My Love, My Drug, My Release

Chapter 7: Anti-Me

Does anyone else find it funny that this is the "7th" even though it's the 11th actual chapter? I was writing the chapter number and then thought, wait, I've written more chapters than that, and it's because I decided that flashback chapters wouldn't count as numbered chapters. Anyway, enjoy!

Linda said I could stay home from school to get ready for my party, which, in all honesty, was totally ridiculous, but I accepted her generous offer anyway and took the opportunity to sleep in till eleven. I tried to stay in bed longer, but I started to physically itch from just lying there without sleeping.

So I crawled out of my bedding like a troll leaving its cave and went to the shower, dragging a bar of soap across my skin as the hot water scalded me raw. At first, it hurt so bad, I had trouble breathing, but I resisted turning on the cold water until, finally, I became numb to it. After that, I brushed teeth right into my gums until I was spitting up blood. That was my fault; I'd been skipping brushing most nights in favor of passing out.

Back in my bedroom, I sat on my bed wrapped in a towel, staring at the baseboards of the room. Siobhan would always complain about the baseboards being dusty, so Jack and I would take damp rags, bend ourselves completely over, and run around Linda's New York apartment, cleaning the white molding above the shag carpet.

That was what was wrong with this birthday: Jackson wasn't here.

"Hey, Lo, can I come in?" It was Linda, sounding surprisingly calm and collected considering how frantically she'd been planning for this party.

"Yeah, sure."

She came in, and, upon noticing that I hadn't gotten dressed yet, gave me a sympathetic frown. "Having trouble picking something out?"

I nodded because it was simpler than trying to explain what I was actually having trouble with.

My stepmom walked over to the closet and pushed my clothes back and forth in a way that was surely method for her but looked like madness to me. "We should do something short, you have legs that demand to be seen, I don't care what that retarded school thinks." She pulled a few dresses on hangers off the closet rod and tossed them next to me on the bed. "I think it's between these three."

There was a blue sparkly dress, a short red number, and a black shift I knew she only put there to make me feel comfortable. As if that were possible.

"There are going to be some really cool cats at this party, and I think you'd be better go with this one. But of course, it's up to you."

It's up to me. If I were in anything close to my normal self, I'd have said 'screw all this' and put on some jeans and a t-shirt. If Jack were here with me, he would have deemed this party 'phony as hell' and we'd have snuck out the side door to go to some bullshit tourist-y place like Piccadilly Circus or maybe the Garrick or just sneak into a pub. But that wasn't what this birthday was. This birthday was the opposite of everything I wanted. So I decided, in that moment, naked save for a beige towel, that I would be the exact opposite of me.

"People are here, you should come down now," Linda told me at about eight pm. I'd been delaying joining the party by accepting my stepmoms excuse that I should make a grand entrance, and now it was time to pay the piper.

I came down the stairs, slower than I would have preferred (anti-me wears heels), so, unfortunately, it looked liked I was trying to make a dramatic entrance, prompting people to clap for me. But anti-me loves attention, so, instead of running back to my room like I wanted to, I just walked to the dining room and sat down between Linda and Paul, the latter at the head of the table, eyebrows up by his hairline at my outfit.

Also at the table were Eric Clapton, another man I didn't know, two model friends of Linda's I remembered from when they'd come over to keep her company when she couldn't leave the house, and Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg. I had to keep myself from staring at the Rolling Stone, who was sitting right across from me.

"So you don't think-"

"No," Paul said to the man I didn't know the name of, though he looked a little familiar.

"I'm just saying, if you thought about it for a little while-"

"Not at the dinner table, Denny," Linda murmured to the man next to her. This was the first time I realized how lilting her voice had become; for a few words, she sounded almost English. "We can talk about it later."

"Why don't we talk about you?" 

My head snapped up from the meatless lasagna I'd rather violently vomit than consume to see Keith Richards, leaning back in his chair with longer hair than I recalled him having and fingers clustered with rings, staring straight at me.

"What?" I said stupidly.

"Well, you're the birthday girl, aren't you?"he said, smiling. "How old are you turning?"

"Um, I'm fifteen."

"Is that true?" He looked at Linda as though waiting for her to say 'oh no, she's eighteen, she just likes to joke'. But instead he just nodded... appreciatively? Normal me wouldn't think so, but anti-me loved to believe that grown men were hitting on her. "You just look older. Don't you think she looks older than fifteen, Anita?" 

The gorgeous blonde woman, who'd been chewing on her thumbnail almost suggestively, said, "Yes, maybe few more years." She had an accent I couldn't place, and also might have been the most beautiful person I'd ever seen. I'd never met someone with an arousing face, but her cheekbones could cause more erections than my bare chest.

"What are you hoping to get for your birthday, Lorraine?" Keith asked. 

I hesitated, not sure what to say. Presents weren't something I'd considered and the idea of unwrapping potentially humiliating items in front of near strangers made me want to jump off the Empire State Building.

But I wasn't speaking, anti-me was. "I just wanna have a fun night."

In the corner of my eye, I could see Paul furrow his brow, but my gaze stayed on Keith, who grinned wide enough for me to see his chipped, crooked teeth, which, for whatever reason, I found kind of sexy, and said, "Well, I'm sure we can make that happen."

This was shorter than I was planning so I'm going to put up the next chapter probably within the next few hours. As I was writing, I decided the birthday was important enough of a scene that I wanted to break it up a bit with several chapters. Thanks to everyone who read!