Chapter 07: Wasted opportunities !

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White noise was a bizarre term. Like sound was a color if its waves were indiscernible. Like the flat line of the heart monitor represented black, or silence, or both. Like every avoided question went unasked and unanswered and left a hole to steep to fill with words.

Black: the absence of light [see: the presence of color].

White: everything at once [see: nothing at all].

Nothing: a vacuum [see: a possibility].

Who drafted these chasms? These inexplicable pit-falls that delved into everyday life unnoticed. The compass circled so erratically fast, trying to find its way home, that solid lines blurred to grey.

Grey: a theoretical blend of everything in between [see: people, places, asphalt].

The kaleidoscope glazing my eyes must have collapsed into the black hole before I noticed because suddenly everything appeared a nineties film reel. A presence of darkness or an absence of light, I had no idea, I just knew something had gone terribly wrong.

It was printed in the noose-like curl of Ryder's arm draped around the back of the couch. In Eli's vacant sighs.

The two of them sitting there, untouchable and cruelly amused, donning postures of muses, made my room feel alien to me, made me an outsider in my own world. The detachment between us evoked memories of my mother's imparted knowledge.

She liked to tell me people were no less than walls. Some, the paper thin ones, you saw right through. The others, steel and concrete were magicians in the making. They'd fool you with a click of their fingers and swear wine was water.

I never knew where I stood in that analogy but the principle of the matter was perpetual.

If you hammered a nail into a wall everyday, it began to crack, bit by bit, and the paint chipped away and as the stakes grew higher, the plaster caved in and there was just a hole where you thought bricks would be. The foundation, no matter how strong, couldn't stop the wall from collapsing.

And both Eli and Ryder looked on the very edge of calamity. Living, breathing, precariously controlled chaos with insomniac's eyes and disheveled clothes. If they went down they'd take the whole building with them.

Johnny stirred beside me. His lethargic movements revived the room.

"You're alive," Ryder commented. "How disappointing." His first time speaking all morning and that's what he said.

Johnny was pallid and sickly on my crinkled bed sheet, a silhouette more than a person. He reached out and grappled at my wrist with the urgency of a drowning man scraping at a lifebuoy. Tragically for him, I never learnt how to swim.

Maybe I was letting the hangover think but there was no denying the earthquake pulsing along the underside of my knees. The hysterical anticipation of what had happened that hollowed my rib cage.

Johnny managed to heave himself up, using my arm as leverage whilst dragging me down with him. I caught his bloodshot eyes burst open. Once fully upright, he let go of me and scooted back so that his back aligned with the headboard.

He spoke around a yawn. "What the fuck happened?"

"You got smashed, that's what." Ryder produced a dimpled cushion and chucked it hard at him, missing by a wide mile. The action in its utmost hostility, even when not directed at me, was enough to rouse the devil.

Slowly, slowly, paint smeared the palette; the world was made flesh.

"Well, shit." I looked down at my wrinkled attire. My trousers were damp and stained yellow under a fluorescent kiss of sunlight. "What the fuck is this?"

"Vomit," Eli informed and my hand instantly cringed away. "Johnny got sick last night."

"On me?" I tried to remember the night but there were only brief bursts of spontaneous imagery. Burned tires, laugh lines, moss. Bone arcing through skin, a shelf of refuge. A sound too, low and fragmented.

Ryder and Eli shared a brief look. Eli spoke. "Kinda. More so in Stella."

"What?" Johnny coughed and choked at the same time.

Ryder interjected. "You heard him, asshole."

". . . you've got to be kidding."

"You wish I was."

That's all it took for Johnny to duck behind me and shriek frantically, "Ryder. Ryder, dude—I'll pay for it. I swear to god, I'll pay for it!"

I laughed, because in his panic he'd missed that Ryder was no longer scowling. He'd swapped his peeved expression for a barely-there smirk with a certain degree of dramatic irony. "Tell Alaska Finton that."

I stilled Johnny's head at my shoulder, the laugh turned sour on my tongue. "What'd you mean?"

The thread tethering our eyes tensed like a bow. I couldn't have imagined the subtle menace in his gaze. "Technically it was her he threw up on."

"No."

"Yes."

"Oh," Johnny said, in spite of everything, and chuckled. I turned on him with a glare. Did he have any idea what he'd done? He cluelessly raised his eyebrows. "What? You know your boy's classy like that."

The fucking idiot. I didn't even have the time to strangle him. I scrambled to my feet. Everything swayed like beer in a bottle. I steadied myself against the bedside table.

Eli sounded concerned. "What're you doing?"

I barely got the words out of my mouth. "I gotta go. I gotta apologise."

"Relax," Ryder drawled. "It's seven in the damn morning. She won't even be up yet. You can say sorry after school. And it's not like she cared. She's got a great sense of humor. Don't worry about it. I mean, she asked what's gotten your thighs so sticky and you said, 'you' which is frankly quite vulgar when you think about it so if she'd wanted to end it, she would've done it then."

I clenched my teeth in frustration. He didn't understand. It was more than me and her. "Where the hell is Vincent?"

"Went to collect the math notes you missed yesterday." I could've gotten down on my knees and prayed with relief at that. Ryder paused. "Why?"

I ignored him and hurried to the door. Maybe I could make it. But the handle had already given away before I made contact.

Vincent Cross stood at the threshold, harboring my stunned reflection in tarnished glass. The white sheets in his hand contrasted greatly with it.

An absence of darkness or the presence of it?

He crushed the paper, and my lungs, between his fingers with everything he didn't, couldn't say. Not with so many walls opening their ears at our expenditure.

But somehow I still heard it, the fatal accusation: you fucked up.