Volition (6 page)

When the door opens, it’s nothing like what I expected. Instead of people dancing to loud beats, they’re swaying and standing, coupled-off in corners. The lighting is dim, and I smell incense.

So, it’s
this
kind of party. I half expect to see James Franco doing a cheesy poetry reading while sitting on a chakra rug.

Are chakra rugs a thing?

Someone is offering me a drink, and I decline. Old Tate would have downed it in a second, but I’m not sure that I want to be completely disarmed here. On that plane, yes. Here, not so much. I want to have my wits about me.

Catherine accepts the drink, and I wonder if this is
The Twilight Zone
.

I’m immediately startled when someone touches my hand. I jump back, knocking Catherine’s drink and spilling it all over her.

I can tell I’ve startled her, but she simply wipes it up and walks off.

“McKenna comma Tate.”

I feel his voice more than I hear it, and I have to take a deep breath.

“Rockefeller comma Hayden.”

I look him up and down, and when I look up, I really do have to look up. He’s much taller than me even though I’m in Catherine’s heels.

“Are you stalking me?” A deep voice over my shoulder startles me.

I gasp, and my hand flies to my heart in a gesture that means,
You can take a girl out of the South, but not the South out of the girl
. I immediately resent myself for it and shove my hand down to my side as if to chastise it.

“Am
I
stalking
you
?” I ask incredulously.

His eyes are much too green to be real. They remind me of the marble statues I learned about in my Roman Art class. Sculptors would put green stones where the eyes should be to make them look more lifelike.

He runs a finger up and down my arm like it’s something he does every day.

I feel my stomach tighten, and I’m not sure what to do. His presence is entirely disarming.

“Meet me,” he says, leaning in closer to my ear so that only I can hear his words.

“Where?” I say breathlessly, falling under his spell.

No, not falling. I’ve fallen. I hate myself.

“Your favorite place in New York.”

I pull back. “You know where that is?”

He nods.

I know he doesn’t know where that is, so I play along. “When?”

“A week from now. Sunset.”

He leans in closer and kisses my forehead, and my eyes close automatically.

My body won’t stop betraying me against my will.

I open my eyes, and he’s gone. Instead, he’s replaced by Catherine, who is clearly enjoying her bubbly.

“McKenna comma Tate,” she says, looking at the door. “I’m going to call you that from now on.”

Then

MY FIRST PROBLEM of the evening was that I couldn’t find Casper.

I couldn’t find Catherine either, so I went to Casper and Colin’s room, hoping to find one or both of them there. I didn’t bother to knock because they always kept the door cracked open.

I walked in and found Colin sitting on the couch in their living room in the dark. That was the thing about Colin and Casper’s room. It wasn’t just a room. It was an entire suite. They each had a bedroom off their main living area.

“Why are you sitting there in the dark, Colin?”

He just stared straight ahead. I spotted some cookies on the counter, so I took two out of the bag and plopped down next to him.

“What the fuck are these? They taste weird,” I told him.

He slowly turned his head and smiled at me.

“What?”

He was creeping me out.

“Am I a dog, Tate?”

I shook my head slowly and squinted my eyes at him. “What is wrong with you?”

He turned his head back, so he wasn’t looking at me anymore. “I’m sorry you ate those.”

He wasn’t very sorry. In fact, he was smiling mischievously like a child does when it has done something wrong but won’t tell you what it is.

I smacked his arm. “What’s in them? What did I just eat?”

He puts his face in his hands and leans back. “Peyote.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“What’s peyote, Colin?”

“You’re not saying it right. It rhymes with
coyote
.”

“I don’t really care what it rhymes with. I want to know what it is! Should I be trying to throw up right now?”

He shakes his head. “It’s kind of fun.”

“Fuck.”

Catherine walked into the room while Colin and I were sitting on the couch, staring at the ceiling. I was trying to figure out how many aliens had walked on this ceiling before. I couldn’t count their footprints because they just kept erasing them while I was counting. I needed to get up there to investigate because they were too far away. I didn’t know how to get to the ceiling though. It was too high. The aliens had done this on purpose. They didn’t want me up there.

“What are you guys doing?” Catherine asked us, clearly confused as to why we were sitting in the dark, staring at the ceiling in silence.

“It’s so beautiful, Catherine.”

“What’s so beautiful?” she asked nonchalantly. “Oh, cookies!”

I heard the bag unsnap and immediately shot up.

“No!” Colin and I both shouted at the same time.

“Don’t eat those,” I said a little more quietly.

“Why not? What did you guys do?” She was shouting now.

I didn’t like the shouting, and neither did Colin. He was slowly sinking into the couch cushions as if he could shield himself from the outside world.

“Colin,” I suggested seriously, “maybe you can become a cushion.”

He looked at me like I was a genius.

“I think I can. Here—wait a second.” He burrowed into the couch and sat there for a moment. “Can you still see me?”

“Yeah,” I said, going back to the aliens on the ceiling.

He sighed sadly. I could tell he really wanted to be a couch cushion, so I felt kind of bad for him.

“What did you guys eat?” Catherine was standing over us now, dangling the bag over our heads like some kind of piñata.

I smacked it just to watch it swing, but then I got scared that I could get trapped inside the bag. Tiny me would never survive inside. There was only so much air.

Colin was now sitting with his knees tucked up into his body. “We ate peyote, Catherine.” He started rocking.

“Where on earth did you get peyote?”

“Casper.”

“Where’s Casper?”

“We don’t know.”

“Casper!” I shouted loudly. I wanted my boyfriend, and I was bored. These stupid aliens were taunting me. “Go away,” I said to them.

She groaned and started throwing the cookies down the garbage disposal one at a time.

Colin and I both shuddered at the grinding sound when she flipped it on after each cookie, and I wondered if I could get sucked down the sink, too.

Then, the laughter set in. Colin started laughing, and even though I wasn’t seeing the same thing he was seeing, I couldn’t help but laugh, too. There was water pouring out of Colin’s eyes, and I couldn’t tell whether he was crying or laughing, but I just kept on going along with him.

“I hate you both,” Catherine told us. “Call me when you’re sober.” Then she stomped out of the room.

Four hours later, Catherine came back. “Seriously?” She stood in front of us with her hands on her hips.

We were still laughing.

“What is laughter?” Colin asked.

“What is time?” I really wanted to know.

“That’s it,” she said. “You guys have got to quit doing this.”

I wasn’t entirely sure how she was going to make us stop because I couldn’t stop laughing. It was just so funny. Everything was so funny, and the little aliens were tickling me, so there was no way I was going to be able to stop.

What we could never have seen coming was that Catherine brought half the boys from the rugby team into the room, and each of them were carrying large buckets of water—not just water, but freezing, ice-cold, chill-you-to-the-bone water.

They dragged us outside onto the balcony where they repeatedly tried to drown us in the water—or so it seemed. It was kind of like being in an arctic waterfall, and I couldn’t breathe.

I felt slightly less insane, but my heart was beating way too fast, and I started to cry.

Colin looked numb.

“Great,” Catherine said, dismissing the rugby players. “Just great. Now, you’re crying. You two are like children who don’t play well together. Next, Colin’s going to tell you to stick your finger into an electric socket.”

I burst out laughing while I was crying because Colin tried to do that last week.

But mostly, I was just crying. I was crying really hard.

“God, where is Casper? I’m going to kill him.”

Next, Colin started laughing. “Don’t kill him. Cath. Then, he’ll just turn into a ghost and haunt us.”

He made the stereotypical ghost noise, and I snorted because I was laughing, and there was water in my nose.

“Do you think he’ll be a
friendly
ghost?” I couldn’t help myself.

Catherine didn’t find it funny. Colin smirked and stared at me.

There was water everywhere. I was like SpongeBob SquarePants.

I started singing the theme song, and Colin joined in.

I could tell Catherine hated us, but she was just being a worrywart.

She couldn’t find Casper, and he never answered his cell phone, so she shoved the two couches in their living room together to make a bed.

First, she put me in the shower, so I could warm up and change into new clothes.

I was still singing SpongeBob, and Colin was doing the response phrases from outside the door.

When it was his turn, I was getting tired, so I went to lie down on our makeshift bed that really looked more like a bird’s nest to me. I wanted to be a bird.

I snuggled up in the blankets and waited. Catherine helped Colin get dressed, and she put him in the bed with me before climbing in herself.

“You guys suck,” she told us.

I knew she was actually angry with us and wasn’t just playing around.

“But we love, love,
love
you,” I told her, snuggling into her hair.

“I know,” she said as she patted my head. “I love you, too.”