"Angie! Angie! Were you lookin'? Were you lookin'? I did it! Did you see? Are you proud of me, huh, huh?"
I laughed at his antics. "Yeah, I'm extremely proud that you downed a whole Stone Oil in less than ten seconds—and it's not even two o' clock. You're gonna be drunk, my friend, if you keep this up." Over the last hour and a half, the hyper-active carpenter boy and I had gotten to known each other. We clicked, in that clichéd way when you know you're gonna be best friends for life, grow old together and live with fourteen cats in a quaint little cottage at the end of an dead-end road. So far, our relationship had progressed to the level of 'let's see how much one (Luke) can drink while the other (me) laughs her bony ass off.'
Now, when I laugh really, really hard, it kind of reminds you of the sound a pigeon might make if it was strangled and then trampled by a herd of cows. So I really can't blame Luke for thinking I was choking, but his panic made me fall off the barstool, thus choke-laughing even more, and causing general chaos.
"Chase! I think Angie's dying!" sounded Luke's voice. My eyes were watering, my chest heaving so it slammed back onto the wooden floor, not without pain.
"Noik…im..'m..kay!" I said, not making very much sense at all. I could see Chase's unmistakable strawberry-blonde head peek over the counter.
"I don't see anything out of the ordinary," he deadpanned, and his head disappeared from my line of vision. This only made me laugh harder—and the head appeared again, surprising me. "Never mind Angela," he said, "I think that chicken on the floor is suffocating."
"Dammit…Ch..a..sse!" I cried. "Pwuh…ese!"
Luke bounded up from his kneeling position beside me. "Awwight!" he shouted—and I'm not kidding, shouted, "No one is to speak to Angela or do anything humorous what-so-evah! Step awwwaaay, people! Awwaaaaay!" And he made a great show of sitting back down at the farthest barstool away from me.
Eventually I calmed and pulled myself back onto my stool. I folded my arms on the bar and cradled my head, my shoulders still shaking in silent laughter. I heard the stool beside me squeak, and a warm hand on my back. "Wow, you really can't hold your liquor, Ange. And remind me never to tell you a joke, ever. I don't want my new BFF to die."
I raised my head and smiled at Luke. "This is the start of a long, beautiful friendship."
He wrinkled his nose. "Clichéd much? Can't you be like: this is the start of a long, probably destructive but hilarious friendship full of booze and bitches?"
I snorted. "You realize I'm not a lesbian, correct?"
"…Right."
My mouth dropped in my hilarity—I was laughing so much recently. "You thought—you thought...!!" Luke's cheeks were now flushing deep pink; the kind of blushing that schoolgirls do in soap opera anime. He refused to meet my gaze, instead muttering embarrassedly.
"I'm really sorry Angie. I'm not exactly…erm…"
"I believe you're trying to say that your observational skills are equivalent to that of a brick wall?"
"Hey!" he protested, "You never know! Maybe brick walls are observant! Maybe brick walls know all the dirt on everyone! You're so prejudiced, Ange! Respect the inanimate!'
"Oh, excuse me," I mocked, placing a hand over my heart. I noticed peach out of the corner of my eye, and caught Chase's gaze. I quickly looked back to Luke.
"You are not excused," declared Luke, "Discrimination is a horrible, horrible disease."
"Um, it's not exactly a d—" I began, but then could not go on account of Luke's lips on my own. My eyes widened upon the realization, but then quickly fell closed. It wasn't like it wasn't nice, after all, and I hadn't been kissed in a long while. I stared at him seriously after he pulled back. I swallowed, "Are you drunk?" I asked him gravely.
"…Yes," and he promptly collapsed to the floor, unconscious.
The mock-solemnity on my face suddenly became the real thing. "Uh, Chase?" I said, panicked.
"What is it now?" he grumbled turning away from his pot. His brow furrowed. "Where'd Luke go?"
"Oh, he just went out for a tic to pick up some milk." I scoffed and glared daggers at him. "Where d'ya think? He's on the frickin' floor, frickin' unconscious!" I flailed my arms around in a mad gesture that I was sure made no sense to Chase and was probably a terrible expletive in some culture. You see, I knew how to take care of myself, especially while drunk. But if anyone threw the slightest responsibility on my shoulders – boom! Total mess. And here was Luke, my new BFFL, probably close to death by alcohol poisoning.
"Calm down, Angela," Chase snapped, rounding the bar. "And of course he wouldn't be out to get a milk. We've got milk right here. It would be completely stupid of him to go and get some, but then again, it's Luke that we're talking about. I wouldn't put it past him." He crouched down beside Luke, all the while smirking. Without thinking, I smacked his peach-colored head.
"Stop smirking and help him!" I cried.
I saw Yolanda watching us from the stairs. She was wearing a self-satisfied smile. "That's right, show 'im who wears the pants in the relationship, hunny." My jaw dropped open.
"Chase—"
"Stop having your seizure," he grunted, "And help me."
I didn't like doctors. They were condescending and pretentious and smelt like rotting plants. I also didn't like clinics. They were the poor man's hospital, and I'd figured, if you didn't have enough dough to have hospital equipment, you must not be very good in your practice at all. So when Chase and I arrived at Meringue Clinic, Luke between us, the ever-so familiar feeling of that last blueberry cocktail going up the wrong way greeted me, side-by-side with the also familiar figure of Doctor Jin.
I smiled brightly. "Hello Jin, long time, no see isn't it?" I knew he could smell the alcohol on my breath.
He was unamused by my attempt at friendliness. "Long time, no see, since last night, you mean?"
I blinked. "You were at the wedding…? Oh. Oh!" I tried to smile at him again, saying, "You were the groom. I remember." I kept nodding, hoping that he wouldn't notice I wasn't completely sober at the moment. I heard someone – Chase -- snort beside me, but I was too busy nodding to yell at him. Then I remembered. Luke. "Oi! Doctor-face, there's an unconscious patient right in front of you, and you're spending all your time shouting at your wife's best friend?"
"Is that Angie out there?" said Irene from inside. Within seconds she appeared next to Jin in the doorway. "Why didn't you let her in? Never, ever be rude to my darling Angie, Jin." She moved aside, practically shoving Jin over so he would do the same. We brought Luke in, up the stairs, and onto a bed. All the while I was criticizing.
"Why would you have the beds upstairs? Making poor, sick, patients drag themselves all up those stairs? Bad interior design, that," I rambled.
"Stop talking, Angie," muttered Jin, his frustration betwixt his eyes.
"Don't yell at her, she's only doing it to distract herself," said Chase, frowning, and I wondered if he ever smiled. Like, an actual smile. He was always smirking and stuff, but that wasn't the same thing at all. I started telling him so.
"She does it out of panic," Irene added over my babble, nodding sagely. Irene was pretty full of it. Always nodding and bowing and acting like a proper old lady when she really was a crazy drunk. I felt obligated to tell her that, too. "She insults people as well," said Irene, "Helps the dear cope."
"Well she needs to stop so I can think," Jin said, raising his voice to a volume I wasn't sure he had been capable of.
"But I can't!" I practically shouted, "Because then I'll think about how dead he looks and how it's all my fault." To my horror, as I spoke tears began to well up in my eyes—to which I responded by blinking like crazy, and the tears provoked waves of shudders to rattle my form. I knew by now that there was no way I could compose myself. I had ripped open the delicate scab that had taken so long to build, and now I was bleeding. "Cause I know it's my fault. It's absolutely my fault. I screwed up again, and this time it's hurting someone other than me."
Irene, Chase, Jin. I could read their expressions quite clearly. Pity, arrogance, shock. They thought I was insane. They were right.
Through the relative silence of my sobs came Luke's voice. "Angie?"
He was sitting up now in bed, looking perfectly fine and dandy, albeit a bit tipsy. Reflected in his eyes was an emotion I had seen many times before when people looked at me in the city. Guilt, cold and cruel, stared at me now.
"I'm sorry. I…I was playing a trick on you."
"A trick?" My voice squeaked and my eyebrows rose. I felt more tears well up, but I ignored them. "Excuse me," I said, and stumbled down the stairs and out the clinic. The sky was strangly white with the midday heat, and without any idea of where I was going, I began to pump my legs and ran out of town and this ordinary day that had so easily had become a nightmare.
I ran until I knew nothing more than one stride after another and the endless desire to go forward – or away, depending on the day. That day, I was definitely going away. At some time I stopped and collapsed, and cried into the grass and dirt.
I thought I had been strong. I was cynical and sarcastic and bitter; weapons that could battle away real emotion while I picked up my sorry ass. But apparently I wasn't strong at all. I couldn't handle the simple, ridiculous countryside losers. The slightest misfortune had set me off into hysteria. I was pathetic. Hopeless. For God's sake, I was drinking in two in the afternoon. That was a new olow, even for me. Then a horrible thought entered my head.
What if it never got better?
What if I was like this for the rest of my life?
No, I promised myself. I would kill myself before I would let that happen. I'm broken, I admitted, but I'm healing. I'm going to do this. I can do this. And then I laughed about how much I sounded like that bloody blue tank engine and felt a bit better.
Minutes ticked by, though whether they were minutes or hours was beyond me. I watched the grass grow. Then I laid on my back and looked at the clouds. Next I carved the words Angela B is Broken in an abnormally large root and smiled.
After that I looked around to see where I was. A few meters ahead of me were mounds of soil dotted with tall weeds. It was a field, I decided, an abandoned one at that. I thought no more of it and began to make my way back to the Inn, following the trails. I glanced up to the sky and wondered if anything was there at all.
Where I entered the Inn, the lobby was bare, and although it wasn't to say that the Inn was always buzzing with customer activity, far from it, it seemed like he owners of the Inn were at least present at all times possible. "Hello?" I swept my eyes across the room once more and saw peach.
"They're all out looking for you," said Chase, not bothering to look at me. Of course, when the whole town was all a-flutter over my disappearance, the only one who would've stayed behind and polished glasses was my good old cooking friend.
I nodded even though he couldn't see the action. "When they get back, tell them I'm fine." I started for the stairs.
"But you're not, are you?" He said, and I heard the small clink of glass against wood as he set down the cup. I turned to look at him.
"This isn't the best time to play Sherlock, Cook." I said, trying my best to brush off his accusation.
"Oh, come on," Chase scoffed, "After that episode? You're not going to stay here for a season. Next morning you'll have your bags all packed and you'll be hitching the next ferry off this Goddess-forsaken island." He explained this to me likedI was a child, with all the confidence in the world that it was going to happen. He thought I was weak like that. I waited for him to ask the inevitable. While I waited, I wondered what he meant by 'Goddess - forsaken.'
"So," he said, just like I had known he would, "Since your leaving, you don't have anything to lose. You could tell me, y'know." He chuckled. "I'll admit, you are a bit of an enigma to me, and I'd like to know some of your secrets." He finally turned and in his eyes I could see that he thought he was too clever. And he was. Chase was too clever for this town on this island in the middle of nowhere.
"You see, Chase, the problem with enigmas is that they don't easily reveal their secrets," I told him, and that self-importance drained out of his posture until he was looking at me with genuine curiosity. "And then," I said, "Some enigmas are rather disappointing. Some are just normal people that have a broken past."
"I don't think so," he said, and I tried to imagine how he had construed such an opinion of me.
"You would be. You'd be disappointed, and then you'd laugh, and then you'd mock me. And…it would be horrible." I closed my eyes. I didn't want to see his determined expression.
"I wouldn't."
That simple defiance made my eyes fly open and I stared at him now. I realized he was as much as an enigma to me as he thought I was to him. We spent a long time staring at each other before I spoke again.
"I didn't come here to get a 'breath of country air,'" I said, sarcasm creeping in and making me stronger, "You saw me today. I," I spoke deliberately, "am not okay. And I need to be. Can you understand that?"
His Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed. "Yeah."
"Okay," I paused, "And now, I'm going to go upstairs and stare at the ceiling until I fall asleep." I once again began to go for the stairs, but I was prevented again by Chase's voice.
"Could I join in?" It was obvious he hadn't thought much about his wording before he blurted that one out.
"Excuse me?" I said, smiling for the first time in hours.
"Erm, I, uh…that's not…what I meant," Chase stammered, and I smirked. "I mean, could I, just talk to you?" He had such pleading eyes, so I had to say yes, laughingly. And then he did the impossible.
He smiled. A real, honest-to-god smile.
"Oh my god," I uttered, shocked. "Oh, my god."
The smile dropped and he was frowning again. "What?"
"Fwhh," I sighed, frustrated. "Oh man. Now it's gone, and I didn't even get a picture." I pouted, forbidding any trace of a smile to play upon my lips, lest it give away the joke.
"What are you talking about?"
"Never mind that," I grinned, "I thought you wanted to talk." And I dragged him up the stairs.
That night I dreamt of the field, except it wasn't the dreary patch of dirt and weeds I had seen before. It was green with plants that I could never identify. In the field was a child. She held a tomato. Her cheeks where smudged, and she grinned at me, a twinkle of mischief in her eyes. In the next second the image was gone.
I dreamt of wings and trees and cats and rainbows, and then I dreamt of nothing at all.