paranoia, that most probably came from some kind of bizarre drug induced paranoia. She couldn’t be sure though. What she could be sure of was that she didn’t like the way they were looking at her. She raised one hand to her mouth and was ashamed to find that there was some drool there in the corner. Perfect. Just fantastic, drooling before she even stepped foot inside of the city. If that wasn’t a bad omen, she didn’t know what was.
“Oh, Ella bear, I guess it hit you too hard, huh? I should’ve broken it in half. I wasn’t thinking about it on account of how long I’ve been taking it. I’ll remember next time, or else you can remind me.”
“Hit her too hard? What hit her too hard? What’d you give her, Pam?”
“Just some Xanax. She was freaking out about the flying and I knew that wasn’t going to be good for any of us. I thought the little guy would do the trick, and it did. Just did it a little too well, I guess.”
“Jesus, Xanax? Why would you do that, Ella? You’ve never been afraid of flying before.”
“I have been, actually, I just never told you. It never came up, and I figured there was no reason to bring it up. I didn’t realize we’d be flying anywhere together. Now, would you mind helping me up? My legs still feel sort of wobbly and I don’t want to sit here anymore. People are looking at me.”
Jen rushed forward, grabbing her by the arm and helping her out of the seat while also shooting Pamela a look that could kill at the same time. Pamela flushed and then looked angrily at Ella, who was definitely somehow at fault for this entire thing. God, not already. She couldn’t be the reason the trip
fell apart before it ever actually started.
“No, Jen, it’s not her fault. I’m a big girl, and I took that pill on my own. She was trying to help me, really. If you’re going to be pissed, you should be pissed at me, not her.”
Pamela’s face looked slightly less aggravated at that, but Jen still looked far from happy. This was her weekend, and it wasn’t supposed to go this way. Ella would make sure it was better after this. For her best friend, she would get through Vegas.
She just hoped she never had to come back again. She was also already worrying about how she would make it through the plane ride home, but she would put that in the back of her mind. She was sure there were many other problems to wade through before they got to that one. The four girls deboarded the plane, picked up their luggage, and got two cabs.
Pamela and Kristy piled into one, and Jen helped Ella into another. It wasn’t until the two of them were alone that Jen said the things Ella knew she had been wanting to say since she first realized that a pill was taken. She waited maybe five minutes before starting in on it.
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