Trapped in Forever

54 ~ Just Live a Little

Whenever I had been at a party before, amongst those drunken high school students with tight denim shorts or smoky eye-shadow outlining their glazed, slow eyes, red cups with amber hued liquid sloshing in their hands as they danced to pop song that blared through docked iPod speakers with auto-tuned choruses, I usually was off to the side, out of the way, avoiding the line toward the keg or dark brown bottles of Bud Light beer stacked like bowling pins beside the greasy cardboard boxes of pizza, and mumbled my excuses if someone brushed against my sides, grazed against my elbows, or stepped on the toes of my shoes, and I jumped when someone would place both of their hands on either side my waist as they passed, my back brushing against their chest before they disappeared into the mass of scantily clad students, laughing and shouting the wrong lyrics to songs they didn’t know or forgot in their drunken haze.

The few times that I had ever gone to a party with Roxanne, I just stood beside her as she spoke to her “friends” and tried to convince them of what I already knew. That she wasn’t a freak, that her pica was pretty much gone (I knew this was a lie, anyway), and that she was seeing a therapist, either ignoring or oblivious to the shared incredulous looks her “friends” exchanged in between her words. I held a drink I wasn’t drinking, and I nodded to her whenever she looked at me and said something like right, Amanda? I was always her shadow at those parties, watching silently as she tried to earn back old friendships while I stood there, holding a friendship in my hands that wasn’t important enough for her to stop, to roll her eyes and finally say whatever to them when they stifled their sanctimonious smiles, and to walk out.

She already had me so why should she need me?

But something at this party was different, different than the ones I went to with Roxanne so she could desperately declare her sanity to people who only laughed harder when she walked away with the pinkness of shame glowing against her cheeks, different than the ones I went to by myself, different than that one I went to with Mikayla after slipping through her bedroom window and crawling against the shingles of the roof and feeling as if Mrs. Hubbard was peering through her window just at that moment, a hand clinging to her robe, just in time to watch us as we descended down the Escape Tree and then would call our parents. Maybe it was because I wasn’t here alone or quickly abandoned by Mikayla as she vanished into the crowd I was so unfamiliar with, but with Reese, Veronica, and Kara who stood there, as if was us against them, a pack of perfumed girls who talked casually as they sipped their lite beers. Maybe it was because I felt like I was a part of something there, in the midst of those girls after straightening or curling the backs of each other’s hair and helping to choose between lipstick shades.

Maybe it wasn’t those girls and how we all stood around each other, with drinks we actually drank, and ignored the brushes of elbows and the touching of sides as if the friendship we all had was enough, and this party was just scenery and the drunken people there nothing but a whisper in our ears as we spoke to each other, or how I felt the closest I had to having a friend—or even friends—in such a long time, without the complication of feelings or unexpected kisses in bedrooms or curbsides, but maybe it was me that was different. I wasn’t sure it was the missing two pounds and fourteen ounces or that I had braided my hair into what Kara called a “sexy, one braid wonder” that draped over my shoulder, clad in a faux leather jacket that creased and squeaked when I moved or raised my hand, or my heeled shoes Oxford pump heels made this clicking sound of empowerment when I walked, or that I felt like I wasn’t alone, but whatever changed somewhere, it made me feel like Mandy, like I was actually her. Not pretending to be her, not wishing to be her, but actually being her.

We were all sitting together around the corner of a beige L shaped couch in the center of the living room, with a glass coffee table that had dark wooden legs and a couple of Taste of Home magazines laid elaborately over top of each other toward the straight edge, being used in lieu of a coaster for a couple of half empty beer bottles, one missing the label wrapped around the middle, and Reese was sandwiched into the corner with Veronica on her right, with me and Kara on her left, and she had propped her open toed black pumps onto the edge of the coffee table, the sole of her shoe brushing against the neck of a bottle, and her pink toenails gleaming beneath the limited lighting in the living room. We all held drinks in our hand—lite beers with the number of calories printed on the bottle’s label beside the brand’s name—and we had discarded the cracked bottle caps into a few potted plants beside the refrigerator, which was slowly starting to look barren, with only a bottle of mustard with a crusty yellow top and a gallon of milk with an expiration date written in bold, hot pink Sharpie print that came and went two days ago. They seemed disinterested in the party, in the girls that sat on either side of us on the L shaped couch with the screens of their phones illuminating their faces and hands stifling their giggles, so instead of staring at them as they tipped back their brown bottles and gulped and tripped in their heels as they danced, I stared at the glass rim of my own bottle, smoothing my finger over the cool dark glass. I had taken one sip from the bottle, and tried to conceal how my features immediately tried to scrunch together into an unattractive cringe. It tasted like lighter fluid as I swallowed it, and it burned my throat, and for a moment, I wondered if just drinking lite beer would render slipping my fingers into my mouth pointless.