A/N: I hope everyone had a nice holiday!!
To Break And Build: Chapter 13
Allie surged on until it felt as if every ounce of air had been sucked out of her lungs and then finally skidded to a stop in the middle of an asphalt road, her rib cage heaving painfully. As she slumped there trying to catch a breath, she turned weary eyes on her surroundings, taking in the rows of ranch-style houses and bare lawns.
Though a sophisticated, modern school in and of itself, Bakersfield College sat in the midst of a decidedly more modest suburbia. The surrounding neighborhoods contained mostly one-story residential homes scattered among patches of forest and the occasional cornfield, reduced to golden brown stubble now that fall's first chill had begun to chase summer's old growth back into the ground again. Allie picked up a slow pace along these side streets, mind empty, for the sound of her feet thudding against the ground had succeeded in numbing her insides as much as the brisk October air had numbed her outsides. The longer she walked, the more she fell into a kind of stupor as she dragged on through the neighborhood. Only after she heard the angry bellow of a car horn did she realize that she had been wandering about in the middle of the street.
Shaken, Allie slunk over to the left and let the irritated station wagon chug past, trying to string together her unraveled thoughts. Her short-term memory seemed tangled and convoluted. What had upset her back there? A hallway? Some kind of door? She had run away from home…no, that was all wrong. She had left school…Bakersfield. She didn't have a home anymore.
A slow panic once more tightened her chest. I think I'm losing it. Oh God, I have to clear my head.
A little town sat about twenty minutes outside of the college, and though it contained little else besides a Superfresh grocery, the local ten-year-old liquor store, and a strip mall, that same shopping center had a small steakhouse with a lounge where she might be able to sit and think. It was the closest available restaurant besides Scoot's, and since the café sat directly on the edge of campus, Allie had no desire to go there. The girl continued on up the road looking for street signs when a voice startled her.
"Yo, Allie!"
She whirled her head around and caught sight of a tall freshman boy that attended philosophy class with her on Mondays. She struggled for the name, studying his curly blonde hair, stocky build, and green eyes. Dave.
Dave stood in front of a white ranch house with grey shutters. Opening the back door to an old Toyota, one of many cars that crowded the small driveway, he pulled out a heavy paper grocery bag. "What're you doing down this way?"
Allie, still dazed, didn't respond for awhile, searching for a logical answer to his question. She had chatted with Dave often enough in the minutes before Professor Chaplan came to class in the afternoons, and she remembered him boasting about how he had recently moved out of the dorms to live with his brother, a senior who rented a small neighborhood home with three other upperclassmen. As she got over the shock of running into another student on her isolated walk, Allie slowly realized that this must be the place.
"Hey kid, you alright?" the boy asked, waving a hand front of the girl's face. "You seem kinda spaced."
"Oh, yeah…sorry," Allie muttered, snapping back to attention. "I, uh…I skipped classes today. I didn't feel like going, so I took a walk instead."
Her classmate shrugged nonchalantly. "I'm not going to mine either. My brother's having a couple of people over and we're having drinks. Wanna come inside?"
On any other occasion, Allie would have been disdainful over the idea of anyone drinking in the middle of the day, but in her current state of mind the thought didn't even register. She dawdled for a moment, peering up the road. Town suddenly seemed miles away. "Sure," she finally mumbled.
Dave led the way up to a worn screen door, holding it out for her as she tentatively stepped over the threshold. The air inside smelled heavily of stale cigarette smoke and something greener as well. Allie resisted the urge to wrinkle her nose as they entered a crowded living room where five boys and a lanky girl with brightly died red hair butted up against one another on a long couch. Although not exactly dingy, the furniture in the room had definitely aged some time ago. The sofa sagged, and the center coffee table, which currently housed multiple liquor bottles, bore several scratches on its surface.
"Allie, this is Chip, Mark, Branson, Abe, Amber, and my brother Brad," Dave said, pointing to each person in such rapid succession that Allie had a difficult time keeping up. "This here's Allie, you guys. She's in some of my classes and she's ditching today too, so I invited her in here in case she wanted to de-stress."
"Yeah right. You weren't thinking of her. You just wanted to bring more chicks in here. That's all you boys think about," Amber, the redhead, scoffed, taking a long drag on what looked like a flattened cigarette. Allie realized that it was a joint when an herbal scent clouded the room as the girl exhaled. As if in agreement with Amber's statement, a brawny boy with ripped sleeves, either Chip or Abe, Allie couldn't figure out which, licked his lips suggestively.
"You want a hit?" Amber grudgingly asked, extending the joint towards the newcomer. The teenager shook her head and tentatively perched on the edge of the couch where one of the boys had offered his seat. Dave meanwhile headed over to the coffee table and tilted back a bottle of pure vodka into a blue plastic cup. "You at least want a drink, dontcha?" he asked, extending it towards Allie.
The girl hesitated. She had a strong distaste for alcohol because she knew that it could have disastrous power. She had seen how the substance could blur reality and weaken the senses, leaving the drinker filled with painful longing after its effects wore off. But she also instinctively understood alcohol's appeal. Even just one drink could allow a person to float for a short time, free and uninhibited from everything that added weight. It was precisely because Allie felt so heavy that she finally accepted the cup and chugged down its contents in one long gulp.
Because she had only ever had a few sips of wine or the occasional beer, the straight vodka burned the girl's throat like acid. She struggled not to cry out, but once she had managed to swallow the searing liquid, she could already feel her head begin to swim pleasantly. Dave poured her another cup, and several sips later her muscles grew lax. Allie chugged again until she felt boneless, melting back against the foamy couch cushions, her thighs pressing into those of the unidentifiable boy next to her.
She had remained virtually silent since entering the unfamiliar house, but that mattered little because alcohol had made the others light-headed and amiable enough not to notice. Throwing back shots and passing the joint down the line, the boys hooted to one another and made crude comments about which girls in their classes had the biggest breasts, while Amber and presumably her boyfriend made out at the other end of the couch, arms, legs, and lips bumping together in a sloppy, drunken fashion. Allie watched it all through bleary eyes until she too eventually became reckless, the liquor destroying her inhibitions so that she threw her head back and laughed at jokes that weren't funny, blabbed nonsense at Dave, sloshed vodka onto her jeans. She barely even noticed when the lip-licking boy from earlier managed to scoot his way over and wrap an arm around her. Still she drank, basking in her careless anonymity with these relative strangers, letting the alcohol drown out everything else.
She was too far gone when she felt the hands pull her forward and the rough lips begin to hungrily suck at her own. She had become a limp ragdoll, powerless once more as his body advanced upon her and the room faded away.