As You Awaken

2. All Eyes On Me

She didn't take her eyes off her phone screen as she downed another shot. Undiluted, room temperature Scandinavian vodka was the poison of choice, and she stacked each emptied glass in front of her, still watching her phone for an alert. The response never came, and she fought the urge to text her sister again before throwing back another shot.

She saw the barstool next to hers being pulled back, and she turned to the man who occupied it.

"That's an ambitious undertaking," he nodded at her shot glass architecture. "Can I get you another one of these?"
She nodded, and didn't bother hypothesizing too far into his biography. In this town, he likely did one of three things. And he was probably going to let her know anyway.

"I'm Chase. Attorney. At Levin and Cook."
She was almost certain it was his father's firm. She thought a dive bar a few miles away from Pennsylvania Avenue would be far enough to find refuge in, but it wasn't. She quickly filled in some gaps in his resume for her own amusement. Average grades at Georgetown, a stint at a fraternity, and a few date rapes under his belt.
"You look really familiar," he squinted his cornflower-blue eyes, as if scanning her face against a roster in his memory, doing the same thing to her as she had just done to him.

"How astute," she quipped, and only sipped half of her shot to conserve it. She tilted his chin to the television mounted above the bar, directing his eyes to it. "That's my mother."

On the evening news, Rena Saliba was draped in black, shown ducking into a car followed by a flock of her aides, with her face hidden behind a pair of oversized sunglasses.

"And that's my father's funeral that I attended this morning," Kenza muttered when the footage panned across several faces performatively mourning over a coffin in the presence of cameras, and then stopped at hers. Her stomach nearly turned at the irony of witnessing herself in high definition, at the center of the reality she had come here to block out.

"Kenza, you're cut off."
The warning came from behind the bar, and the man that had been pouring her only sustenance for the night was now taking apart her castle of shot glasses. She counted four bills from her black clutch, and begrudgingly placed them in front of him. It was only when she stood up that she realized her vision had blurred, and her balance wasn't what it was when she had first sat down.

She lifted her middle finger up at Chase in a silent farewell, and navigated the narrow path out of the bar and into the street.

The partially molten slush under her boots slowed her down, and she hid her hands in her coat, blinking against the bite in the wind. He wasn't far behind her; she didn't have to see or hear him to be sure of it. All week long, she had felt a rage bubbling up inside of her, consuming her as it expanded out. It started in her gut and rose until it was in her throat, and she tried to tamp it down with alcohol like she was trying to incapacitate a beast. There was nowhere left for it to go now, it was on her tongue, and she needed to expel it if she ever wanted to breathe again.

"Fuck off, Noa," she spat over her shoulder angrily.
"I can't do that," he responded without breaking his pace.
"For once in your fucking life. Just fuck off. Leave me the hell alone," she repeated. Pins and needles pricked at the tips of her fingers, and her chest tightened painfully. Her vision narrowed, forming a black vignette around her that began closing in. The pricks became sharper, and she squeezed her hands into fists in her pockets. Her next breath went in like a pitiful, injured mewl, and came out in a cough. Tears stung her eyes, and she couldn't feel the ground underneath her anymore.

Noa was in front of her now, blocking her trajectory forward like a brick wall. She willed her arms to move, and punched against his chest. "Leave me alone. I just want to be alone."