Casting Shadows Everywhere

by L. T. Vargus

  There are only a few blocks between the store and Nick’s, but it was Friday night and getting toward the whole evening rush deal, so traffic was much heavier now. Minivans and sedans rushed past. I forced myself to maintain eye contact with the sidewalk, but the sound of every passing vehicle still made my heart stop. (My heart is a wuss. Duh.) The only other thing that stood out during the walk was the smell of freshly cut grass.

  It wasn’t until I arrived at the safety of Nick’s that I sort of said to myself, “Oh, I’m probably going to have to actually drink this or whatever now.” It really hadn’t crossed my mind. I guess it’s difficult to plan too far ahead when you’re busy imagining yourself shitting your pants while cops cuff you and haul you in and all of that. So yeah...

  I strode into the living room and unsheathed the bottle of King Cobra, except it wasn’t the black and gold label of a bottle of King Cobra staring back at me. It was a thinner bottle of pale pink liquid. The label had a farm and huge berries and stuff all over it. I read it. Strawberry Hill flavored Boone’s Farm.

  “Awww,” Donnie said, still sporting his Taco Bell attire. “Look how cute.”

  He and Nick found this ultra-hilarious, which I guess it was pretty funny or whatever, but... Tammie didn’t laugh, though I could tell by the strained look on her face that she wanted to. She was holding off for my sake.

  “I asked the guy to get me a forty of King Cobra,” I said, but I think they were laughing too hard to notice. Whatever.

  I wanted malt liquor, but instead I got this fake wine. I cracked it open anyway. By “cracked it open” I really mean “unscrewed the cap” and, from what I understand, the screw top is the ultimate sign of class and quality in the wine world. It smelled like a goddamn fruit salad mixed with perfume or something, except all artificial fruit. (The perfume was real.)

  I tipped the bottle back and took a swig. The words “sickeningly” and/or “cloyingly” sweet really do not do this stuff justice. It is beyond all of that. It is like drinking artificial strawberry syrup with a dash of Ax Body Spray for its rich aromatic quality.

  “I’m just glad you got this Boone’s Farm in time for your sweet sixteen,” Donnie said. He was a real barrel of laughs all of a sudden.

  All I wanted to do was chug down this Boone’s Farm and be done with it, but it’s basically impossible to chug something so sweet. The best you can kind of do is kind of sip it and try not to retch. So I watched Donnie and Nick play video games and kept nursing my drink. As I got toward the bottom of the bottle, it was a little warmer and that much harder to get down.

  “Almost polished ’er off,” Donnie said, grinning. “So are you fuckin’ wasted, or what?”

  “No,” I said. More than anything else, my face was hot.

  “Bullshit!” he said. “You’re sloshed!”

  “No, I’m not. Watch.”

  To demonstrate how not- drunk I was, I hopped down onto the floor and started doing pushups. (Made sense at the time. I think I thought my perfect form would speak for itself or something.)

  Donnie and Nick howled with laughter. Tears streamed down Tammie’s face, she was laughing so damn hard.

  “You’re, like, way drunker than I thought,” Donnie said. Nick just laughed that kind of hissing laugh through his teeth.

  I don’t know. I didn’t think I was drunk, but I must have been. I don’t get what all the fuss is about, to be honest. My face felt all hot, and I guess I felt a little dumber than normal. Not much of a lesson.

  I slammed the rest of it down and felt a little sick before long. I think it was more from the sweetness than the alcohol.

  Donnie went to bed kind of early ’cause he had to work in the morning, and Tammie fell asleep on the loveseat, so before too long it was just me and Nick. He was out of cigarettes, so he was using Donnie’s machine to roll a shitty one.

  “So what do you think of your first drunk experience?” he said.

  “Not much.”

  He smiled.

  “Didn’t care for it, eh? It ain’t for everyone.”

  “What’s the point?”

  The machine popped as he pulled the lever to pack the tobacco into the tube. He pulled free the final product and lit it before responding.

  “If you mean, why do people drink in a sorta general way—”

  “I mean for me. What’s the point of making me drink? What wisdom am I supposed to glean from this?”

  He chuckled.

  “Well, there ain’t no wisdom in it. It ain’t about that. Life don’t really work the way they make you think in school. I can’t teach you some simple lesson and have that somehow prepare you for what the world is really like. I can only try to show you by having you experience different things for yourself and seein’ what you think of them.”

  He tapped the cigarette in the glass ash tray on the armrest of his chair.

  “I think alcohol is a pretty basic way to do two things. First, to break down all the bullshit propaganda that tries to make you scared. I mean, alcohol can be dangerous, of course, but think about what you’re experiencin’ right now compared to all of the fear-mongerin’ stuff they’ve pumped you full of in school. Complete nonsense.”

  I nodded.

  “The second thing is a little more abstract. I wanted you to try something that would alter your state. Now, you might not even realize it just yet, and booze is one of the subtler ways to do it, I’ll admit. Since it’s your first time, and you only had one bottle of girly stuff, you might not feel like your brain is working all that differently, but it is. I think there’s a lot to learn from that. Maybe it’s different for everyone, but having your thoughts affected can give you a sort of perspective into how flawed and warped your perceptions can be. And it definitely ain’t somethin’ that I could just teach you. You have to do it and feel it on your own.”

  Just then, the cherry fell off the tip of his cigarette and quickly burned a black smudge into the rug. Nick licked the tips of his fingers and pinched it to extinguish it.

  “Shit. Don’t tell Donnie about that,” he said and scooted the recliner over the black mark.

  Chapter 10

  WE TALKED ABOUT THE LEFT and right brain today in Psychology. I guess everyone kind of knows the gist: the left brain is orderly, logical, rational, organizational, controls language (mostly). The right brain is chaotic, emotional, passionate, creative, intuitive. I guess the super simple way to summarize it is that the left brain thinks and the right brain feels.

  I think the thing that seemed most interesting to me is that the communication between them isn’t great. So there’s basically all of this stuff going on in your right brain that you are only vaguely aware of. All of these instincts and emotions and impulses bubbling up all the time but always just out of the reach of your conscious mind.

  The professor told this story about Agatha Christie, this ancient mystery writer. She was sort of aware of how her right brain needed time to cook up the endings to these stories she was working on, so she’d take baths. She would soak and just let her mind go clear. Let it wander. And so long as her right brain sort of had some space to work, she’d come up with these new twists and turns that would snap perfectly into place in a satisfying way. Like she knew that her imagination always wanted to find the perfect solution to the problem, and it just needed time without her left brain cluttering everything up.

  So here’s where it gets real crazy. Some people have epilepsy so bad that they have to sever the part of the brain that connects the left and right hemisphere. Once that baby is cut, everything gets a little funky. The two halves of the brain can’t communicate and there are all kinds of weird repercussions. My favorite was “Alien Hand Syndrome.” Basically some of the people with severed hemispheres could still feel things in their non-dominant hand, but it would move purposefully without them controlling it. In other words, a right-handed guy would witness his left hand grab a hair brush off the table and start brushing his hair without him choosing to do so.
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br />   They get all weirded out by it, which I guess makes sense. But I think I get it. Your right brain controls your left hand, so if you see the brush and your right brain gets the impulse to brush your hair, it does so. The problem is that your left brain doesn’t know about it since the sides are split, and that’s sort of the conscious part of you, so it feels like your hand has a mind of its own. Weird shit in any case.

  Another set of tests they did on the differences in the left and right brain that I thought was interesting involved like injecting stuff to numb one side or the other of the brain. So even though I kind of crudely summed things up earlier, every individual brain is a little different, right? Like 95% of right-handed people have their speech center mostly on their left side. Obviously that leaves the other 5% as oddballs with their speech mostly wired and coming from their right brain. (For the record, around 70% of left-handed people still have their language function dominated by their left brain.) They do this test to numb one side or the other to sort of find out what areas are dominant for different skills for that individual.

  So they inject this stuff, and as it takes effect a lot of the patients begin to shiver. The people with their speech completely dominant in their left brain can’t speak or even comprehend language with their left brain numbed. But — and this is the awesome part — they can still sing songs, with the proper lyrics and everything, because music is usually centered in the right brain.

  Fucking mind blowing.

  * * *

  We decided to go to this pasta place. Beth and me, I mean. Pasta Pasta. That’s the name of the restaurant. It’s this somewhat fancy pasta bar, which probably sounds like an impossible combination, but that’s what it is, so fuck you. So like you order a type of pasta and then go to this little sauce buffet type situation and ladle on various sauces.

  Yep. I don’t know.

  It felt the most like our first real date yet, so I was extra nervous. I didn’t know if I should sit next to her or across from her. I went with the latter, but I regretted it at once. The table was kind of big, so she was like really far away from me.

  “Ooh… I think I’m going for this one,” Beth said. “These little lasagna wraps.”

  She pointed to a photo of them on the menu. They did look pretty tasty.

  “Isn’t there like meat and stuff inside there?” I said.

  She read the menu closer. It said “stuffed with a spicy sausage blend,” which, it occurred to me, would also be a particularly disgusting way to describe a girl in an orgy.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” she said. “Hm… I think I’m getting them anyway.”

  Classic mistake.

  Our table sat smack in the middle of the floor, so we were fenced in by idiots. It was even worse ’cause my back was up against a table of douchey frat guys. They all looked vaguely like Dane Cook, which made me assume right away that they weren’t very funny. It also made me feel vulnerable somehow to have them lurking around behind me.

  I didn’t know what the hell to order. My gut leaned toward regular old spaghetti. I figured, why mess with success? Plus this sauce bar would provide the real star of the dish, right?

  A family of really short people with stubby little legs screened our view of the buffet, so we couldn’t make out any saucy details. This helped the meal maintain an aura of mystery, at least, I guess.

  Oh, also I wore this kind of fancier yellow button up shirt that I’ve never worn before. So I felt dumb. Yep.

  The waitress came to take our orders. I think she was laughing at me ’cause I was being so awkward and sitting like a mile away from Beth and everything. Not laughing in a mean way or anything. Laughing in an “Aww, that’s cute. What an awkward first date!” kinda way. But it’s weird ’cause I didn’t really feel any awkwardness between me and Beth. I felt awkwardness at being out in public, fixing to eat food surrounded by strangers with stubby legs and such.

  That seemed important somehow. Usually I feel the awkwardness from all sides. I actually felt close to Beth despite the physical distance between us.

  Anyway, I thought long and hard about these cheese-stuffed ravioli guys. But I ultimately went for the spaghetti.

  We had to wait behind these hippie dudes who clearly pried themselves away from their hacky sack just long enough to take for-fucking-ever at the sauce bar. Eventually they dreadlocked out of our way, and the suspense was finally over. Only a sneeze guard stood between us and six stainless steel tubs of sauce.

  First was a watery marinara loaded with dark chunks of sausage. Second was a watery marinara loaded with light and dark chunks of sausage. Third was a watery marinara loaded with three shades of sausage. Fourth was a white sauce. Fifth was a watery marinara loaded with light chunks of sausage and some mushrooms. Sixth was a watery marinara loaded with light and medium chunks of sausage.

  “Christ,” Beth said. “Am I supposed to ladle chunks of sausage over my sausage-stuffed pasta?”

  I shrugged.

  “You could go for the whi-”

  She interrupted me.

  “Don’t even say it. Lasagna with white sauce is for pussies.”

  Indeed.

  She was really mad.

  “Ridiculous! They should probably change the name of this place to ‘Sausage Sausage!’” she said.

  I laughed. I kind of wanted to say something to somehow make things better, but maybe there are no words that can rectify a sausage party debacle such as this.

  I actually calmed down and had fun after that. The food was awful, but we made fun of it together.

  * * *

  “I missed it,” Robert said.

  “It’s alright,” I said. I kept my voice low so the other kids couldn’t hear. “We’re still up by three. Two more points and we win.”

  He scooped the badminton racquet under the shuttlecock and flipped it up toward me. I caught it and hit it over the net to our opponents Mike and Doug.

  Wait. Opponents is not a strong enough word. Whatever is the plural of nemesis.

  Eight badminton courts occupied the gym floor. Red electrical tape marked out precise boundaries around each net. This was the badminton tournament that wrapped up our two-week section on racquet sports.

  There would be no “guesstimating” or lenience now. Maybe earlier in the week, during the lighthearted exhibition contests, people might let some things slide, but not today. Not in a tournament game. If that shit hit one millimeter outside of the red tape, it was out. Score it. Move on. First team to 21 wins the game, best two out of three games takes the match. Let’s go.

  Doug served a line drive shot that Robert returned with a snap of a back hand. The return floated a little, which gave Mike time to set up for a big overhand slam. He wound up and drilled it about as fast as you can hit a shuttlecock. Somehow I dug it out with an uppercut of a shot. I don’t know how. It was too fast to even see and headed almost straight down, but I just did it without thinking. Like a reflex.

  So here’s the thing: I am fucking awesome at badminton. It might even be contagious or something, because Robert is pretty good, too. We mowed through the other teams to get to this championship match with Mike and Doug. We shut out a team of two goth girls, Jamie and Nicole, in back-to-back games to get warmed up. Next we crushed a slacker and a computer nerd, Ricky and Jeff. Two guys from the baseball team, Dirk and Jessie, gave us some competition, but no real trouble. We won those games 21-15 and 21-17 instead of the blowouts from our earlier matches.

  My save of Mike’s slam popped way up, so Doug drifted back a few steps to circle under it. He hit another line drive. Robert reached straight up and tapped it with the softest touch. Its rotation stopped, and it died in the air like a knuckleball. It made it just onto their side of the net and fell too fast for either of them to return. The shuttlecock hit the ground tip first and fell motionless onto its side.

  Our serve again, thank you kindly.

  “Shit,” Mike said through clenched teeth.

  Doug scowled. I thin
k, but can’t be sure, that it irks him more when Robert scores on them.

  Mike and Doug were two of the best athletes at our school from little league to present. Mike was an All Valley running back. Doug was a starting wide receiver. They were also two of the more cruel of Troy’s minions. One time Doug even got ejected from a game for twisting a guy’s leg in the pile to try to break his ankle. So clearly these guys weren’t into the whole “it doesn’t matter if you win or lose, it’s how you play the game” thing.

  Maybe that was why I wanted to beat them so badly. Isn’t that the natural urge here? To find a way to grind the sadistic kid’s head into the ground so he can see what it feels like? I don’t know how much of this kind of social nuance Robert understands, but he really wanted to beat them, too. Maybe more than me. He was getting pretty tense, actually, so I felt like I needed to keep him loose.

  I reached out my racquet toward him side arm, and we did three low racquet fives followed by simultaneously flinging our racquet arms up in a kind of limp way. This was our handshake. I felt like this ritual was helping to keep him calm.

  “Nice shot,” I said, tipping the shuttlecock to him. “It’s your serve.”

  He wiped the back of his wrist over his forehead, smearing sweat around more than anything else.

  Mike and Doug were much better than the others we had faced. They were both quick and really aggressive. The velocity on their shots impressed everyone. The birdie hissed, they hit it with such ferocity.

  It took us a game to adjust to the speed, I think. They won the first one 21-16. We rebounded, though, with a 21-14 win. I think they assumed they had us and let up a little bit. Their brows hadn’t unfurrowed since then, and we were deep into Game 3 now.

  Robert served. Doug returned. I smashed one. Mike saved it. It went back and forth like that rapidly now. Everyone was going all out. I blasted some line drives in hard-to-return spots, but someone always made it there just in time. I had to retreat and field a couple over my shoulder as well. Looking back, I don’t know how I do some of this stuff. It’s like I stop thinking and just go do it.