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BANG! CLAP. BANG! CLAP. BANG! CLAP.
"Come on, Jonathan. I'm going, and you like me-"
His eyes narrowed.
"Okay, you're stuck with me, so be stuck with me tomorrowtoo! C'mon, don't make me go alone."
Valentina awaited the boy's response while she continued laying on her back, tossing a tennis ball she found under his bed up at the ceiling. The 'BANG! CLAP!' it made every time it the ceiling then landed back in her hands was the only reason she didn't twitch at the anxious silence in the room.
Every once in a while she'd toss it too hard and bang it into the ceiling, causing it to come back too fast for her to catch. The red mark on her forehead was definitive proof.
"Hey, I didn't choose to make you go. You did that. Why do you even wanna go, anyway? Weren't you like... not invited?" Jonathan began to whisper, "Because, y'know, you and Tina..."
The blonde froze, her eyes leaving the fuzzy yellow ball to glare at her friend sitting on his bed to her right. By the downturn of his dark brown eyes, she could tell that he meant no harm by his assumption. But that didn't mean that there wasn't some offense taken.
To be fair, the boy made a great point. Why would someone want to crash a party at the house of someone they definitely did not want to see, where there would be plenty of other someones that they definitely did not want to see?
The truth was simple in Valentina's eyes, it was an excuse to get drunk—one of her favorite activity since the events of last year.
It's not a coping mechanism, she told herself, it's just fun. She used to say the same about cigarettes, and shopping, and arguing, and messing with Steve. 'Fun' was letting loose for a while, and Valentina quickly realized that her scarred mine couldn't do that without some sort of relaxer. She wasn't distracting herself with whatever was going on because it was too hard to actually deal with anything, she was just having fun.
But deep down in her gut, she knew that wasn't true. Neither did any of the other few people that knew about her 'addictive habits', as she called them. Habits, not straight-up addiction. She could quit any time she wanted to, she just happened to not want to.
There was really only one person who noticed the downfall of Valentina's mental and physical health, and that was Jonathan Byers. She didn't directly tell him, and she certainly didn't tell anyone else, but the boy simply cared enough to notice on his own.
Once he really payed attention, it wasn't hard to put together why her leg suddenly started hurting more in the morning after a late night, or why the rims of her eyes turned darker than the irises themselves. And it wasn't just smudged eyeliner this time. There could've been other explanations for the missing labels on what she told him were prescription bottles. There could've been other excuses for the brown paper bags strewn about the backseat of her car that she told him were just from lunch.
