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For what it was worth, the tickets had been cheaper than any normal concert that she had her eyes on. Still, Levi considered that maybe if they’d gone to a normal concert, he wouldn’t be in a tent with heavy smoke surrounding him and a tie-dye shirt on with his hair slicked back. It was such a weird situation that only she would have been able to drag him into. The food was weird too, some kind of American fried food that he didn’t know how to name or understand. Despite these oddities, the music was good, the alcohol was great, and he and Hange’s trip to America was going pretty successfully so far according to her.
Levi’s idea of American immersion was spending four days at Disney, spending approximately two of those days in bed with her and denying room service. She had insisted they get the full American experience by going to this music festival, a patch of land with hundreds of tents lined up for a couple days to see so many different bands. They didn’t understand a ton of English and they had been lucky enough to grab a tent with other people who spoke broken Japanese, but they were still a set of American teenagers who were obsessed with anime and the weeaboo culture. Between the two cultures, there was enough broken language to make ideas communicable. The enthusiasm for their interests was exciting among the weeaboo group however, so in the end, Levi’s only protest was that he didn’t get to bang his wife in the white-sheeted Disney bed.
Anyways, the outfit wasn’t his choice either. He couldn’t stand staying in the same clothes for three days, so he was reduced to paying seven dollars a pop for a rainbow tie-dye tee shirt. He wasn’t really sure how much seven dollars was in yen, but it seemed like a lot for a tee shirt. Maybe because they were handmade? The sponge baths weren’t exactly agreeable either, which led to his hair… it would definitely have to be washed later.
“The hell are you doing?” he asked Hange in Japanese upon entering the tent. His wife had a lazy grin on her face, batting his question away with a wave of her hand. He smelled the cloudy white air, narrowing his eyes at the familiar scent that was often in random thrift shops on car air fresheners back at home. “Are you smoking marijuana?”
“It’s nothing like how it is at home,” Hange responds. “Those air fresheners aren’t anything compared to this.”
He stares, her red-tinged eyes staring slightly unfocused back into his. Finally, he sighs and sits down on one of the rolled up sleeping bags inside the tent next to an equally red-eyed friend. “What is that?” He asks in English, gesturing to a glass tube-like object that she was holding.
“It’s the marijuana,” she explains in Japanese, evoking laughter from those in the tent. “What?”
“We call it weed,” one of the girls in their tent has fading lavender hair tied up in a messy bun, strands hanging in front of her face. Her arms clatter with metal and acrylic bangles that adorn them, making noise every time she breathes. “You butcher it. Besides, that’s not it.”
Levi hates repeating himself, especially in English. “Ye, but what is it?”
Hange has apparently lost all semblance of decent English, for she passes Levi the glass object with a hurried scientific explanation in Japanese. He stares at it, seeing the wad of leaves in the tube sticking out of it like a thorn. “How use?” He asks, full aware of his bad English and wincing internally.
The lavender-haired girl’s boyfriend with tattoos up his arms and ears stretched with loops that even a blind woman could thread teaches him how to work the tube, and within minutes, Levi’s repeating the same actions as everyone else. He’s never been high before, so when Hange’s three-day dirty hair suddenly becomes ten times more beautiful than any other time, he questions reality.
“What the hell,” he asks in English, making nearly everyone in the tent cackle. In Japanese he asks Hange if she’s done something to her hair. She replies no, she hasn’t, but she’d love for him to braid it. For once, he obliges.
An undeterminable amount of time passes before they stumble out of the tent, and Levi’s pretty sure he reeks of smoke but it doesn’t matter much. Hange’s eyes are red as the sun that sets in the distance, giving the world a hazy glow. It’s not quite cool out but not quite hot out, and the temperature probably wouldn’t matter anyways if they were sober enough to really feel it. Somehow, they find one of the gigs for the night, some kind of dubstep rave thing where lights flash every half second and the crowd seems to be in a state of ever-bobbing.
Neither of them really know the song or the band or the exact location of this place on their map (the sure sign that Levi was gone, for he’d meticulously checked the map for every show they’d seen so far) but the music was vivid and the energy was nothing like they’d ever felt.
Levi’s not sure when the high wears off, but when the show ends he’s sure he’s pretty hungry. Hange disappeared for another undeterminable amount of time, only to return with four corndogs grasped in his hands. He hates greasy American food. He devours the corndogs in seconds.