Juliet Caster had always dreamed of getting out of Pine Point, just like every other teenager from a small town. For a while, she was content with rebelling the normal way; dying her hair, listening to music too loud, quietly writing opinion pieces...
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Sunsets are tragic. Beautiful, and fleeting, and tragic, painting the sky with creamsicle orange and lipstick pink and just-picked lavender. Lighting up the blue. And then disappearing, never to be the same, an endless cycle of beauty-dull-beauty, a blank slate consistently drawn over and wiped clean.
It's pretty sad, if you think about it. No sunset can be experienced twice. The clouds will never align the same way, smudged colors will never be the same hue. Or maybe Ette's just really, really drunk.
Either way, she's been zoned out and staring at the horizon for the last handful of unreliable minutes. Time had sped up and slowed down the entire night. Bex Reardon's backyard, overlooking the lake and forest that consumed it, had never felt quite real. Tonight was no exception.
Mari exhaled, smoke pooling from her mouth, and snapped Juliet back into focus. Rejecting the blunt, she tucked her legs under her, jeans uncomfortably tight around her thighs. She could smoke. She had before. But tonight felt weird, and wrong, and she was already drunk enough, so she held back.
"Why is everyone in the world here right now?" Juliet whined, hands cupped tightly around her drink.
People always flocked to Bex's, but not usually this many. It was hard to pick specific people out of the clusters of cliques, black clothing and spiked mohawks blending together in the dimming light, the same pair of high-waisted jeans and crop top ten times over. Crowds were never Juliet's forte, even if they were fun to analyze.
"I heard there was a fight at the Cast Iron," Mari said, a wicked smile on her face.
"Yeah? Who?"
"Two senior boys, apparently one sold the other laced weed," she punctuated her sentence with a drag from her blunt. All 'who-fucking-cares' as usual. To be fair, she was untouchable. Or at least she seemed to be.
Juliet rolled her eyes and leaned back in her seat, staring up at the stars wistfully. It would be so much easier to live on a speck in space, just alone in the bright white. "When will people grow up?"
Mari shrugged in agreement, lazy from the high. They sat like that in silence, watching the sky grow darker as the sun set further, the last of the waxy orange and pink blurring away.
"I think I just saw Carson," her friend stood up, legs unsticking from the plastic lawn furniture. "I'm gonna head to the lake. You coming?"
The idea of standing up made her legs go wobbly, head spinning as she tried to formulate words. She shook her head no. Even if she could climb down the rocky, steep path to the lake's shore, it wouldn't be a good idea. Not in her state.
So Mari left, box braids bouncing behind her in the autumn breeze, thighs indented in stripes, and left Ette to sit on her own.
There weren't many vacant places to sit, at least not actual seats; beach towels and old rugs and mandala tapestries were strewn about the grass, almost covering the natural ground entirely. Still, it was nice to have something with a back, and she didn't doubt that someone would come and steal Mari's perch in no time.
