Sleep Magazine (Completed)

The Injury: Part One: 3

For a little while, Ava continued to observe the party normally. She watched the familiar faces of her classmates and friends from nearby towns as they filtered in and out of the kitchen, even conversing with different groups of people once in a while as she kept a conscious feel on her breathing. 

Just when she thought she may, by some miracle, escape any effects of the orange-powdered mushrooms, she caught the faint glint of a sparkling trail of muted colors behind a boy's legs as he shuffled across the floor, lifting the empty vodka bottles up into the light of his phone to inspect them.

Her breath caught in her chest and she closed her eyes.

Stay on the counter, she told herself. Don't move.

She could feel Luther next to her; he was talking to the pretty girl again. Ava thought about reaching out to squeeze the back of his arm, but for the sake of the success of his flirtations, decided not to.

Her eyes seemed to drag when she looked toward the side kitchen door, more vibrant colors now streaming off the edges of the people she scanned over to rest her vision on three young men standing in the doorway. She felt that the man in the middle was staring directly at her, though she was untrusting of her flawed perception. He darted his eyes back and forth between her eyes and her sweatshirt and then, in an instant, he and his companions were stood at the other end of the kitchen, near the door to the strange room occupied by Dave and Marcus. The door opened and the men shuffled in, as it seemed to Ava, in choppy, erratic movements that flashed with swirls of color into her brain. 

And then the door was closed again.

Soon Katie was standing in front of her, hands on her shoulders, her mouth moving slowly. Ava nodded her head in agreement though she hadn't processed a word of what Katie had said.

Hearing noise from behind the doorway instead, she turned her head to look at it. She tried to focus every bit of her senses on the commotion coming from the room—unable to determine if the men on the other side of the door were yelling or laughing—then turned her head back to find Katie suddenly yards away down the hall, hand twisting the knob of the front door to leave the house with Mike following close behind her.

The kitchen seemed more crowded now than it had been before. An unfamiliar boy stood in the middle of the room with his jeans down at his ankles, one hand holding his dick while the other gripped the countertop behind him for balance, hardly able to stand as he pissed all over the floor. 

Ava contemplated the color of his urine as she watched it puddle; it was so fluorescent green in the candlelit kitchen that she suspected it must be an effect of the drugs either digested by her or the boy. 

She turned her gaze up to Luther, still beside her, who stood with his arms wrapped around the pretty girl. They were both laughing at the spectacle, which made Ava smile and relax a bit, as no one else seemed to notice the bright green color.

Then the kitchen filled with gasps at the same moment that Ava registered a loud thud from the room behind the door, as if someone had been thrown against it. As she turned her head to scan the kitchen, she noticed, in a confused and slow state, that none of the shocked, gasping people in the kitchen were looking toward the door to investigate the thud. 

They were looking, instead, at a boy near the cupboards, on fire.

Ava felt frozen in her place on the countertop as she watched the boy. Airy strands of orange and purple waved around him, spreading more quickly than Ava could register, the flames now rising up behind his head. 

Luther lunged out and held his arm up to stop another boy's movements, but it was too late. The drunk boy, out of instinct, threw the contents of his plastic cup onto the burning boy's upper body and suddenly half the room appeared to fill with flames.

Ava wondered for a moment if she was dreaming; if the scene unfolding in front of her eyes was happening in real time, or if it was delayed, or had already happened minutes before, or perhaps in another life altogether.

There was more commotion coming from the room behind the door now, possibly the sounds of fighting or moving furniture, though it was too muffled behind the yells and screams in the kitchen to make any sense of.

Ava leaned over the sink and twisted the faucet to dip her face under cold water. When she looked up, the scene in front of her eyes had changed. The burning boy was no longer burning. He was on the floor surrounded by three other boys, one of whom was beating him viciously with a large gray sweatshirt, extinguishing the flames. It was Ben Wagrowski.

Drying her face with her orange sleeves and taking several deep breaths, Ava prepared herself to get down from the counter. She had the sudden desire to run; to leave the party and run into the woods before God knows what else might happen, though she was unsure if she would be able to. 

She could feel her legs and was able to wiggle her toes inside her purple sneakers, but she wasn't positive that her lower limbs would register her brain's commands the way she needed them to. She extended one foot down, toe tapping on the floor to test her balance, before a disturbing bout of vertigo froze her in her place.

She now found herself perched in the old green chair where Marcus had been sitting.

Shaking her head to expel the vision from her mind, Ava looked down at her hands, only half surprised to see the plush green armrests under her forearms. She ran her palms over the inlaid carvings, her eyes enlarging as she watched them protrude out from the fabric of the chair and shape into a set of large, polished wooden hands. Unconsciously, she interlaced her fingers with the hard spindles and looked down at them, mesmerized, as flashes of red and blue danced over the skin of her knuckles.

"Pigs!" someone yelled out from the living room.

Ava couldn't lift her head up to look around the room. She could only sit frozen in the forest green chair, gripping the wooden hands to keep herself from falling, and watch the flashes of colored light on her skin. She felt the hard hands grip back, clasping around her soft, fleshy ones so roughly that they started to pull her down.

"Cops!"

Ava heard yelling and running, then felt two large hands on her shoulders.

She snapped her head up to see Luther pulling her down from the counter and setting her on her feet in front of him and, clasping her hand with his, they ran.

As Ava and Luther hurried down the basement steps in a mass of their peers, the open bulkhead shone a spot of moonlight onto two of their friends near the washing machine and clothes dryer.

Marco jumped into the dryer, slamming the door closed behind him before another boy ripped it wide open again and grabbed Marco roughly with both hands.

"Fuck you, Kenny!" shouted Marco as the other boy hoisted him from the dryer and threw him onto the ground. "I was here first!"

Kenny dove into the now empty dryer, calling out, "You got it last time, douchebag!" before he pulled the door closed.

"Come on!" Ava grabbed Marco's sleeve with her free hand and pulled him along behind her and Luther, the three of them leaping up the dusty concrete steps and out of the bulkhead.