"Brigitte Snaps Back"
Chapter Four
"Gone Gone Gone"
Sam remembers that once, half-drunk and on the wheel, he tried to persuade the police officer that pulled him over to let him off the hook in exchange for some grass. That particular attempted and failed deal was less speedy, less sloppy, less slippery and somehow definitely less solid than the ones he is doing now. After Brigitte's slinked off, he's left with a crowd of outstretched hands and bills folded into neat squares and triangles.
He doesn't even see their faces, he just flashes them the bags. They like it, they pay, it's done; they don't, he passes on. No contact lasts more than tenseconds. He has greetings from people all around him, he smiles and says a what's up or two, playing it smooth, whatever it takes to get his face around the party and to deal to as many people as possible.
He doesn't even count the money, he just sticks the bills into his pants' pocket and that's that. Thank you, come again.
One of them even stops him to ask him if he can break it up. Break it up into what, he doesn't have time to break it up into a pay-per-gram basis, does this asshole have any idea how much of a pain that is? No. It's what Sam has or a night without grass, which nobody opts for.
Once he sweeps the entire greenhouse, he heads back into his room. On the way, he sees Ben Coleman and Tim Manners, Jason McCardy's asshole friends. One of them is dressed up like the devil, chatting up some drunk girl, and the other, dressed up like a cow, is sipping on his beer.
Sam extends his ten-second contact and has them roll him a joint in exchange for a nickelbag. Tells them that all the fake blood crusted on his skin, now that he didn't anticipate, so he doesn't want that shit getting in the weed.
Once he has the joint, he rushes to his room. Nobody's in there, the sheets don't look disturbed, which means nobody's discovered the room yet. Thank fuck.
Sam closes the door and locks it twice. He needs this, he needs it.
(nothing takes the edge off like a good toke.)
He takes a puff. Another. Ahhh.
Now, work to do.
Brigitte navigates the sea of bodies, moving from one gap in the pulsating crowd to the next, her eyes searching the mess of different faces to see one that belongs to her mother. She pushes and prods and elbows, is pushed and prodded and elbowed along the way. She systematically clears the clusters from one end of the greenhouse to the next. Soon, the only thing left is to go outside.
Brigitte goes to the driveway. There are a few people there, including two couples attached at various places, but...
There.
Her mother's SUV is still there. Brigitte rushes to it and looks inside. She's not there.
(gone gone gone)
Brigitte feels the entire day weigh down on her shoulders. To quote Henry, she doesn't know where she's gone wrong, or what she's done, but this is it.
(you should be out there in the streets, not here)
Brigitte goes back inside.
Brigitte enters the room full of the smell of weed smoke and finds Sam at his work bench, holding a very small steel pan over a candle. He doesn't notice her. She closes the door behind her and locks it. The sound of the lock alerts him. He looks up from the cook-up.
"Hey. Find her?"
"No. She's gone somewhere. I don't know where."
Sam doesn't say anything.
"...have you been smoking?" she asks.
"Thought that'd be obvious."
"Can I have some..?"
Sam raises an eyebrow.
"Sure, if you want. I figured you should be the sober one."
"What was wrong with your sobriety?"
"Couldn't cope that way."
"Is there enough monkshood?"
"For both of us? Yeah, I'd say there is."
Silence.
"Why did you do that?" she asks, looking away.
"Do what?"
"Kiss me."
"To make it believable."
(just go for the show)
Silence.
"Look, Brigitte, this isn't grade school - just holding hands isn't anything. I had to give them something, something to push aside any doubt anyone might have had."
"Great. You're the cherry hound and I'm... the cherry, I suppose."
"The only way it works."
(I do not think of you that way)
Brigitte says nothing.
"Besides, we can be here all night and nobody would come to look for us. Far as they're concerned, we're fucking right about now."
He stops abruptly, as if just figuring out that he has actually said what he heard himself say.
(you pervert, she's fifteen!)
"Sorry." He says, clearing his throat, "The weed and the blood loss talking."
Brigitte rolls her eyes.
"How do we do this?" she asks.
"I do you..." Sam clears his throat again, "Then you do me."
"Whatever."
"Lie down. It's about ready."
As Sam prepares the kit, Brigitte lies down on his cot. It carries his scent, Brigitte can't help but notice. Cigarettes, lye whiskey, something like coconut soap and tired nights. Brigitte almost smiles as she ties the double-helix shoelaces around her arm and pumps her fist. Sam hits where the vein is a couple of times.
The dim, yellow light hanging from the ceiling brings a sickening luminosity to the room. It reflects off the surface of the gleaming needle, sharp and ready.
Cold metal, alien and painful, penetrates pale skin.
Red, seeming black, mixes with the thick purple.
Inject.
Brigitte feels the monkshood spread from her arm throughout her body, branching across the network of veins embedded into her. It brings pain, pain from her heart to the tips of her fingers and toes, pain that makes her twist around, kept in place only by Sam's hands.
A lapse of consciousness. A blank in her perception.
And, just like that, leaving behind an almost unnoticeable after-ache, it ends. She breathes in, exhales and opens her eyes.
There he is. The light above is obscured by his head, and it looks like a halo.
"How do you feel?" he asks.
She smiles.
"Wicked."