Sick Shit
I'm not sorry
Matt sucked on what was left of his cigarette to try to distract himself from the cold as he walked the neighborhood side-by-side with Mello. The cloud of tobacco smoke was amplified by the condensation of his own warm breath. They were both squinting at the numbers on each house, trying to spot the right one under the darkness of ten at night in January winter.
"Is that it?" Mello asked, motioning to an impeccable grey house across the street thinking he recognized the bronze number bolted onto the door from the text message
"Yeah, that's it" Matt confirmed, relieved by the thought of guarding from the cold indoors. They scanned the road to make sure no cars were coming and jogged across the street, diving straight for the doorbell. At first there was silence, but then came the sound of bare feet walking on a wooden floor. Dan opened the door in a plain white t-shirt and sweatpants, issuing his signature toothy grin at the sight of the boys
"Hey! I was starting to wonder about you guys" the boy stepped out of the way to let them in, his lightly freckled face coming into view under the artificial lights. "You can leave your shoes on the rack" he directed, taking Matt's coat and placing it on a hanger by the entrance "we're warming up some pizza, are you guys hungry?"
Despite having consumed a copious amount of spaghetti only a few hours back, the incessant voraciousness of teenaged boys showed no limit.
"Pizza sounds great" accepted Matt, leaning on a knee as he placed a shoe on the rack.
Mello nodded with a half-smile as he hung up his own coat, trying his best to appear sociable despite still feeling the effects of his drinking the night before. His first hangover was proving to be a darling life lesson. The three boys walked into the kitchen, where Emma was leaning into the oven with a spatula in hand trying to pry the pizza off the the baking sheet. If she leaned any further into the appliance it would swallow her whole.
"Dante. The... cheese… is… stuck…" she said punctuating her word with every attempt to shove the spatula under the crust
"Hand it over, chef" said Dan approaching to intervene, not wanting his friend to suffer burns for the sake of a cheese pizza. He gently moved her to the side "I got it, offer the guys something to drink, yeah?"
Emma spun around at the mention of the Wammy boys, she hadn't heard them arrive during her scuffle with the oven. Her face lit up with joy, brown eyes wide
"Hey!" she exclaimed loudly and skipped over to Mello, embracing him in a hug that knocked him back a step. However, her excitement quickly met a dead end.
As the blond returned the hug a memory from last night pounced on his mind and froze him in place. The smell of rum, synthetic strawberry scent, and thin female arms encircled him as he leaned down to fervently kiss female lips. There was no image, only a feeling. His eyes widened and his brow creased in concentration as he tried hard to remember the context
Emma pulled away with confused disappointment "damn, do I look that bad without makeup?" she asked only half-joking
Mello shook his head "I just… remembered something" he said slightly rattled "an assignment I forgot about until now" he lied. Matt gave him a confused, knowing there was no such thing, but didn't denounce him
"Oh… well you have all of tomorrow to work on it, right?" Em said trying her best not to let insecurity take over. She had a knack for fulfilling the role of her own best cheerleader, but today had really been a kick in the nuts. Events from earlier this afternoon coupled with Mello's less-than-receptive reaction was succeeding in shaking her usual blasé demeanor. "W-what do you guys want to drink? There's Coca-Cola, orange juice, and beer" she listed shaking away the feeling and opening the fridge "Dan's parents are cool" she cooed and giggled.
"How can you drink after last night?" Mello asked her incredulously
"Hair of the dog, my friend." She pulled out two beers and handed them out. Mello looked at the can in his hand thinking that just wasn't right, but cracked it open anyways.
"Alright, we're good here." The dark-haired boy proudly presented his plated pizza all in one piece despite the baking fiasco "Em, can you grab all the beer so we don't have to come back up?" he asked, picking up the pizza and motioning the Wammy kids to follow him towards the entrance to his basement "it's down this way."
The basement had that familiar damp smell of underground spaces, but was well-light and clean. There was a single couch facing a television, a coffee table, a washer and dryer set, and an old sound system that had been probably been replaced by a newer model and stuck down here by default. The walls were lined by crooked posters of bands the boys had never seen or heard of, the floor was lined with boxes containing old records, cassette tapes, and CDs. The television showed a paused game of Mario Kart in session– Dan placed the pizza on the coffee table and picked up a controller to exit out of the current game. Emma's footsteps could be heard at the top of the stairs, pulling together a balancing act as she carried more beers between her arms and under her chin than she could safely handle.
"Hey! I was ahead on that round," she complained, watching as her chance at victory was discarded
"I was going easy on you, we're going to play for real this time" the boy remarked cockily.
Emma huffed. "Whatever" she sneered as she bent town to try to place the first beer on the table.
Matt spotted a can sliding over her forearm and caught it in time before it dropped, "I got it, your hands are full" he said carefully picking out the cans one by one and putting them down upright. The girl watched his careful movements
"Thanks, it's–"
"So here's the deal" began Dan "we play two at a time: for every time you fall off the track you take a sip, for every lap you're behind you take a sip, and loser in a round has to chug. Got it?"
Matt nodded excitedly, trusting he'd come ahead in this game. It's as if all the hours he spent at Wammy playing videogames had lead up to this moment "got it"
Mello, on the other hand, held a worried look in anticipation of having to drink once again. He sat on the couch and hoped to God he wouldn't have to go against Matt.
"Emma goes first because she's bad at this" Dan asserted with a shit-eating grin as he handed a controller and an unopened beer to the girl, who reacted with rotund eye-roll. However, she didn't retort as she sat cross-legged on the floor and scrolled through the character choices to settle on Princess Peach.
Dan then offered the second controller to Matt "do you want to go first?"
The redhead nodded and joined Emma on the carpet. He picked his character without much thought, landing on the mushroom-hooded Toad, and then waited for her to select a track. The timer counted down with large yellow numbers on the screen, and an alarm announced the beginning of the round.
The results were very predictable once Matt crossed the line to finish the first lap while Emma lagged a handful of seconds behind. Abiding by the rules, she hurriedly took a sip from the beer while trying to steer at the same time. Then a second lap came, and once again the brunette drank to mark her disadvantage. On the third round Princess Peach fell off the track twice: once as a result of a trap and once again purely by accident. Emma's total drinking tally added up to four sips punctuated by chugging– a total of half a can of beer.
"Well… fuck. You're good at this" she granted, passing the controller to Dante while wiping her chin of a couple stray drops of lager. She scooted on the floor to lean her back against the couch so the boy could have a seat in front of the television screen. Her eyes fixated on the glaring image as her head lolled to the side to lean on Mello's knee.
The blonde glanced at the top of her head, trying to figure out how they he had gotten to the point of kissing her and forgetting about it. He mentally tried to come up with dialogue that could help him ask her without letting on that he was too drunk when it happened. Emma laughed lazily at the two boys' racecars colliding on screen. He took a sip of his beer and grimaced, feeling his body reject the flavor intensely. Matt and Dan were currently stuck in a shoving match trying to push the other's car off the track, but in the end Toad persevered.
"No! That was so close" Dante lamented, taking a sip from his own drink
Mello leaned in to grab a slice of pizza and a napkin, leaning back into his seat "so… how was the end of your night last night?" He asked the girl and took a bite. She sighed.
Her head turned to face him, her chin now resting on his knee "it was good. Angie and I just went to bed right after you guys left, were you able to find any more of that rum?"
"Uh, yeah. After we left…"
"The balcony. You guys went looking for the handle, remember?"
He did. He was finally starting to piece it all together "… and you guys stayed upstairs in Angie's room. Yes, we found it" his expression sank with the realization that he had made a mistake.
"We came, we found, we conquered" added Dante from the front of the room with a proud chuckle "not a single drop left behind."
Mello's mind flashed a memory of Dan lifting the handle and declaring those same six words as he tilted it to pour a stream of amber liquid into another partygoer's mouth. People cheered. The dark-haired boy then passed him the handle, and Mello remembered drinking liberally. Cheering continued. A girl with dark lipstick kneeled in front of him and opened her mouth like a beacon so he poured some rum down her throat. Cheering intensified.
"Chug, chug, chug!" cried Emma in celebration of Dante's defeat, throwing Mello back into reality. He had lost his appetite as a nervous feeling to refuge in his stomach for reasons beyond having to dwell with Matt on on the Mario Kart track. The blonde placed his slice of pizza on a nearby paper plate and wiped his hands clean before accepting the controller.
His eyes were glues to the television but his mind was elsewhere, trying to figure out whether Dante or Matt had seen The Kiss take place. He didn't even notice the voices going off all around him until he lost the first lap and was handed his beer. Time passed and he was still running on autopilot: game on, game over, game on, game over. It wasn't long before the empty cans of beer started piling up underneath the coffee table.
The clock stood at half past one in the morning. Mello had offered to wait outside with Emma after Dante called her a cab to make sure their tipsy rose-tinted friend got home safely. They shared a cigarette in silence, passing it back and forth to each other after a couple drags each. The mood was saturnine.
"Give me your phone, I have something for you" she finally spoke, laying out her hand
"What is it?" He asked, pulling out the worn out Motorola to unlock the screen
"This girl from my class called me today" she took the phone and opened the contact book "she asked about you"
Mello could feel his blood freeze, the hairs on the back of his neck standing up "who?"
"Leah. She asked me to give you her number" Emma pressed 'save' and handed his phone back forcefully
"So… you knew this whole time?"
"Yeah. To be honest I wasn't going to give it to you, but she could just find another way to get to you" she tossed the cigarette on the floor and stepped on the lit cherry "is she a good kisser?" she hissed
"I don't remember" Mello said plainly "I don't remember her, it was nothing"
Emma insisted on facing away from him as if withholding eye contact was going to make it any easier. He was coated in defensiveness– he owed her nothing, she had no right to berate him for this. If he was really just looking for some female company he could just text Leah and get it over with, this whole situation could go unresolved for all he cared. Maybe it was the slight buzz of the beers he'd had tonight coupled with way she insisted on treating him like he had betrayed her.
"It was far from nothing. You made me the fool"
"Who cares what they think, you said it yourself just yesterday"
"I care" her voice came loud and angry "I'm not a backup. Especially not to some desperate little slut like Leah" her expression was saturated with disgust
Mello paused. He observed the brunette: her tone, her posture, her air. Suddenly it wasn't too hard to understand that he had hurt her ego. "She's not important" he offered " I'll take you on a date, how's that?"
Her eyes softened and her jaw unclenched, leaving behind only sadness lingering on her face. A long moment went by, a car paused in front of the house but it turned out not to be her ride.
"The Ferris wheel on the pier" she answered softly
The blonde arched an eyebrow at the specificity of the location, he could tell there was more to that answer than she was letting on "oka-"
"I'll only go if you text Leah that you want nothing to do with her, otherwise I never want to hear from you again." Her tone was stern.
Mello's head cocked to the side ever so slightly, he huffed in disbelief "are your threatening me?" Who the hell did this girl think she was? Did she not realize we had already knee-deep in feeding into her bullshit?
"No Mello, I'm not threatening you" she turned to stand right in front of him and neared her face to his so that all he could smell was that sugar-sweet essence of hers. Her voice was drenched in venom "I'm giving you a choice"
Mello's blue eyes thinned into an icy glare. A taxi parked in front of the house, this time it was definitely waiting on someone. His temper was starting to heighten and something in him suggested he shove the girl into that cab and forget about it. However, he wasn't comfortable with the thought of having bad blood between them, a line had been crossed. He took his phone out of his pocket and opened a new text message, inserting a simple-yet-effective rejection below it. Once he was done he held up the screen to Emma's face "happy?"
I'm not interested– Mello
The brunette's expression, spotlighted in the night by the green glow of the phone screen, turned to sick satisfaction. She lifted her finger to the keypad and pressed the 'send' button, "happy. Text me." She sprang to her tiptoes and planted a cold kiss on his cheek, and then ran off towards the car that awaited.
Mello sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. What a mess. The front door was left unlocked so he could go back inside and reunite with Matt and Dan, who were currently downstairs playing another videogame and lighting up. As he walked back into the basement the sound of roaring laughter caught his attention: his roommate and Matt were both sitting on the floor letting the game go solo as they cackled at something or other. The blonde sat down on the couch, arms crossed, eyebrows knitted.
"Huh… you look PO-ed" remarked Dan, offering him the joint "this will help"
"I'm good" said Mello thinking he wasn't in the mood to insert another substance into his body
"Alright then" Dante took a long drag and held it in his lungs before releasing a big cloud of smoke. "Matt and I just had the best idea, ready?" He passed the joint to Matt, who's eyes watered from his laughing moments ago, and changed his position to face Mello from the floor. The dark-haired boy cleared his throat "so it's a regular café except there's all these vintage video games you can play for free. Mario Kart, Tekken, Crash Bandicoot… you know, all the good ones. If you get hungry, there's like, pizza slices, soda, ice cream, and all that stuff, so you can just pretty much go in and play all day, no problem"
Mello nodded "you mean like an arcade?"
Matt and Dante looked at each other with disbelief that their genius idea was nothing more than a regurgitation. The redhead shook his head "shit"
They broke into thunderous laughter as if on cue, gasping in air periodically "how did we miss that?" begged Dan
Mello looked at Matt in disbelief– the third smartest person in an orphanage for the gifted reduced to this? Whatever they were smoking was doing a great job at turning his brain to mush. "I changed my mind" he said taking the joint from Matt, who was bent over still cackling, and took a gentle drag.