ARIANA WANG
Drunk Teenage Girls
It’s too late to be driving like this, like we’re untouchable. The trees are blurring together like spilt watercolor, and I can taste green on my tongue.
“You’re too stiff,” Lily whines. She’s sitting in the passenger seat in front of me, so she has to crane her head back and around to face me like a deformed doll. She pouts prettily, batting her long eyelashes. “Are you sure you don’t want any?”
She holds out a styrofoam cup, lidded and opaque. It used to hold orange soda, but Lily poured that into the lake hours ago. We have learned the hard way to stop drinking straight from the bottle, after a police officer pulled us over for speeding a few months back and found a half-empty bottle shoved haphazardly into the trunk. We know better now. Shrinking back in my seat, I shake my head and say, “I’m okay. Really.”
“You need to lighten up.” Lily thrusts the cup in my face, arching so far back that her legs are no longer touching the seat. The straw is close enough to my mouth that I can almost taste the magenta lipstick smeared onto the plastic. “Come on, darling.”
“Hey. Let up, Lily,” Raina tells her and then speeds right past a stop sign. She’d claimed to be sober when we hit the road, but now, I’m not so sure.
“Fine.” Lily slumps back into her seat, cradling the cup in her arms like a newborn child. She picks at a loose thread trailing off the hem of her dress, looping it around her finger so tight that her skin turns purple before she lets go. “Always the good girl. Bet Mommy’s proud of you.”
There’s no use fighting with Lily when she’s like this, so I press my forehead to the cold window and pretend that I’ve already won the argument.
Raina swears then, a string of colorful expletives that would land her a mouthful of soap anywhere else. The car jerks, just in time to swerve away from a pickup truck barrelling down the road at three-digit speed. The world spins. We’re suspended like ants in jello before everything comes crashing back down, the car hurling onto the grassy median like a spinning top. None of us make a noise, not even when we’ve come to a startling stop. Too afraid that even the tiniest sound will send us cascading back into motion.
“Sorry,” Raina says at last. Her voice is unwavering, but it’s her hands that give her away, gripping the steering wheel so tight that her knuckles are white as snowdrops. Lily makes a noise like she’s crying, but then she does it again, and it’s a laugh this time, bubbling out of her mouth all frothy until wild giggles are tumbling from her like flies.
“That was fun,” she squeezes out between peals of hysterical laughter. She clutches her stomach, neatly trimmed nails digging into the shifting satin of her dress. “We should do it again.”
Raina starts the car, and we drive slowly, hesitantly, back onto the road. We don’t speak, and Lily doesn’t stop laughing.
* * *
Lily directs us off onto a side road, her dulcet voice slurring into an arpeggio of wrinkled vowels. Raina’s driving slower now, but I wish that she weren’t because I can feel the bump of each rock beneath the tires. The trees around us lunge toward the sky, skeletal and jagged. I think about telling Raina to turn back. I’m sure that the car headlights will break down any moment now, and we’ll become the stars of an old slasher film: Raina and Me, Darling Lily and her cup of not-orange soda.
Just as the trees are about to swallow us whole, we break into a wide open clearing. There’s a massive house sitting right in the middle, the type that should belong alongside a private beach instead of in the middle of the woods. Raina parks near the edge of the clearing, away from all the other cars clustered in the middle because she never learned how to park quite right.
“We’ll just have to walk a little,” she says. Lily claps and clambers out of the car. We walk one in front of another: Lily first, then Raina, then me. When I pass the spot Lily deserted a minute ago, I can still smell her perfume hanging in the air like cough syrup, only sweeter. The front doors are shut tight with a silver padlock, but the side doors are cracked open, blue light leaking onto our clothes. Lily glows in her white dress and pushes open the door. This is always the worst part. It’s that rushing water sound, like swimming through thick molasses and free-falling all at once. Everything goes a little hazy as we enter, too-loud music and flashing lights and humid air seeping into my veins. I hold my breath until I’m about to pop, and then I release it all in a rush so that I’m light-headed and flowers are exploding in my vision. Once I get used to it, it’s not so bad.
“I’m going to dance,” Raina says. Lily’s gone already, and the styrofoam cup is in Raina’s hands now. I watch as she downs the rest in one go and tosses it at a nearby trash can. She misses, and it hits the wall instead, leaving arcs of luminous brown splattered across white plaster. “You gonna be okay?”
I nod. I’m not so sure, but I’ll manage. I always do. Except without Lily or Raina, I’m a headless chicken. A ghost, lingering and aimless. The music is beating at the base of my bones like a faltering heartbeat. I wander around and don’t become solid again until I’m pushed into a wall by a couple with golden hair. They’re too busy grappling at each other to notice me, at least until they bang into me a second time.
The boy is the first to pull away, turning to me with a blinding, white smile that makes me squirm. “Sorry. Didn’t see you there.”
The girl peeks around him. She’s small and wide-eyed, the type of girl you’d see wearing overalls and French braids in an Old Navy advertisement and think how cute. The only thing distinguishing her from perfect, angelic innocence is the teeth-shaped mark stamped into the smooth skin of her neck.
She points and says, “Hey, I know you! You go to my school!”
I blink.
“Annabelle Reese, remember?”
The name is enough to ring a bell. There was a rumor circulating around last year – one more fact than fiction – that Annabelle Reese spiked a girl’s drink in eighth grade and left her alone with a group of seniors in a locked room, all because she was wearing the same shoes as her. I peek down at my mud-caked sneakers and then at her sparkly heels, ribbon curling around her ankles like snakes.
“Right,” I say, measured. “Hi.”
“Why are you here?” Annabelle tilts her head. Her pupils are so large that her irises have been consumed completely. It makes her look haunted, haunting. “Isn’t this a little too… fun for you?”
“Don’t be rude,” the boy scolds, but I’m flushing already. “She’s friends with Lily and Raina.”
“Really?” Annabelle frowns. She tries to lower her voice, but one thing about drunk teenage girls is that they really have no control over their volume levels. “She seems too boring to be friends with them.”
“Shut up, Annabelle.” The boy offers me a half-hearted, apologetic smile before he turns to her and glares. “I get my homework answers from her. What’ll I do when you scare her off?” Annabelle dissolves into hysterics. That’s another thing I’ve learned about drunk teenage girls. They’ll laugh at anything, even when it’s not funny. Even when it’s so not-funny that I want to cry. He kisses her to shut her up. My eyes fixate on the hand that trails up her thigh, pushes the cheap polyester of her skirt higher and higher – I tear my eyes away and flee. Before I make it to the door, someone grabs me by the wrist and drags me onto the dancefloor. It’s Raina. She’s smiling wide so all her teeth are showing. She mouths, come on, dance, and I mouth back, I don’t dance.
I don’t dance, but then I lock eyes with Annabelle Reese from across the room, and maybe I didn’t dance, past tense. Now, I dance. Restrained at first, but when Raina laughs and twirls me around, I take up space, resolute in my uncertainty. She’s holding a cup of something bitter, and she doesn’t protest when I take it from her. Like magic, the alcohol warms my stomach immediately, and I wonder why I don’t do this more often because I feel better, so much better.
And when Raina leans in close and whispers in my ear, behind you, someone’s staring, I let her push me back against a solid body. Hands settle, heavy like paperweights, on my hips. I hope that Annabelle Reese is watching me now.
“Let’s get out of here,” he says, and when he herds me away, I don’t protest. Not even when he pushes us into an empty room down one of the infinitely long hallways, not even when his sharp teeth sink into my skin like a brand, a painful seal that reads NOT BORING.
I think I’m going to be sick. I throw up a little in my mouth when he pushes me onto the bed and climbs on top of me and breathes heavy in my ear. Stop, I say, but he just leaves another mark that will blossom into something stunning in the morning. And his hands are sliding up my body, and my skin crawls and splits open so that I’m raw and bleeding rose petals and ribbon and vodka onto the sheets, and all I can think is that Annabelle Reese, with her perfect sparkly shoes and perfect golden hair, didn’t have to tear herself in two like this, and then I don’t think at all.
* * *
Lily’s already in the bathroom when I stumble in. I collapse into her arms, and she pets my hair. She smells sticky, like sweat and alcohol and cologne.
“Oh, darling,” Lily says, wiping away my tears with her thumbs. “It’s not so bad once you get used to it.”
I cry harder. She kisses the top of my head.
See, that’s the thing about drunk teenage girls. When the party is over, and the sun has fallen from the sky, and the car is parked too far away to walk to alone, the only thing we have left is each other. I lace my fingers through Lily’s, and we sit together in the dark. Tomorrow, we’ll rise and do it all again.
Ariana Wang is a high school junior from Dallas, Texas. Her work has been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation and The New York Times, among others. She is passionate about the color purple, iced chai lattes, and navy-blue walls in art galleries.