Train Track Girls

5 - Fast Lane Girls

Chapter Song: Walt//Yoko Kanno

Before

There was a time when even own actions, own consequences was tested. We'd just started school again, after Summer vacation, and things were happening fast (as they always were). Mom's never known how to deal with it and Becca's got too little time to tame the wild, although she's always tried.

Back then, November and I drowned in the euphoria of being fast lane girls. We popped who-knows-what, snuck into who-knows-where and hung with who-knows-who. We were skipping classes and having nights that lasted forever. What we couldn't remember was made up for by the vibrancy of what we could. There was nothing we couldn't do. Maybe nothing we didn't.

Too fast for the cops, for the bottle, for the world.

Then this party rolled around and November and I couldn't tell the floor apart from the ceiling. Nobody spiked our drinks or forced us to have too much. It was all on us.

It was wondrous at first. The music was all right. The lights were flashing in the right directions. I was dancing with all the right people, high on all the right stuff.

I remember hands and smiles, but no eyes. I was cotton candy, spun around and savored for my sweetness.

"Alice, call me Alice." And they did. They did whatever I wanted.

Then I saw November stumbling into a room, with a joker-smile guy following behind her. Somewhere in the mushroom field of my thoughts, I realized something was off. I made my way over there, my surroundings warped and my head buzzing, shoving people out of the way as I walked on walls.

I fell through the door, my hair wet with alcohol, and she was there, pressed against a cupboard, her head lolled to the side. She was muttering deliriously, on another plane altogether. And he was on her, hands everywhere, lips sucking her lungs dry.

I screamed.

I shrieked.

I cried.

I wailed.

All of the above. I converted all of my oxygen to agony and I couldn't move but God, I screamed. People spilled into the room, not fast enough, and he disappeared into the crowd. My cry seemed to wake November to some extent. She sunk down, repeated same thing over and over, as though it were still happening. Her hands crawled through her hair, spider legs walking her scalp. "No, no, stop. No – please get away from me."

And then we were home somehow. I was drinking lots of water and I wanted my mom to be home but she wasn't and Becca was asleep. November was in the bathroom, throwing up I guessed because that wasn't unusual. I opened the door, ready to hold her hair back, ready to talk as little or as much as she needed. But she wasn't throwing up.

Her eyes were feral. She was standing in the bathtub, fully clothed, showerhead spraying as she scrubbed at her skin frantically. It shone bright red.

I tasted my tears as I wrestled her hands away but she fought, she said, "No, no, stop. No – please get away from me," and I said, "November, it's me. Listen, it's me. Riley." But she struggled on and I was in the tub, water soaking into my boots. She started to get it, she said, "Riley...Riley...no, I have to – I have to get him off me. It was just like him, that's why I can't go there. Please, Riley. Please, please – " And then she was breathing too fast. She was shaking and her eyes screamed help and I didn't know what to do. I sat her down and said it was okay when I knew that it really fucking wasn't.

Maybe the worst was that I still couldn't see straight. She was a blur and her words pierced my ears the way they pierced my heart.

The next day we laid her clothes on the train tracks.