Hag Night (52 page)

It was a simple enough proverb, though she often ignored it in her own life. She only followed it when it suited her purposes in the moment. No one could condemn her for it, either, because everyone else was exactly the same.

Raising her head, she convinced the world to quit spinning for a moment and stared at the new (yet somehow rust-stained) front walk to try to get some equilibrium. 

“Who’s Jessie?” she asked Katy.

Her voice was louder than she’d intended. She braced herself for rebuke. Her friends would be worried, she thought, that their host had heard her indiscretion. But no one seemed to notice or care.

“A friend of ours.  We met her at Rebirth this year.”

“Rebirth?” Doreen scoffed, taking her eyes off of the ground just long enough to scowl at Katy. “Is that Jesus camp or something?”

“Something like that,” she replied loftily.

“You don’t even try to hide your condescension anymore, do you?”

Katy shrugged and they walked on in silence.

Doreen went back to holding down her food.

They were all the way to the door and Blake had knocked twice before she realized she didn’t have her purse with her.

“Shit,” she groaned, turning away from Katy’s grasp and staring ruefully back toward the driveway.

“What?  What is it?” Lindsey whispered, clearly nervous.

“My purse is in the car.”

“You don’t need your purse,” Katy said.

“Yeah, I do. My phone’s in there. I’ve gotta call Drew.”

“Drew’s probably here already.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah. He was on his way before we left the club.”

Doreen furrowed her brow and tried sobering up enough to make sense of it all.

“I didn’t see his car ... ”

“He probably parked farther up the street.”

Doreen was about to dig deeper, but then the door opened and she forgot about her purse.  Something about the thrill and intrigue of exposure to new college friends always distracted her. She could forget about anything when she was trying to impress new people. Even her inhibitions.

But there was no warm face here. No half-drunk party animal gleefully admitting anyone and everyone to share a good time regardless of background or affiliation. 

The girl who answered the door was thin, grave, and hollow.  She was like a ghost, nakedly assessing Doreen’s physical and emotional stature. She didn’t even pretend to look at the rest of them until she’d locked eyes with Doreen for no less than five full, agonizing seconds. Doreen found herself shivering again in the warm summer breeze.

“Everything’s ready,” the girl muttered to Blake and Vic.  Doreen wasn’t sure whether or not she was supposed to hear it but no one seemed too concerned either way.

“Is this Doreen?” she asked pleasantly. For the first time, she forced a smile and took a step onto the front porch.

By the light of the porch lamp, Doreen could see she was a user, or had been once. No doubt about it. The sunken cheeks, bruised eyes, and bone-thin resilience were unmistakable. She reeked of drugs in a way only an experienced doper could identify. 

Doreen grinned in spite of herself.

Oh, how nice it will be to shove that back in all of their faces when this is over.

Their self-serving, snobby, holier-than-thou bullshit.  Always condescending on her and her lifestyle, she thought, when their ‘pure’ crowd, the ones who went to Jesus camp and sang songs about how their purity and faith were all they’d ever need, were even worse off than she was.

They must not have realized their friend was a druggie or they probably wouldn’t have given her the time of day. Not unless they’d known her at least as long as they’d known Doreen.  Long enough that they could still remember her before the fall.

“Hi,” Doreen forced a smile of her own.  “Jessie?”

“Yeah!  Nice to meet you!  I’ve heard so much about you!”

“Really?” Doreen laughed, making sure Katy and Lindsey picked up on the accusation. The boys didn’t know enough about body language and tones to get it. Not like the girls.  Girls were born with a sense for that or else they had an undiagnosed social retardation, Doreen thought. Not one found in medical journals, but a valid one nevertheless.

Lindsey’s face was white and drawn. Katy only smiled. It was another bitchy response given the circumstances.

“Oh, nothing bad,” Jessie assured her.

They all laughed uncomfortably.

But was there a hint of smugness behind the laughter?  Was there another underlying insult in Jessie’s assurance?  Doreen couldn’t tell. After all, Jessie was a user just like she was, and that meant she was much more comfortable with deceit than the rest of them. She would be much harder to read.

Doreen found herself liking and distrusting this new girl all at once. The distrust was strong, but Jessie presented just enough of that thrilling mystique to get her through the door, against her better judgment.

Katy and Lindsey fell in behind her. The boys led the way without turning around. They were so confident they had her now that they didn’t feel the need to look to their girlfriends for assurance. It was impossible not to mark the ease with which the two of them passed into the foyer, and the way the tense rise of their shoulders slouched once their shoes were discarded at the front door.

They’d been to the house before. Doreen was sure of it.  And though it shouldn’t have been a cause for alarm (Jessie seemed a close friend of theirs, after all), it still didn’t sit right with her. 

It was too late to turn back, though. She was far away from any landmark she knew and couldn’t remember what country roads they’d turned down. There was no way she could find her way back until morning, and so long as Blake had the car keys, she had little hope of escape.

So, she stepped into the house and slipped off her shoes with the rest of them, not knowing what awaited her inside. The idea was thrilling.

Only time would tell.

What a beautiful possibility.

THREE

Jessie immediately vanished into a small, dark room to the right which Doreen took to be the study (or ‘den’ depending on the homeowner). She couldn’t see much with the light reflecting off the glass doors, but imagined there was a nice computer desk inside with sensible shelves and a dictionary above the desktop computer (a Mac). There was probably an imitation Victorian grandfather clock, too, that only rang out the hour in the afternoon when it wouldn’t disturb anyone’s sleep.  Maybe a nice leather chair in the corner by the window and a solitary lamp by the desk so mother and father could play solitaire late at night while they waited for their sweet little Jessica to come home from doping with her burnout friends. 

She didn’t actually see any of that, but you got used to the scene growing up in Northville and Novi. Sweetly predictable, non-offensive parents in sweetly predictable, non-offensive homes worrying whether or not their children would miss church on Sunday. Somehow, those same parents maintained denial to the fact that their children were routinely busted by the cops for having sex in parked cars at the local Starbucks, or were over at Mr. and Mrs. Whoever-Was-Out-Of-Town-This-Weekend’s house getting high and drinking until they puked because they assumed their physical limit for alcohol consumption was Mars.

In other words, she’d seen a lot of those houses and a lot of those dens.

“I think everyone’s upstairs,” Katy said, tugging softly on Doreen’s arm. “That’s where we usually get started.”

Doreen took a quick look around.

The first floor was dark except for a dull light over the island in the kitchen, but she could tell even from that little bit that it was a well-furnished, modern home with all the amenities one would expect near the Oakland County border. It was gigantic, hollow, and filled with the sort of expensive electronics and sterile, upper middle-class dreariness that reminded her of every summer and every school project she’d collaborated on in middle school. If she had to put a date to it, she would have guessed it was less than a year old.

“Nice house. Where are her parents?”

Katy hesitated for only a moment but it was enough for Doreen to notice.

“They aren’t around much. It’s just her dad, actually.  Her mom died a few years ago. Her dad stays over at his girlfriend’s most of the time when the two of them aren’t traveling.”

It was a lie and they both knew it.

“Oh,” Doreen muttered in response. She didn’t have the energy to argue about it.

The nausea was back again. Whatever sobering effect she’d felt entering the house and meeting Jessie, it had completely worn off. She was back to the feeling of impending esophageal doom she’d had during her worst moments in the car.

Katy and Lindsey had already started up the white, carpeted staircase to the second floor so it was their boyfriends who noticed something wasn’t quite right with their fifth wheel.

“You all right, Reen?  You don’t look so good,” Blake said.

At the mention of her name, Doreen immediately stopped following them and hunched over with both of her arms close to her stomach. 

“No ... I think I’m gonna puke ... ”

“Whoa whoa whoa!” Jessie appeared from a hallway next to the staircase and rushed to put a guiding arm around Doreen’s shoulders. “Not on the floor!  Just hold it one sec and I’ll get you to the bathroom, okay?”

She was talking to her like a baby, and Doreen didn’t appreciate that even in the throes of nausea. She also didn’t appreciate how rough Jessie was leading her to the bathroom.  Rather than rushing her to the toilet before the vomit came, she rushed the result along by making her even dizzier and sloshing the rogue waves of digestive juices around in her stomach.

“Slow down ... ” Doreen tried to tell her, but she was feeling so detached from herself by then that she could barely form a word. It came out sounding like a drunken assurance, and people like Jessie ignored those instinctively.

By some divine providence, she was able to keep it down until Jessie thrust her face-first into the toilet-bowl.

Doreen was barely conscious of the rushed footsteps behind her and the panicked directions Katy called out to the awestruck boyfriends (as though they’d never seen someone vomit before). She didn’t feel Jessie’s sweaty fingers tugging on her hair to keep it from trailing into the puke and toilet water. She didn’t worry that she was hunched over in such a way that everyone could see her bleach white panties beneath her skirt. All she felt was the cold kiss of the toilet seat against her cheek and the lava bursting up and out from her throat like wasted grace. 

It was awful, the wrenching coughs that seized her abdomen and made her gag even when there was nothing left to purge, but it felt wonderful, too. In a way, it was just like doping, only in reverse.

The world flashed before her eyes in bursts of white, black, and orange. Her legs started to give out. Jessie let go of her hair and eased her against the side of the sink.

And then it was over.

“You all right, Reen?” Vic asked stupidly.

“Leave her alone for a minute. I’m gonna go get you a glass of water, okay Reen?”

She tried to nod but it was better to stay completely still with her eyes closed and catch her breath. She was utterly spent. The drugs and alcohol and food were all leaving her system, taking every buzz, calorie, and thought along with them.

They were greedy bastards.

In the hallway, they debated what to do with her in elevated whispers. Doreen didn’t feel the need to weigh in.  The damage had been done. It was a relief to just relax and allow herself to be fussed over.

In another moment, Katy and Lindsey returned with a glass of water and a cold, wet towel.  They propped the towel over her forehead and tilted her neck back against the porcelain sink.

“Drink up.”

It was an invasive act, but Doreen was too weak to protest.

“You’ll be all right, okay?” Lindsey was saying.

Too loud. They were babying her again and she didn’t like it. But as with everything else that night, there wasn’t much she could do about it. She’d signed herself over the moment Katy had responded to her drunk dial by asking if she needed a ride. That in itself was strange, since neither Katy nor Lindsey had ever volunteered their Samaritan services when they knew she was out drinking and doping with questionable ‘friends’. Doreen certainly didn’t know how they had found out she needed help, other than the admittedly belligerent call she’d made.

It hadn’t really been that bad, though. All in good fun. She didn’t actually remember saying anything about needing a ride until they’d asked...

... In that case, maybe it wasn’t so strange that they’d called back. If Doreen was honest with herself, she would have seen it coming a long ways off. They wanted to help to show her the way she should be living. Anyone remotely cognizant of her life realized she was in trouble. Even Doreen knew that much. It was just like Katy to intervene, too. Hell, maybe Doreen’s parents had even put them up to it. It wouldn’t have been the first time.

“Do you want some crackers or something?  I have some in the pantry,” Jessie said.