Silence | Book 1

4-8: Party

Tristan ran his fingers along the still healing scratch on his face, trying to rid himself of the itch, before he hoisted his messenger bag higher on his shoulder while ascending the stairs of his apartment building. Once at the top he caught his breath and yawned softly. He had spent all evening in the university library until it closed at midnight. The harsh, fluorescent hallway lights didn't help to keep him awake – if anything it only gave him a headache. He had already taken his keys out of his pocket, when he noticed that a door at the end of the hallway was slightly ajar.

Did they finally stop partying?

It had been the reason he had gone to the library in the first place, as that one guy at the very end of the hallway had thrown another party – what must've been the third of the week. Yet something about the door being open bothered him, because there didn't seem to be anyone around anymore. Once more his free hand drifted to his cheekbone, his fingers tracing the nearly healed wound. He did fix that for me... I should probably just go have a look to see if he's alright.

With a sigh he stuffed his keys back into his pocket, and walked up to the door. The remnants of the party were all around, even outside: plastic cups and beer bottles had been strewn about, he saw several cigarette butts and a very sad looking broken picture frame that lay face down on the floor. He kicked the bottles and cups together besides the door, collecting them all in a heap, and then picked the picture frame up by the back leg. A few shards of glass fell out, and he turned it around to see it still had a photo in it.

Two women held hands, one slightly taller and red headed, the other blonde and more stocky. In front of them there were two younger children of East-Asian heritage, a girl and a shorter boy grinning widely, and beside them another child, who was at least a head taller than either of the women. It looked like the picture was taken during a summer holiday, somewhere atop a castle ruin overlooking green hills.

Tristan sighed deeply, wondering why someone would throw a picture like that against the wall, but seeing the women hold hands he had a fairly good guess. Carefully he undid the back of the frame, and slid the picture out from behind the ruined glass while trying not to damage it. It came out quite easily, and for the moment he put it in his messenger bag between the pages of a book so it wouldn't fold or crease.

He opened the door of the room with his foot, and saw it was a two-person unit, which meant it had a larger shared area, with two doors leading off into bedrooms. The shared area was an absolute mess. Bottles and cups had been strewn about everywhere, on every surface, many of them toppled over and staining everything with whatever liquors and beers had been left on the bottom. A few notebooks had been dumped out over the couch and torn apart – he saw parts of someone's chemistry, biology and mathematics scattered along the floor. The very centerpiece was a large blue bong on the coffee table that had fallen over and shattered, as if some wicked effigy to the god of morning-after messes.

Not even sure where to begin looking, it took him a moment to see that one of the bedroom doors was also left open. Carefully he made his way through the shared living space, kicking the mess out of the way with his foot to create a safe path.

The bedroom was equally ruined. The beer bottles and plastic cups continued to invade the room unrelentingly. Medical textbooks had been pulled off of the shelves and carelessly thrown onto the floor. The blanket had been torn off of the bed, in a hasty attempt to cover up a puddle of sick in one of the corners. The smell invaded his nose and made him gag, but he managed to put his wrist in front of his nose just in time hold back.

He wasn't sure how the guy could sleep through it, but from the bottle of whisky on the desk right beside him it was probably not your ordinary sleep. What was his name again? Cailan? Tristan tried to remember, as he looked over the passed out mess right in front of him: he'd slumped into the desk chair, dried puke on the ends of his hair and corners of his mouth and quite a bit of it had splattered on the front of his shirt. It seemed that his esteemed party mates had taken the liberty of using their passed out host as a canvas, a rather explicit dick drawn on his cheek.