𝐖𝐎𝐕𝐄𝐍. ˢᵗᵉᵛᵉ ʰᵃʳʳⁱⁿᵍᵗᵒⁿ ¹

005

005. 𝘁𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝘀𝗵𝗲𝗲𝘁-𝗳𝗮𝗰𝗲𝗱 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝗮𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗲.

        𝐋𝐎𝐑𝐈 𝐊𝐍𝐄𝐖 𝐄𝐗𝐀𝐂𝐓𝐋𝐘 𝐖𝐇𝐀𝐓 she was getting herself into when she parked her mother's jet-black BMW on the side of the road, down the street from the raging Halloween party. Beside her, in the leather passenger seat of the car, sat the crumpled neon flyer, the words "SHEET-FACED" engraved in bold at the top. The night was young, the stars were going to be shining soon, and Lori would be inside.

She liked Halloween. As much as you could like a Holiday that, now in her time, transformed into who could chug the most beer from a keg whilst wearing a shitty wig and some face makeup that faded with the alcohol.

So there really was no reasoning behind why she was parked outside of Tina Mitchell's house, at eleven o'clock, other than her mom being at Claudia's and the car being left behind (something about having drinks while the kids are out?). It was the perfect opportunity to sneak out— and Lori was beginning to think that Claudia's coaxing about going to the party was convincing her mother, which would be why sneaking was so easy. If not done purposely, Maureen should've known that leaving her car behind on Halloween was the perfect setup for a teenager like her daughter. With or without the untold permission of her mom, Lori didn't care and took the car anyway.

The moving truck had officially emptied all of their original furniture into their new house the night before, but Lori didn't have the energy to organize her room just yet. One— because she was busy finding her last-minute Halloween costume all evening. And two— it kind of stung seeing her beloved furniture and posters in a much different, much duller room, than back home. She was, maybe, putting it off for a night, resulting in still sleeping on the mattress on the floor. But none of that mattered at the moment, because she was on the brink of Tina's sheet-face party.

She was on the brink of getting absolutely, entirely, not sheet-faced.

Now, at eleven at night, she pulled the key out of ignition.

Her jet-black dagget boots stepped hard onto the concrete, and she shut the door with a thud behind her. Her fingers gripped around the lapels of the hot pink blazer she was wearing, pulling them down a bit to ease the weight on her shoulders and letting air in. There was a thick silver chain on her neck, hiding behind a blue bandana-kerchief tied loosely around her throat. Briefly, she adjusted the plain t-shirt tucked into her black, polyester flat-front pants. She had her headphones pressed to her ears and her Walkman in the pocket of the blazer, music spilling out from them. A bag was on her shoulders.

Underneath her own music, she could already hear the shouts, and the party music, and the cheering. She didn't close her eyes in a tight, dreading blink like she would at school or towards her mom, she kept them sharply pinned forward at the house's front lawn, not moving them for a second as she neared. She wasn't going to look at the people who looked at her, or the people who paused to watch her walk by, or the small sum of (probably the only not drunk) teenagers that were going to whisper to their friends about something meaningless like her costume, her hair, or her general presence. She didn't have the greed for social statuses and where she fit into that.

By the time some boy in an angel costume was throwing up in one of the shrubs out front, Lori was walking, hard-stepped in her dagget boots, up the driveway. The music was blaring at this point, overpowering her headphones, spilling from the open windows of the house, and radiating from the boomboxes out in the backyard. With a small groan, as she walked on the pavement, she pulled her headphones off her ears and let them rest around her neck.