whispers and mutters • blasnique

Chapter Twenty

UNIQUE

It was a close call of finally exposing myself as an in-denial, boy-liking piece of shit. Sometimes I hate Zild for chiming in, but for now maybe I'll love him a little bit. Just a little bit.

I feel Badjao's hands around my shoulder as I light up another cigarette. These cigarettes just make me feel so cotton-mouthed in a way that it calms me. "I know." he just smiles awkwardly.

What the hell's with this guy? He looks at me like I'm some guy with dirty, deep secrets that he just so happened to know about all too well. He's so obvious yet so mysteriously vague in a way. He always knows things and it makes me feel so utterly exposed.

So I blew a smoke right at his face.

The cigarette dangling right at the edge of my lips hung loosely. Badjao stared at me so I stared right back at him. I feel weird.

Zild stared at us, then we stared back at him. Feeling awkwardly bizarre, I took the cigarette and tapped its edge on the ashtray. "Zild, stop staring at us and buy me lunch, man." I said as if he was my servant of some sort. He rolled his eyes in response.

Badjao opened the television right after a deafening silence followed. 

I never liked the quiet. It was always an odd subject I've never talked about, except in my insomniac nights of always trying to figure out what to do with my life.

But if there's anything worse than silence, it's the noise and the cries of laughter that oppresses you in language you never understood.

So I upped and walked towards the door, not losing a wink of eye contact with Badjao. I shuddered. 

"I think I'll be going home for now." I tell Badjao under my breath but audible enough for him to hear. I turn to the door, losing the thought of Zild paying me lunch for the first time. 

As I was about to cross the road, I first mindlessly littered my cigarette on the ground and stepped on it. 

The curly-haired boy had always crossed my train of thought. But always became more frequent when she mentioned him and Blaster to me.

I flinch at the thought of her, but then startled when I saw her appear right beside me. She smirked with her wicked, red lips and her hellish, sly smile. 

"Thinking of me?"

Trying to repress my fear and agony, I look at her straight in the eye with a plain, emotionless face. "How'd you know?" I ask in monotone.

She lights up a cigarette. "You know Badjao: he knows things. And so do I." then she opens her cigarette box up, leaning her hand to me as if she was offering me some. "You want some?"

"No. I'm trying to stop, you know," I look away from her. "Liar. You think I don't know that that poor cig is yours? Damn, Unique, stop bein' a pussy." she says as she pulls out a stick, handing it to me afterwards.

My hands shake as I try to light up the cigarette in agony and pressure. She is right. I'm a pussy who cowers in fear of a cigarette stick that I've never stopped using since.

"See? It's not so bad after all." 

Being a fool of a probable hallucination, I muttered her words under my breath with smoke exhaled as I spoke silent words to myself.

"It's not so bad after all."

***

I downed nearly a bucket of beer with a girl nobody else sees but me.

My hands are numb and my head's is utterly intoxicated. The hazy fumes of liquor that filled the clouds of the nightclub seeped through my nostrils. People were dancing to the funky music that seemed like rotating spirals flying around my head. Drugs were dealt from one hand to another and people were just using it here and there.

"Hey! You drank too much!" said she as she tried to drag me out of the loud, frenzied nightclub of dancing feet and drunken bodies. "I don't care!" I huffed, trying to reach for the pot I bought from some long-haired guy that have become faceless to me over time.

She said my words were slurred in ways nobody else but God could understand. So I told her to tell God to fuck off.

"I don't wanna go home yet, you fucker!" I shout at her, earning a couple of judging stares and meddling eyes. I try to pull away from her tight grasp. "You-- I told you! I don't wanna go fucking home! I don't wanna go home! Mamaaaaaa! Mamaaaaa!"

Like others would call it, I was "nutty as a fruitcake." I shouted at strangers and with my often-dizzying vision of them being heads of alien-like spirals trying to attack me.

As sure as an answer to a failing exam, I convinced myself that it's just alcohol I took.

I was sure about my liquor-induced intoxication until I felt the strong grasp of the security personnel on my arms, taking me out the club. But when I looked at them, they hadn't the face of a male. They had her face. They had the face of a certain girl in my head that I see.

She dragged me to a taxi cab that fortunately parked right in front of us just in time. So I threw myself in and closed the door, telling her to fuck off while giving her the finger.

The driver looked me weird. I rolled my eyes at him and told him where to go.

Watching the vehicle float through road by road while on a probable high is like levitating on top of the world. Your head feels like mush and cotton that you're right on the borderline of the very pinnacle of relaxation and being temporarily brain dead in a way.

But being brain dead doesn't mean you can't be stupid no more.

You're just at the beginning of stupidity that the next morning, you'll be completely stupefied at everything. What a weird word. Stupor.

I cackle at my thoughts. 

"Stop fucking staring at me!" I shout at the driver.

But when the driver had dropped me off, he didn't even wait for the money and he just completely drove away from me as if he was in some kind of hurry. 

So when I entered my lonely, broken home, a pang of guilt attacked me with some type of heaviness down my chest. "Fuck,"

It was the chaotic inertia of the house that made me snap out of certain things. 

Maybe I do want Blaster to come over, right? Maybe I do want him to make me feel safe in his innocent embrace and warmth. Maybe I do like him.

Absentmindedly, I drove myself towards the telephone and mindlessly dialled his number.

I was about to ask him how he was, but when a certain voice has picked up from the other line,  I knew I was fucked up. 

To snap out of a worsening infatuation, sometimes you gotta have the patriarch to tell you from the other side of the phone to fuck off and stay away from his son.