When Dylan managed to pry his eyelids apart the next day, it was already early afternoon. Unforgiving rays of cold winter sunlight seared through his eyelids and into his brain. He made a noise of abject horror and yanked the covers up over his head, but he'd been through this enough times to know that resistance was futile. Then a machine-gun starting firing somewhere next to his head.
Dylan gave a violent start before he realized it was his cell, its vibrations amplified in force by the wicked hangover headache currently taking up residence between his ears. He freed a hand from his blankets and groped weakly for the phone, almost knocking over a black skull candle and a bottle of Ibuprofen that he made a mental note to dry-swallow several of once he could move again.
He hit 'accept call' without looking to see who it was and waited for whoever was on the other end to start talking, less because he felt like ever speaking to another human again and more to stop the fucking vibrating.
"Hey," said a familiar voice after a few seconds. Dylan winced and quickly removed the phone from his ear, turning the volume down as low as it would go without being completely silent. Henrietta's caller ID picture stared at him from the display; a shot of her hunched over her cigarette holder, blurry because she'd moved halfway through.
"I'm so fucking hungover," Dylan mumbled indistinctly, because it felt like a good idea to get that established right off the bat. There was a noisy exhale on the other end that made Dylan cringe and then Henrietta's voice was boring its way into his skull like so many tiny drills of pain, even at a more manageable volume.
"Come over," she said, somehow managing to sound a lot less fucked than Dylan even though she'd drunk exactly the same amount, maybe even more. Fucking girls. Not that Dylan would know anything about girls. Henrietta was the only one he knew that he could be around for prolonged amounts of time without wanting to blow his brains out. More than usual, anyway. The point was, she sounded less in pain than him and it was annoying. "We've gotta talk about this new gig."
Thinking about the gig made Dylan feel vaguely less miserable. Not happy, of course, because that would be sacrilege. Not unhappy, maybe. That was probably still pushing it.
"I'll do your hair, too," Henrietta continued. "I don't know if you've noticed, but it's fucking pink."
"Gimme half an hour,"
"'Kay." Henrietta hung up, and everything was blissfully silent.
Dylan hid under his blankets for fifteen more minutes before dragging himself out of bed and over to Henrietta's, not bothering to change or do anything about his tangled hair and fucked-up eyeliner. Henrietta's blond conformist brother Bradley was hanging around in the kitchen when Dylan let himself in the door, and he looked legitimately terrified when they made brief eye contact.
"You look like shit," Georgie greeted him when he opened to door to Henrietta's room. He looked as fresh-faced as ever, not a lipstick smudge in sight. Not for the first time, Dylan wondered how the hell a kid and a girl managed to hold their alcohol better than him. Life was such bullshit.
Dylan chose to ignore Georgie and flopped onto Henrietta's bed, face-first. Or at least he would have, if stupid tall Evan hadn't been in the way.
Evan shifted lazily to make room. Dylan tried to stick his hand in one of his coat pockets for a smoke and failed miserably. Hand-eye coordination had never been a strong point of his, and especially not when he was hungover.
"Cigarette," he said instead. "It's a death-or-death situation."
"Lightweight," Evan snickered, lighting a cigarette out of his pack and putting it in between Dylan's fingers.
Dylan picked his head up and took a drag, directing a glare at Evan that abruptly transformed into an expression of relieved ecstasy as he inhaled. Much better.
"So now that we're all here," Henrietta said pointedly. "The gig."
Puffing away, Dylan arranged himself into a sitting position next to Evan and pulled his knees up to his chest. "We gotta do it," he said immediately. "Even if it's for a faggy vampire kid. He liked us, right? Probably treat us better than fucking Wendy."
"Our first gig for a Britney-wannabe conformist bitch and the second one for a faggy vampire kid," said Evan glumly. "Fastest sellouts ever."
Henrietta just rolled her eyes. "Whatever. How can we sell out when we're not even getting paid yet? And it doesn't matter, anyway, because he already called and I told him we'd do it. Gig's next week."
Evan just sighed, but Dylan knew he didn't actually care that much or he'd totally be throwing a shitfit right now.
"We'll start practicing for it tomorrow," Henrietta decided. "He'll probably want new stuff or something." Dylan was pretty sure his head would explode if he even thought about listening to Georgie play drums for the next twelve hours at least, so that was fine with him.
"How'd I sound?" Evan asked, stretching out next to Dylan on the bed and sipping on a Thermos of coffee he'd probably brought from home.
"Kinda stiff in the beginning," said Georgie from his place on the floor, examining one of Henrietta's candles. "Cool at the end though."
"Yeah," Henrietta agreed. "I like the way you did Vampire Afternoon."
Dylan fought the urge to groan as he remembered playing that song last night. When Evan wasn't looking, he snuck a glance at his neck for the first time that day, vaguely hoping that the whole thing had just been a dream or a bad trip or something. No suck luck. The bite-mark was still there, a jagged semicircle on the side of his throat, just turning purple at the edges.
Henrietta saw where Dylan was looking and almost cracked a smile. "You bit him hard," she said, sounding amused. "What was up with that?"
Evan answered before Dylan could, tugging his coat collar up to conceal the mark and shifting almost imperceptibly away from Dylan, who had to fight the instinctive urge to roll after him. "Nothing," he said. "It was nothing, right?"
"Yeah," Dylan agreed after a pause. "Totally."
Henrietta gave them both a look but didn't push it any further, and they spent the next half-hour or so arguing about whether it was more hardcore to play really fast or really slow and exactly how far lyrical influence went before it turned into plagiarism.
Soon Dylan started feeling like he might actually be able to get up and walk around without crumpling to the floor in a ball of pain. He and Henrietta headed to the bathroom to dye his hair while Georgie and Dylan elected to stay behind and try to get some writing done.
After unceremoniously kicking Bradley out of the bathroom, Dylan sat on the toilet lid to wait while Henrietta mixed the dye in a plastic cereal bowl. It looked like soupy blood. They opened a window, but the space was still claustrophobic and gross-smelling, and all that really did was make it freezing too. Dylan had sort of built up a tolerance to the chemical smell over the years, but when combined with the hangover it felt like a distinct possibility that he might puke.
He felt a little better once he was on his knees with his head bent over the sink and Henrietta standing over him, the familiar stance they adopted every month or so when he needed his hair done for as far back as he could remember. Dylan thought he should probably start trying to figure out how to do this for himself soon, but it just seemed like so much work.
"So, like," Henrietta said over the sound of the running faucet, voice too casual to actually be casual. "What's up with you and Evan?"
Dylan tried to pick his head up and make eye contact with her, surprised at the question, but she just made an annoyed sound and forced him back down again. After this caused a near miss that involved his head and the hard porcelain edge of the sink, Dylan decided it would probably be wise to just keep down from then on.
"What? I don't know," he said, distracted. Even though she'd practically just given him a concussion, Henrietta's hands were soothing in his hair. How was it possible to make someone feel soothed when they were freezing cold and bent uncomfortably over a sink with a noseful of chemicals? That was the real question here. "Nothing."
Above him, Henrietta smirked. Dylan couldn't see her, but he bet that was what she was doing. "I'm sure," she said, and Dylan huffed, annoyed. Dye trickled down his temples, and he knew he'd have stains for days that made him look like some kind of head trauma victim or something. Whatever, head trauma was hardcore.
"Shut up," he said. Not because he was defensive or anything. He just didn't feel like talking.
She did, humming Skinny Puppy under her breath as she finished working the dye through his hair and then ordered him into the shower, lighting up another cigarette as she stepped out of the room and shut the door behind her.
Dylan stripped and turned the water practically as hot as it would go, waiting until it warmed up to step under the spray. Henrietta was crazy, obviously. Maybe the fumes had gotten to her, or she was more hungover than she was letting on.
Red turned to pink and then ran down the drain, and Dylan made sure he was all warmed up and his hair was rinsed thoroughly before he stepped out of the shower. He toweled off and climbed back into his clothes, which was actually kind of disgusting because he hadn't bothered to change out of what he'd been wearing last night before he went to sleep, but whatever. Artists weren't supposed to be clean all the time anyway.
Dylan dried his hair roughly. The mirror had completely fogged over, and he wiped a clean patch in order to examine it. It was sticking up every which way and his bangs looked insane but the top was a satisfyingly vivd shade of red, definitely not pink anymore.
He thanked Henrietta's hair voodoo and padded back over to her room without bothering to put his shoes back on, sitting back down on the bed and leaning over into Evan's space to see what he was looking at. He didn't move away like he had before, and Dylan was briefly terrified that Henrietta had said something to him too before he decided even she couldn't be that crazy and just focused on reading the prospective new song, which was called Canadian Bondage. Georgie had written it, apparently. Dylan raised an eyebrow, but no one else was saying anything so he decided not to either.
"You smell like minty fruit," said Evan when he was halfway through reading the song, using his height advantage to blatantly rub his nose in Dylan's hair. "That's so fucking weird."
"Get off me, fag," Dylan said, but he didn't say it in a forceful tone or make any move to pull away. It felt kind of good, or whatever. Evan stopped after a couple seconds, but he was closer than he'd been before, practically on top of Dylan like they were freaking chicks or something.
Dylan shot Henrietta a don't-even-say-anything glare, but she wasn't looking at them, eyes focused studiously on the notebook in front of her. Georgie was as out of it as usual, nodding along to whatever was playing on his iPod and scribbling in a notebook of his own.
One of Evan's arms was slung across Dylan's chest and they were close enough to be sharing body heat. On a bed. And instead of being creeped out by this, Dylan felt relaxed enough to go to sleep. What the fuck that was about he wasn't entirely sure, but he figured it probably wasn't worth it to get all weird if Evan wasn't. He had freshly dyed hair and a cigarette between his teeth and a gig next week, and things were as good as they were going to get.