I am trapped in a cascade of dancing lights, that showers myself and my peers in a bath of multicoloured hues. I stand to the side of the pack, watching as bodies jump and grind to the fat bass booming from the speakers. Any other night and I'd be ready to jump right in and join the wave of euphoria but not tonight. Tonight's different. Tonight's the anniversary.
I raise the red plastic cup to my mouth and slurp up a mouthful of warm beer. It's not the nicest taste in the world but it's good enough. Looking back around the large room before me, I survey the scene. A table of pizza crusts to my right, an intense dance-off happening up front, green eyes peppered with hazel specks looking at me and an intense game of truth and dare happening to my immediate right. Wait, go back. The green eyes are still there across the room, bobbing in time with his footsteps heading directly towards me. I don't attempt to hide the grin to spread across my face and take a step forward to meet him.
"Hey," he smiles when he's close enough for me to hear him over the raging music. Zach approaches me like a red-blooded man, hooks a finger around a belt loop of my short-shorts and pulls me towards him for a quick kiss. By quick, I mean at least a couple of seconds.
"Hey yourself," I whisper back, breathless and giddy.
Tonight was Zoe's idea. Apparently one of the best ways to overcome a bad anniversary is to make it a good anniversary of something else. So instead of reminding ourselves of the Vocatio and all the terrible things that ensued after it, tonight has become a meet-up at a party to have fun, just like how the Vocatio was meant to be.
"Are the others here yet?" I ask him.
"Just arrived," Removing his right hand from my pants to instead swing around my shoulders, Zach uses his free hand to gesture towards three individuals huddled at the opposite end of the room from us.
Lucy and Zoe greet me first. Hugs, hellos and giddy how-you-doings, as I see my two best friends most days, our greetings don't take long to complete. I'm surprised when Roberto pulls me in for a hug next but I wrap my arms around him just as tightly. I haven't seen him since Zoe's birthday six months ago and, in all honesty, I missed him.
"You ready to join?" Roberto breaks the moment, nodding towards the swirling mass of drunken teens.
"Are you?" Zoe grins back.
The tension between the two of them is palpable. This time next year and I predict they'll be in a relationship. Distracted by their cuteness, I jump when a warm hand slips into my own and guides me towards the hub of party life.
Dancing, drinking and even a bit of kissing, we spend hours in this room. We laugh when Roberto performs a strip tease for Zoe and laugh even harder when Zoe records it on film.
The five of us bonded in the most brutal of conditions. They say traumatic events does something to relationships: either they strengthen or they break. And ours, I'm happy to say, have definitely been strengthened. At almost eighteen years of age, most teenagers believe their current best friends will be their life long best friends. Maybe this is me being young and naive, but I'm confident we'll be meeting up on the Vocatio until our heads are grey and our partying centres around a Bingo score card.
As the night dwindles to a slow stop, I find myself gravitating towards Lucy. She stands against a wide pane of glass, staring into the inky night illuminated by the fluorescent street lights. The Vocatio changed Lucy in a different way to the rest of us. She's quieter now and her wild streak of booze filled delirium has settled down into peaceful sobriety.
"You alright?" I ask, catching the green eyes of Zach checking up on us, concerned.
When Lucy turns to me, I'm startled by the water that has tinted her eyes pink, pooling like a dam. And when she speaks I barely hear the three syllables to whisper across her tongue, "It's raining."
———————
A/N:
It's taken awhile but finally Misplaced is completed. Thanks for reading and I hope you've enjoyed this journey as much as I have.
VOTE. COMMENT. SHARE.
YOU ARE READING
Misplaced (COMPLETED)
Teen Fiction|misplaced/mɪsˈpleɪst/adjective| 1. incorrectly positioned. 2. temporarily lost. So the story goes: a boy once loved a girl. The boy stopped loving the girl. The girl got over the boy . . . until a hundred kilometres from home said girl kept encount...
