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“Don’t Go Blaming Me Because You Got All Wasted and Slutty.”
The thing about Dick that not many people realize is that he is a great boyfriend. It’s true that people don’t realize this because one of his few life goals is making sure this fact stays a secret, but still. Dick Casablancas. Best boyfriend. It’s not hard to keep quiet, actually. Madison is strangely uninterested in telling people about his most awesome moments. She doesn’t giggle with her girlfriends when Dick takes her to monster truck rallies after Logan cancels on him. She doesn’t brag when he remembers to buy the fancy cherry-flavoured condoms, although that time he actually did specifically say not to kiss and tell: “If the ladies find out Dick is cherry-flavoured, soon everyone will want a taste.” She’d only responded with that not-quite-nice smile of hers that always makes Dick nervous, because he doesn’t really know what it means.
Whatever, the point is, is that Dick is an awesome boyfriend, and it’s not even just because of the really big things, like condoms and monster trucks. Dick is actually pretty great when it comes to other regular couple stuff, too. Sure he might joke around with his friends about blue balls when Madison’s having a fat day, but he actually likes it when Madison feels good about her body, so he tries to make her think good things about herself. He almost never says “yes” when she asks if she looks fat in something, even when it’s a lie. Because, okay yeah, Madison can get a little large sometimes, but she’s not a whale, and anyhow, the more pounds she packs the bigger her tits get. Like Dick is going to care what Madison’s back fat is doing when he’s got boobs in the front to distract him.
So Dick doesn’t care about back fat, or Atkins, or that Madison has suddenly convinced herself that she needs to drop 5 pounds. He cares that his girlfriend is hungry and cranky and that when she gets like this, he can never do anything right. He cares, and that makes him a good boyfriend. He cares enough to try to get her to stop worrying about her weight and sleep with him instead. That makes him a spectacular boyfriend. No one cares about cellulite when they’re making the beast with two backs. Madison needs to have sex with him for the sake of her self-esteem.
But it’s not like he can just sleep with her and get the feel-good ball rolling. Madison is too prickly for that. He needs alcohol to get her past this, because alcohol fixes everything. Alcohol makes cranky uptight girls messy, and it makes frigid girls easy. Madison is always easier to convince after she’s had a few beers, even if she sometimes rolls her eyes at him and calls him an asshole for not stopping her after the buzz wears off. Unfortunately it’s not an option tonight either, because fucking Cosmopolitan had an article last month about empty calories and drinking. Fuck everything Dick’s life really sucks sometimes.
He’s about to give up and get used to an apparently sexless existence from here on out when he overhears “liquid X” and suddenly everything starts to look a whole lot brighter. Madison is freaky when they’re on GHB. Dick is convinced his night is saved, until he imagines her giving him a long, cold stare and maybe a “Do I really look like I’m in the mood, Dick?” thrown in for good measure. Dick doesn’t call himself a good boyfriend for nothing though. He knows what she needs, even if she doesn’t, so if he doesn’t tell her what he slipped in her Pepsi until after she’s drank it, it’s not a big deal. She’ll probably thank him later, when she’s feeling better.
“As I Understand it, GHB is Supposed to Make You Nicer.”
Luke doesn’t know what Dick and Madison see in each other. Yeah, they’re both his friends, but he’s never seen a couple who hate being a couple more than them. There is no reason for Dick to be standing around whining about Beav getting more action than him when he is currently dating one of the hottest and most popular girls in school.
“Much like fake boobs,” Dick intones, when Luke points this out. “Great to look at but they don’t do as much as you’d like ‘em to.”
There’s a chance Dick is trying to sound wise, but he’s still whining and living up to his name, so the effect is mostly lost. Luke tunes out a little when Sean starts talking about just getting Madison drunk, because he’s heard this routine, too. Madison doesn’t drink. Madison is on a diet. Madison doesn’t care about the needs of Dick, Jr., Jr. Luke secretly thinks that Dick likes to exaggerate how terrible life with Madison is because he likes the excuse to complain. Admittedly, he might only think this because of his tendency to forget Madison’s personality as soon as she’s out of earshot, as a sort of defense mechanism.
“Who invited Veronica Mars?”
Luke has to force himself not to cringe. Madison voice gets this tone when she feels personally wronged, and listening to it kind of feels like someone is dripping acid down your ear canal.
“Why do you let this stuff get to you? Look at you. You’re all tense.”
It’s not that it’s the best come on line in the world. Dick has about the worst game Luke has ever seen in his entire life, but still. Madison is Dick’s girlfriend. She knew what she was getting into when she agreed to date him, and frankly if she gave it up every now and then it probably would help make both of them more pleasant to be around. Not that it’s not funny to watch Dick strike out as Madison shoves him off of her and all but stomps on his balls getting away from him.
He feels obligated to hand over the GHB after she’s gone, to make up for laughing at the poor guy, if nothing else. Besides, how could watching Madison and Dick strung out on Liquid X not be the most entertaining thing to happen at Shelley’s tonight anyhow?
“Don’t Even Start with the, ‘I Was So Wasted.’”
See, this is why no one likes Veronica Mars anymore. Like, Madison doesn’t understand how someone who doesn’t have money or even status managed to worm her way into their circle of friends in the first place, no matter how trendy Lilly though street urchins were at the time. And seriously, Lilly would be so over Veronica if she knew all the things her lesbian backup had started doing as soon as she was left on her own. (What? Like there would be any other reason to keep an impressionable, easily-intimidated blonde girl desperate to please at your beck-and-call.)
Because Lilly hadn’t been dead in the ground before Veronica was all like, spitting on the poor Kane family, accusing them of murder for who the fuck knows what reason. It was just disgusting and petty and trashy. And so obvious that that vile little cockroach had no business being around quality people once her only advocate was out of the picture. Really, pushing Veronica to the outside of the group was more like an act of kindness, like when you see a dying cat on the side of the road and run it over to put it out of its misery, like Dick did that one time when he was drunk.
If Madison were in a car right now, she would be happy to take that simile (Metaphor? Whatever. She’s not a total loser, she doesn’t just know these things) and make it a reality, because Madison is a very understanding person, and if a friend just broke up with a boyfriend, or if they are having a bad day and need to cry or egg someone’s house, she is more than happy to be supportive. But Madison does not have patience for home wreckers and boyfriend thieves. She just doesn’t, and she doesn’t know if Veronica thinks she’s being cute right now or whatever, but Madison is right here, and for fuck’s sake what is that tramp doing hanging off of her boyfriend?
Jesus Christ some girls have no shame, and this is the kind of thing that makes Veronica the kind of girl who will always have someone spitting into her drinks for the rest of her life. Because there are lines, and those lines are not to be crossed in civilised society. There’s only one kind of person who doesn’t back off when your obviously drunk boyfriend comes onto them, and that person is a slut. Who just lets a guy kiss them and feel them up when that guy is in a committed relationship with another girl?
Madison’s hands literally twitch with the desire to claw out one very specific set of eyes as she watches Veronica literally fall all over her boyfriend, using her sloppy drunkenness (and ew, totally not attractive on a girl, by the way) as a convenient excuse to sit on Dick’s lap and run her hands through his hair. Madison breathes a little easier as the hoe-bag gets distracted and flops over to Casey, apparently happy to settle for anyone so long as she can fondle someone’s penis. She’s still beyond angry though. She still wants to make Skank Street pay for trying to make a move on her man, and if there’s one thing Madison is good at, it is making people pay.
Before she even realizes what she’s doing, she finds herself rummaging through Shelley’s hall closets looking for shoe polish.
“If You Don’t Remember Much About That Party, Maybe You Should Leave it That Way.”
The night before Casey went to his first ever party in middle school, his grandmother sat him down and gave him a fifteen minute lecture on how to treat women.
“Having fun with a girl you like is fine, Casey. But if I hear even a hint about you getting involved with a girl who couldn’t pass a sobriety test at a traffic stop, I will disinherit you so fast your balls will shrivel up before I can rip them off myself.”
Grandma may have been a little drunk herself during the lecture, and when his parents heard about it there was yet another addition to the “Grandma is a psycho bitch” list, but Casey still remembers it. His mom and dad don’t think about much beyond their own bank accounts, but Casey has always liked his grandma. She wasn’t trying to accuse Casey of being a rapist-in-the-making, she’s just had a hard life. She’s told Casey about her first marriage before, and how bad things were for a while. Grandma only wants him to understand that women are people, too. She’s just an angry drunk, that’s all.
Veronica is not an angry drunk, but when she falls into his lap after making out with Dick (okay, okay, after Dick makes out with her), he can almost hear his grandma snarling that fooling around requires two people present or else it’s just masturbation. He’s not about to tell Dick that Veronica is a person, too, because popular opinion these days says otherwise, and Casey’s not one to rock the boat. He does, however, make a point of helping her upright again and sending her on her way.
“No thanks. I like mine to be able to stand on their own power.”
He considers it his good deed for the night. Later on he reminds himself of this when he notices Sean and a bunch of the other guys feeding her shots. He’d never take advantage of someone, not even someone like Veronica Mars, but he’s not going to turn into her knight in shining armor, either. It’s not like she needs his help anyway, not really. Everyone’s heard the Birds and the Bees talk at least once before they got to the party tonight. Veronica will wake up in the morning with a hangover and no idea anyone did body shots off her and everything will get back to normal, because all of his friends are smart enough to knock it off before anything bad happens.
“You Gotta Let it Go. You’ll Make Yourself Crazy.”
The thing is, Meg really likes Veronica, she always has. Yeah, it’s true that she’s gotten a little bit... crazy these last few months, but to be fair, Veronica’s best friend was just brutally murdered. Then there was all that grossness with the Sheriff losing his job and, well, Veronica is really alone right now. She has a right to be acting screwy. It makes Meg’s stomach hurt when she just thinks about it. She can’t imagine trying to live through it.
Veronica’s not alone right now, but as Meg gets ready to leave Shelley’s party, she can’t help thinking that this isn’t an improvement. Veronica looks even tinier than usual at the center of a cluster of horny high school boys. Perfect little Veronica who gets tipsy from a glass of champagne and who never looked at another boy except for Duncan Kane is so out of it that she’s letting guys do shots off her. It’s a little sickening.
“Someone should help her,” she blurts out almost before she has a chance to think.
“Come on, let’s go,” Cole says impatiently. “I’m not ending the night with Veronica Mars puking in my car.”
Meg feels like puking, herself.
“We can’t leave her like that,” she says, quietly.
Cole gives her A Look, undoubtedly getting ready to give her the “You can’t save the world with sunshine and positive thinking” speech when he glances over her shoulder and triumphantly points,
“Look, someone’s got her.”
Meg glances back in time to see someone pulling Veronica to her feet. She’s not sure who it is, exactly, and when she thinks back to how everyone at this party has been talking about Veronica ever since the Jake Kane fiasco, she’s not exactly comforted. It’s gotten creepy, listening to people at their lunch table, joking about the things they’d like to “do to her” to get even. For the most part, they always look sheepish when Meg gets upset, but that they think like that at all is unsettling, even if it’s just blowing off steam. Meg stares at Cole’s out stretched hand, hesitating. They should really go back and just take Veronica anyhow, to be sure.
Except she has to be home by curfew, and up until now she’s had a really nice evening. She may be sober but just because she is, it doesn’t mean she signed on to be a designated driver. And anyhow, maybe tonight is meant to be Veronica’s wake up call. Maybe it’s the night she realizes getting this drunk at a party isn’t the way responsible girls act. Meg’s parents always say the best way to stay out of trouble is to act like someone who doesn’t get into trouble, and the truth is that Meg agrees with them. She knows the only time she’s ever been embarrassed about her behaviour at one of these things was the first night Cole got her drunk and she ended up letting John Enbom’s freshman little brother make out with her and cop a feel. Everyone laughed, even Cole, so Meg laughed along with them, but the truth is that she was never more humiliated than when she had to face her friends the next day. But she learned her lesson, and she’s never let herself lose control again. Hopefully Veronica will reach the same conclusion after tonight is over. Before she finds herself in a similar situation with people who really will hurt her.
Meg takes a deep breath and turns to catch up with Cole.
“I Just Wanted Duncan to Have Some Fun.”
Logan doesn’t know why things ended up this way. He doesn’t know how he lost the three people who mattered most so quickly, but after Lilly went, the others followed, and Logan is trying to pick up the pieces as best as he knows how. He is. He tries his damndest to coax Duncan out to parties, to get him out of the house where they found her. He tries to talk to Veronica into seeing reason about her Dad, that they have to let the family—let Duncan—move on with their lives. He tries to forget about the perfect, self-centered girl who made their worlds revolve around her. He tries. He doesn’t succeed.
Duncan goes to parties to look at the world through vacant, deadened eyes; Veronica refuses to see reason about her dad, because suddenly she thinks her dad is the only person who matters; Logan can’t stop seeing Lilly out of the corner of his eye, hiding in every shadow, laughing at his stupidity. It’s not long before he starts to resent them all. Logan has never handled loneliness well. It hurts, and it makes him want to hurt. Maybe that’s why he laughs when he sees Veronica all but passed out on a lawn chair as Dick and Sean encourage her to drink shots.
He only pauses for a second, when he remembers Veronica isn’t a big drinker. She isn’t a big anything – 110 pounds soaking wet, if that. He shakes himself a little, refusing to feel bad for a traitor. Instead he wonders how embarrassed she would be if she fell asleep in a puddle of vomit. After the thought enters his head, it’s impossible to ignore and he starts walking in her direction. He justifies it by telling himself that if he’s in the middle of the action it will actually be easier to make sure no one else gets carried away. Veronica may not be his friend, but he can still make sure things don’t get more serious than drunken groping and foreplay. He can at least honour Lilly enough to make sure her best friend doesn’t get hurt, whether Veronica deserves it or not. He takes pictures of the stuff with Shelley and the body shots, so he can show Veronica later, when she starts acting like she’s better than the rest of them. He feels better just imagining what her face will look like when she’s informed of how big a slut she really is. To say that he’s pleased with himself would not be an exaggeration.
Until Duncan comes charging in, out of fucking nowhere, yelling about how Veronica can barely even sit up, telling everyone to leave her alone, trying to pretend like Logan is out of line. Like this isn’t really about the fact that he still wants to bang his ex-girlfriend. Logan should focus on the positive, on the fact that a pissed-off Duncan is better than the zombie who’s been wandering around Neptune in his best friend’s place. Instead he’s just frustrated that Veronica is the person Duncan bothered to scrounge up an actual emotional response for, like Logan hasn’t been the supportive one all this time.
“You can’t be the cavalry and the martyr man,” he snaps, casually shaking salt into her hair because he knows it will make Duncan even angrier. “Pick a side.”
“Leave her alone,” Duncan spits, which is just a bit much, coming from the guy who hasn’t acknowledged her existence for months. Logan may have started being a prick to Veronica, but at least he still talks to her. That’s more than Duncan does. He’s about to say as much, leaning into Duncan’s personal space, when he notices Veronica leaning in, too. Only she’s doing it instinctively, trying to get further away from Logan. Suddenly he’s not really angry anymore. He feels his throat tighten as he shoves at her shoulder, just a little.
“What’s your problem?” He demands. “If you didn’t like it you could have left.”
“You think she can walk on her own right now?” Duncan snaps. “Really?”
“Dude, how was I supposed to know she was that drunk,” Logan says, defensively. Even though he told himself when he went to go join the others that that was the only reason he was headed there.
“Some days I don’t even know why we’re friends,” Duncan mutters, as he tries to steer Veronica away from the rest of the group. Logan’s heart gives a small lurch. Duncan might not be worth much these days, but he’s the only one left. Veronica will probably never speak to him again once she’s slept off the hangover, and now Duncan is walking away like he’s done. If one more person leaves, Logan doesn’t think he’ll make it. He just wants things back to the way they were. He wants his friends back. He wants them to like each other again.
He’s reaching out and grabbing a glass of beer almost before he thinks about it. Tossing in the GHB and trying to surreptitiously stir it a little with his finger. He’d wanted to take it himself, but desperate times call for desperate measures and all that. He needs to get Duncan in a better mood; he needs his friend to forget that he’s a total fuck-up. Duncan’s built like a tank, so it’s not like this much GHB is going to knock him out. It’ll relax him. Bring back the old Duncan for a little while. Logan just wants to see one of his old friends again, not these new people he can no longer recognize. He puts on the most contrite face that he has, trying to school his features away from “sorry for myself” and into something closer to just “sorry” and makes his way towards Duncan, swirling Duncan’s drink as he goes.
“They Were Horrible to You.”
Sean likes to think of himself as pragmatic. Sometimes people call him a douche or a jerk because they think he’s being intentionally mean, but the thing is, Sean is really just a believer in calling a spade a spade. Sometimes the truth is unpleasant, sure. But is it really wrong to not give out handouts to drug addicts when they’ll only spend the money on more drugs? Of course not. Those people chose their lot in life, just like Sean chose his. No one helped Sean break into the popular crowd at school, it was his own hard work that got him here. If a drug addict really wanted to be clean, they would stop doing drugs. If a slut really didn’t want to be called that, she would stop sleeping around. If Veronica Mars didn’t want to become the party joke, she wouldn’t have come.
“I’m a believer in equal opportunity,” he earnestly tells Beaver as they watch Dick stumble towards the guest rooms with Veronica in his arms. “Yeah Veronica’s a psychotic bitch with a psychotic bitch family and there’s no way she was invited tonight. But I still entertained her! I still got her drinks when she was running low, because I’m a gentleman, Beaver. We do things like that.”
“Gentlemen do this?” Beaver asks, and Sean wonders why he looks so twitchy, glancing around like he’s trying to find the exit.
“Men do this,” Dick corrects, calling out over his shoulder. “Time to be a man, Beav.”
Dick starts to sing the wedding march when they reach the bedroom, which is hilarious, only Beaver isn’t really getting it. He keeps asking if they’re being serious, staring back and forth between them in that way he has, like he’s playing a game of chess instead of interacting with people. Sometimes Sean thinks Beaver is really creepy. It really looks like Beav thinks this is something everyone is expecting to happen, and Sean sort of wonders he if should point out that if Cassidy is so desperate to give away his flower, he’ll have more fun with a hooker than with an unconscious skank.
He never does say anything, just tells Beaver to suit up before he leaves, in case the kid actually goes through with it. In a way, it would make the whole thing even funnier if Beav does do it. It’s not like she won’t be crawling into bed with someone tonight, with the state she’s in, and how hysterical would it be to trick someone into having sex with Veronica Mars?
“I Just Wanted Him to Leave Me Alone.”
In the end, he just leaves her there. He’s not sure what else he’s supposed to do. With each step towards the doors leading to the pool his stomach twists a little further, even though he doesn’t know why. Even though he knows he hasn’t done anything wrong. When it gets to be too much, he throws up on Carrie Bishop’s shoes. He blames it on the alcohol. He blames everything on the alcohol.
“I Saw You.”
Young love really makes Carrie sick sometimes. She can’t help judging her classmates for how stupid they are about high school romance. It’s not like this is the rest of their lives. It’s not like the people you date now will even matter to you six years from now. But don’t tell any of her friends that. Not even that clueless bonehead Duncan Kane, who has spent the last 2 months walking around like a freaking zombie, never meeting anyone’s eyes, never talking, never even crying. If it was just about his dead sister, Carries guesses she could understand that, but she really thinks this is more about Duncan losing his girlfriend than it is about allegedly being the one to find Lilly’s lifeless body by their pool.
She hates the people at this school. She hates their drama, and their scandals, and the way that Duncan and Veronica can take the death of a person they both claimed to care about and use it as an excuse to get so hammered neither one of them can form a coherent sentence before they end up falling into bed with each other. Like she really needed to see that—Duncan barely moving on top of Veronica while she lies there like a log with her eyes closed, smiling stupidly and cooing in his ear like she’s settling down for a nap. Maybe Duncan really is that small, that he can be pounding into her without her feeling it, but that doesn’t explain why they both look like they’re losing a battle with consciousness right now, or why Duncan’s eyes are so disoriented when she barks at them to “Shut the door next time.”
Carrie may not be any better at having a functional relationship than anyone else at Neptune High, but she at least knows how to have good sex. Sex that you’re both too wasted to remember the next morning is way worse than no sex at all.
“Do You Know How Wasted I Was at Shelley’s Party? I Barely Even Remember It.”
He’s confused when he wakes up with his arms around another person. He doesn’t remember where he is or how he got there. And he’s not wearing his clothes. How much did he have to drink last night? He doesn’t handle hard liquor well at the best of times (Lilly used to be all too happy to remind him about that), and ever since Lilly... well, they’ve put him on some new medication, anyhow. It makes him feel alcohol even faster, makes him lose control faster, so the plan had been to nurse the same drink all night and hope no one noticed enough to give him a hard time. Now it looks like he didn’t follow through on that. He stomach drops when it dawns on him that he lost his virginity last night and he doesn’t even remember any of it. Or, he doesn’t remember at first. Not until he opens his eyes and sees Veronica asleep next to him.
Things start coming to the surface then, in horrifying fragments. Staggering into the guest room. Reaching out to touch Veronica’s hair as she smiles up at him, unguarded like she hasn’t been for months. Her voice softly saying, “I’ve missed you.”How right it felt.
It doesn’t feel right anymore. Duncan thinks he’s going to throw up if he stays in this room, and he pulls away as quickly as he can without disturbing her. Veronica can’t wake up right now. He can’t face her now. Can’t explain this to her. What if she thinks they’re getting back together? What if Duncan said something? What if he didn’t? His eyes sting a little as he looks for his pants. He wonders if there’s a word for the kind of a person he is right now: someone who sleeps with their sister. Incestuous seems too polite, too kind. At best, he’s a pervert or a monster or something.
Duncan is used to the blackouts. To feeling numb, to staying far away from the people who matter to him. He’s been living like this for months now; it’s starting to feel normal. He doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to hurting the people he loves though. Knowing that he can lose all control of his body and his actions are bad enough, but when he takes it out on people he cares about? He didn’t think he would ever feel worse than when his parents told him about how he got angry and attacked his dad, back when they were trying to convince him to change his medication. He didn’t think he’d ever wake up as scared as when he has those nightmares where his hands covered in blood (not Lilly’s, not Lilly’s). But now he’s hurt Veronica, too. It doesn’t matter what her dad (but he’s not her dad) has done, she did not deserve this. How could he let this happen? How could this not be his fault? What if this is the thing that destroys Veronica? What if it’s what destroys them both?
His hands are shaking so badly he can barely close the door behind him. He can’t see her face when she wakes up. He would tell her everything if she woke up right now, just so he’s not the only one feeling this panic. He tells himself it’s the right thing to do when he thinks about how disgusted she would be if she found out he slept with her even though he knew they might be related. He thinks about what his mother would say, and how he would turn into a laughing stock at school. He wonders if they might even start to make jokes about him and Lilly. No. He can’t stay to wait for Veronica to sleep this off. He can’t let this turn into anything real.
His mom never said much to him about the right way to treat a girl, probably because she liked pretending that her kids would never have sex, but Lilly would occasionally say things. Nothing much, just the odd smack to the back of the head accompanied with a “Hey, Donut. Do the right thing, not the wus thing. You have to be a man to treat a girl right, okay?” Duncan would roll his eyes at her and remind her that she wasn’t that much older than him, and she’d come back with something mean, and then there would either be laughing or fighting, depending on what kinds of days they were having. He knows he’s doing a shitty thing right now, leaving a girl who just lost her virginity to wake up on her own. He knows he’s not doing the right thing, but the point is the right thing is something he should have been thinking about last night, not this morning. He doesn’t know why he didn’t think this through last night. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him.
What he does know, is that Veronica knows where to find him if she really needs to. Hopefully, she’ll get the hint and stay away, but if there’s any reason she can’t (Jesus), she knows where he’ll be, and it will better for everyone if he’s back to hiding behind his manufactured apathy when it happens. Nothing good comes from him letting his guard down.
“I Was Drugged, But I Wasn’t Ra—“
The last thing she remembers thinking when she walks into the Pomroy house is that she shouldn’t have come. That she would have been better off spending the night with her dad, throwing tennis balls for Backup at Dog Beach.
The last thing she thinks as she leaves is that she shouldn’t have come, and she doesn’t know how she’ll be able to look her dad in the eye without him noticing that something is wrong. She doesn’t know how this all went so wrong.