F 250 by Bud Smith

Author:Bud Smith [Smith, Bud]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Piscataway House
Published: 2015-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

12

The crushed seashell driveway was packed solid with cars. Everyone was blocked in, and they were in no condition to leave anyway. Walking up, the gardens were bright, pulsing with nectar-heavy flora throbbing beneath a full yellow moon. K was throwing a party in the ocean manor. “My family will be back any day. Make it count!” was the theme.

She was a party person, a rave girl, and would look for any excuse to throw one. Your band broke up? Let’s throw a party. You’ll be homeless any day now? Let’s throw a party. You’re lost, directionless, motherless, and fatherless and looking for some scraps for fun in the wild? Let’s throw a party.

Music poured from the upper windows. Strobe lights flickered vividly with the music that seemed to float, stutter, and pulse like life itself.

The house was locked tight; no-one was allowed in there except June, K, and me. Everywhere you looked, the kids were wrecked—laughing and shouting on the slate steps, leaning on the white columns, standing in the brick path that led through the fence; rocking and rolling in white plastic chairs, or sitting on my boulder wall: animated, yelling, smoking, drinking strange serums from red solo cups. Life: full and blur buzzed with slanted beauty on a Saturday night.

It felt that good to be that close to the ocean. We could all feel it and were responding accordingly. The dune grass swayed. In the distance, if you squinted on the horizon, the Ferris wheel could be seen spinning again.

It was close to midnight. Things shifted into a drunken fog. I leaned over the railing, looking at the kids crowded around the kidney shaped pool below.

Feral and Trish were swimming in the pool, drunk and looking like they were gonna drown. They were all pilled up. So was K. So were a lot of the guests.

Some kid I didn’t know, dressed in backwards red Yankees cap, was heckling Feral savagely, saying, “I feel like I’m at the Philadelphia zoo watching the polar bears swim.”

“Careful, bro,” Feral called, his arms flailing in the water ineffectively.

“Why?” the kid asked with a smirk.

“Bears bite heads off.”

“I got a head for you to bite,” the kid said, grabbing his own nuts through his board shorts. The kid was a typical Jersey douchebag.

I yelled down, “Hey, Feral—you’re gonna fucking drown, man. Get over to the shallow end.”

Dale appeared through the gate with Steph at his side. I waved, but they didn’t seem to notice me in my perch.

Feral laughed, swallowing more water as he drifted over to the kiddie side. Trish swam to him, and they embraced next to the pool light, obscuring it, sending shadows across the water, altering the light for the whole backyard.

I looked down at all of the people from my chair, not sure who half of them were. June was across from me. She had a gin gimlet in her hand. She kept half smiling, half grimacing.

“What’s the matter?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I’m just not feeling so good.

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