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“How’s it feel so far? Good?” Ashley turned her head to him and elbowed him gently, her eyes half-lidded and red. Her ear was pressed to the couch and there was a deeply inebriated grin on her face.
“I can confidently say I have never experienced this feeling before in my life.” Travis felt like he was going to start phasing through the overly soft couch he was planted on. He stared at the ceiling, his hands resting on his stomach, listening to the quiet Spice Girls song playing in the background. Maybe it’s the fact that he doesn’t typically listen to a lot of contemporary music, or maybe it’s the weed, but right now, Saturday Night Divas was the most beautiful song he’s ever heard.
In this moment, he could feel everything; the fabric of every piece of clothing on his body, the thick and stale air of the Addison Apartments, the softness of the couch and how his weight shifted the stuffing inside, the way Ashley’s body next to him shifted the couch even further, the sensation of his bruised and scraped skin, the weight of his own body, he could even feel the Earth’s axis. But unlike other times this happened, it wasn’t overwhelming. It felt fine. Unifying, even. He could feel the way that everything was connected.
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” Ashley asked, probing him for symptoms of greening out.
“I have no idea.” Travis looked back to the ceiling. Whether it was good or bad just seemed so insignificant to him right now. Right now, it just was.
Based on the way the others always acted when they were high, he was expecting more of a euphoric feeling when he tried it for the first time, but it didn’t feel quite like that to him. It felt like a relaxed, yet weighted clarity had dawned onto him. He was putting into words concepts he was acutely aware of but never consciously recognized. It was heavy, evocative, thought-provoking, stimulating.
“I think that’s a good sign.” Sal said from his spot on the floor. He’d been laying down on his back on the floor for a while now, since he took a couple of huge hits from the bong and his blood pressure dropped so badly that he nearly passed out just sitting up on the couch. Larry was digging through his kitchen for chicken broth and pickle juice right now.
“Should you even be doing this with your heart thing?” Travis asked, noting the way his heart was pounding in his chest a little bit, but Sal blew raspberries from behind his mask. “It’s fiiiiine, probably. I haven’t had a heart attack yet. I just need a little bit of salt or something, then I’ll be at least half as normal as I usually am.” He snorted.
Travis didn’t really know what that meant, but if Sal knew what he was doing, then he probably shouldn’t argue too much. Travis was acutely aware of how that was a mildly unusual thought process for him to be having, but he couldn’t find it in himself to care all that much. Right now, he just wanted to sit in the moment.
Larry walked back in with a mug of something hot with a straw in it in one hand, and a jar of pickles plus a plastic fork in the other. He knelt down next to Sal to set them on the ground. Sal raised himself to his elbows to start getting up, but his arms and shoulders were visibly shaking from the effort, and he quickly plopped himself back down on the ground, snorting, and Ash quickly joined in.
“You have to feed me…” Sal said, feigning a weakness to his voice. “You have to feed me pickles like a baby bird.” Larry chortled highly. “Dude, I would do that for you… If you actually needed it. But you're strong, you can eat pickles.” He opened the jar of pickles and stabbed the fork inside uncoordinatedly a couple of times before pulling one out for Sal.
“Ew?” Ash said.
“But I do need it, Larry, I need it so badly. Feed my- my pickles, Laaaaaaaaaaryyyyyyyyyy-” His voice got progressively louder until Larry grabbed the plastic nose of his prosthetic and shook Sal’s face until he started laughing.
“Shut up, I feed you pickles. I do it every day.” Larry deadpanned, and Sal laughed. Without missing a beat, the blue-haired boy replied, “My beautiful pickle nurse saves me from the brink of death once more.”
Sal unbuckled the bottom straps of his prosthetic face so Larry could attempt to shove a pickle underneath it in what was probably not the most effective way to get this done.
Travis had a feeling that none of what they were saying was true, but he wouldn’t know. Maybe friends did pickle-nurse each other.
“This is proper procedure, right Neil?” Ashley asked, looking over to Neil on her other side. Todd was on the floor in between his knees, letting his boyfriend play with his hair.
“I taught Larry everything he knows about pickle-nursing.” Neil said, not even looking up from the little braids he’d been constructing and deconstructing repeatedly in Todd’s curly, red hair.
Todd seemed to stir for the first time in maybe thirty minutes. He wasn’t asleep, he’d just honked a little too much of that bobo and got himself a bit more zoomed-out than he normally would’ve liked. His voice was quiet and words slurred together in a far-gone kind of fatigue as he asked, “What the fuck are we talking about?”
“Nothing, don’t worry about it, baby.” Neil said, petting his head softly. “Okay, I believe you.” Todd said, leaning back into the couch. “I’ll believe anything you tell me.”
“Travis, which is gayer: pickle nursing or the unquestioning hair salon?” Ash asked, gesturing from Sal and Larry to Todd and Neil.
Travis continued staring straight ahead, having absorbed himself in the conversation around him. He felt perfectly content right now, listening to this.
“Hellooooo, Travis?” Ash begun waving a hand in front of his face, and Travis started to snap himself back into reality.
“Huh? Whuh?” Travis sputtered and blinked dumbly, before he processed what had just happened. “Oh my gosh.” He covered his face in embarrassment and began laughing drunkenly, all high-pitched and lacking inhibition. He fell over onto the soft armrest of the couch as his knees lifted themselves up until his feet were off the ground.
“What, whaaat?” Ash asked, grabbing his shoulder and shaking.
Travis peered at Ashley through his fingers, and she could see parts of the stupid, inebriated grin on his face, and his squinted, reddened eyes.
“I thought I was listening to the radio. For like, the past ten minutes.” Travis’s voice was strained from trying not to laugh again, and he failed this fight after he stopped trying to communicate.
Ashley burst out laughing at his stoned-up mistake, and Larry began laughing hard enough that he needed to lean over, his forehead resting his weight over onto Sal’s trunk. Sal himself had spat warm chicken broth all over the inside of his mask, and he quickly turned over on his side, laughing and sputtering wetly on the ground, with Larry on top of him.
In the middle of the childish laughter, a deep and stinging melancholy had struck Travis.
It used to be a lot like this. Him, Larry, Ashley. All wound up in laughter at Travis’s old-fashioned home, or Ashley’s contemporary one. In Larry’s musty, turpentine-smelling basement bedroom. He remembered the smell of that wooden tree house Mr. Johnson had built before he disappeared. He wondered if the some of the glitter he’d spilled in the carpet of Ashley’s bedroom that one time was still there in its minuscule, yet untouchable glory.
Does Larry still have that scar on his elbow from that time he fell down the front steps of Travis’s house?
Travis’s ankle never stopped clicking when he turned it a certain way after he fell on it wrong from falling out of the tire swing in Ashley’s back yard.
Sometimes he still heard Ashley involuntarily repeating something rather mundane he’d said so many years ago with the same tone and inflection as when he’d first said it. It was like a snapshot of that moment existed within her permanently whenever her tics made her say ‘I got peanuts!’
It used to be a lot like this. Easy, fun contentment away from their parents. Away from expectations or prying eyes.
But then they got older. Life started getting complicated. They couldn’t dismiss their parents’ expectations anymore. Grades started becoming important. They had to think about their futures.
They just changed.
…No, that’s not what happened.
Travis changed.
And he didn’t just change out of nowhere, he was made to change, molded into what he was now through closed fists and backhands. Through hair brushes and belts, buckle-side first. Empty locked closets and physical restraint.
All at the hands of his father, spitting verses of the holy book like venom.
His father took him like clay and Travis let him, until he became so deformed by that tireless anger that he couldn’t look his reflection in the eye anymore. Because when he looked into those angry brown irises, he found himself consumed wholly by his father’s.
…And now they were here, where Travis was pausing in the middle of a laugh with people who used to have reasons to care about him, letting that old, empty ache spread further within his heart.
As they continued to laugh, and as the laughter died down back into conversation, he found himself falling quiet again. The way they spoke so naturally without him intervening only served to remind him that he didn’t belong here anymore. Maybe he never did.
Travis’s eyes made their way back to the point where the ceiling met the top of the wall as he leaned back into the couch, letting the soft, old cushions absorb his weight and sink his body in.
Nothing he could say in this conversation would be as funny or as useful as something one of their actual friends had to say, and he knew that. He knew that he was incredibly out of place here, what with all of the inside jokes and referenced memories he was missing. The way that they seemed to stop trying to include him as he got quieter and quieter again.
He internally begged someone outside his head to bring him back, to want him, to even notice him, but he wouldn’t ask out loud, and so it never happened.
So he sat back on the couch, feeling the weight of everything on his skin, everything in his body, the unifying feeling of his own gravity, and he tried to be content with what he could get as he quietly listened to the radio.