Asterisk*

Alcohol and Agony*

*With neither pertaining to Marcus, thank goodness

In a world so dark,

The only option is to go darker,

Substances that bring death,

Become substances that delay death.

Pure freezing horror,

Buried in the ice caps of the world.

Marcus

When I was fifteen, I broke my leg. My brother decided that he wanted to sign my cast, so he put his name in huge block letters on it, leaving no space for other people. Kadance left it be, but Aiden decided he wanted to sign the cast as well, so he took a highlighter and wrote his name on top of Dash's. It all looked disgusting, so Kadance helped me color in the rest of the cast, pretending like we did rainbow stripes on purpose and not because the ink in the red marker ran out.

That night, Aiden discovered alcohol for the first time. He was hanging out with the older kids, who probably stole it from their parents. I had to get Dash to pick him up in his car, then pretend we were having a sleepover. He's lucky that it was the summer, or Dash wouldn't have been home to pick him up. He puked his guts out in the bathroom, which took forever to clean up. He didn't touch alcohol again for a while, probably scared it would have the same effect on him. Ultimately, it did. But every few months, he kept doing it. There had to be something he was feeling, but he never explained it.

Kadance and I would take turns taking care of drunk Aiden. His parents would have killed him if he ever came home drunk. In fact, they didn't drink at all, which had to do something with his mother thinking it was the devil's work. Quite hypocritical when you think about it, considering she can go through a pack of cigarettes faster than I can get through a water bottle. Whatever it was, we didn't want to get him in trouble, so we ransacked our brains for some kind of excuse we could use to cover for him.

When I moved out here for college, I didn't think I was going to have to deal with drunk Aiden again. When I didn't hear anything from him last Friday, I assumed he had made new friends that would cover for him, since there was no way he would skip a big drinking holiday, But I guess that wasn't the case, considering Kadance was calling me this Friday night, telling me he's going to pick me up in about twenty minutes because Aiden was drunk, again.

I was in my room with my hands stuck in my pockets, pacing around slightly. I was a bit nervous about what to say to him. I'm not sure how much Kadance had told him, or what I even could tell him. Besides that, I had no idea what crazy situation we were going to get into today, other than the fact he was going to be staying at Kadance's apartment. It was a really small studio which Kadance was still moving into, most of his furniture still at his parent's house.

"Hey, you're gonna chill out or what?" my roommate asked me, throwing a pillow at the back of my head. "Where are you going anyways?"

"Dealing with a drunk friend," I responded, running my hand through my hair before trying to fix the tangled mess I had made.

"Seems fun."

"Seriously?"

"Sure, why not? It's always fun to see how people are when they're drunk. Bet your uptight ass wouldn't be as uptight, yeah?"

I shrugged, checking my phone to see a text from Kadance. After walking slowly to the outskirts of campus, I got into Kadance's car, trying to find a place to sit, which wasn't very easy with Aiden sprawled out in the backseat. It smells slightly like throw up, with cheap perfume from what seemed like Marshalls sprayed around to hide the smell. The car already smelled of sweat from beforehand, so I tried just holding my breath for the ride.