Sleep Magazine (Completed)

The Forest: 1

"Where the fuck is Luther?" Ava sighed in exasperation as she shimmied her heavy backpack down off her shoulders and let it drop onto the dirt driveway with a clunk. 

She bent down to unzip the bag and pulled out her phone and an energy drink, then promptly zipped it up and hauled one strap back over her shoulder. She hit the call button and tucked her phone between her ear and shoulder while her fingers fiddled with the tab on the aluminum can, continuing the walk up the steep dirt driveway alongside Katie, who also wore a heavy backpack and held two plastic grocery bags full of juice and soda bottles in her hands.

As the girls made their way up the hill, the narrow dirt path became increasingly littered with fallen pine needles from the overgrowth of the woods around them. They turned their heads to look back over their shoulders every so often, hoping for another partygoer to come driving up the path and spare them another twenty minutes or so of walking uphill. 

When the girls had finally trudged about fifty yards beyond the thick tree line, a large, cabin-style house came into view, adjacent to a partially cleared lot that was occupied by dozens of parked cars. The land immediately surrounding the house was less cleared; several very tall, imposing pine trees brushed their dark branches against the side of the house and over the roof to intertwine with one another. 

Ava looked up at the trees in the distance and watched them sway over the house in the mild wind. Though it was nightfall, the outline of the trees remained clear and black against the misty gray-blue sky behind them. Ava thought the trees looked rather ominous compared to the elms and maples that lined her own driveway. Even in the late fall—bare and completely void of any leaves—the elms and maples somehow looked friendlier and cheerier than the lush, green pines.

"I see a dark blue Mazda," Katie announced with a squeal. She turned her body toward Ava and hopped a little as she stepped, making the glass liquor bottles in her backpack rattle loudly.

"Oh great," remarked Ava. She rolled her lips together between her teeth, trying to hold back a smirk as she observed Katie's sudden enthusiasm, but laughed out loud when Katie began jumping up and down in a childlike display of giddiness. Katie's eyes lit up, relieved to hear a laugh instead of the lecture she had been anticipating, and jumped in front of Ava to stop her in her path.

"Will you actually do some with me tonight?" she asked excitedly, dropping the grocery bags to grip Ava's forearms.

"Fuck no," Ava laughed.

Katie's face dropped into a blank stare as she bit the inside of her cheek, exhaling loudly out her nose to convey her annoyance with Ava's rejection. She trotted back down the driveway a few yards to chase a rolling bottle of orange soda, wordlessly picked up the grocery bags and dramatically turned away from Ava to continue her trek up to the house.

"Katie, seriously, don't take anything from him. He gets all that coke from wicked sketchy places." Ava continued walking a few steps behind Katie, not bothering to try to catch up.

"Yes, yes, yes," Katie replied in an irritated tone without turning back toward her friend. "Good thing you reminded me for the millionth time; I almost forgot you knew everything."

As the girls finally approached the lot of cars, a shift in the clouds above cast them in nearly complete darkness, aside from a light on the front porch up ahead and a light coming from the cab of a small pickup truck parked in the center of the lot. Katie, still a few steps ahead of Ava, veered off the driveway and made her way through the lot toward the lit up vehicle. 

Ava squeezed between the parked cars as she followed Katie silently toward what she could now make out was their friend Alex's Tacoma. She dropped her backpack by her feet and threw her empty can in the truck bed as Katie set the plastic bags down and knocked on the passenger side window.