Page 3 of Intrepid

I shook my head, gently pushing the flask away. “No thanks. Not a fan of whiskey.” More like, not a fan of giving up my wits when the stupid decisions were stacking up.

But I wasn’t a total idiot, in spite of my brain telling me so. I’d heard enough stories about girls getting trashed at college parties, and guys doing things to them, posting it on social media. Much as I’d have loved to muddy the preening and pruning my father had put into his little garden of lies for the public, I didn’t need to martyr my innocence to do it.

“We’ll have to harden you up, freshie. You haven’t lived the collegiate life until you’ve had your head buried in a nasty toilet, puking your guts out.”

So much for slam poetry and coffee houses.

Simone turned the Prius into an empty grass lot behind a boarded up brick building, just off Jefferson, where dozens of vehicles had packed in together.

Stepping out of the car, I stared up at the ominous building that stood about ten stories high, reaching toward the moon above it. Something about it seemed sad. Lonely. Violated by decades of break-ins and vandalism, evident in the broken glass and gray blotches of chipped brick. Graffiti tattooed onto its skin, meant to deter passersby, spelled ‘Stay Out’, along with various symbols that I assumed were gang related. Even so, an inexplicable draw tugged at my feet, pulling me toward it. I wanted to see more of it, more of the destruction, more of its story. Like catching the tail end of a news report about some horrific murder, I wanted to know how it died. “How do we get inside?”

Simone led the way, flicking her cigarette into one of many patches of grass over the frost-cracked dirt. At a busted-out window, she hoisted herself up and into the small frame, with the same ease as if she’d done it a hundred times before, and disappeared inside.

“C’mon, Bloomfield, you’re next.” While making her dig at the city I’d come from, Bea jerked her head for me to follow.

I gripped the bricks as Simone had done, hoisting myself upward. “Don’t call me that.” I pushed the words out on a grunt as the windowless frame slammed into my stomach with a sharp thump. I’d spent eight years amongst the elitist rich, trying to hide the fact that I didn’t belong, contrary to my father insisting I did, which made me hate the association with a place from which I’d made a point to entirely dissociate myself.

The garbage-littered dirt floor caught my fall, a plume of moldy dust kicking up as my shoes hit the ground. A streak up my black tights marked a snag alongside my knee, ending just below my ripped up shorts. “Damn it,” I muttered, sliding the red flannel shirt off my shoulders, and tying it around my waist in an effort to hide it. Decked out in a beanie cap and Chucks, I could’ve been classified as hipster punk, a style my father detested and tried to smother with J.Crew sweaters and loafers.

Clothes I’d burned alongside my uniform.

I twisted to find Bea pushing through the window, teetering on its frame like a seesaw out of balance.

How the hell they planned to get Mister Whiskey Breath through the thing was a question I didn’t stick around to watch. Maybe his breath would carry him on a steaming cloud of Jack Daniels.

The incessant thump of bass reached my ears, a steady heartbeat that echoed inside the mostly hollow core of the building. Seemed strange to hear music while my eyes wandered the surrounding annihilation. Piles of splintered wood, rusted iron pipes and exposed wires, drywall crumbling over rotted studs. The rancid stench of mold and age crinkled my nose, as I followed Simone toward the sound. For a moment, my mind attempted to construct a scene, set in the early part of the century, when the place might’ve been a stately and respectable hotel. Nearly impossible to imagine. As I took in my surroundings, I found myself mentally snapshotting the details inside the building. The art buried beneath the destruction.

A faint breath of voices up ahead grew louder as we neared, until they filled the building’s lungs in a cacophony of conversation, none of which happened to be discernible over the music.

Through a rust-hinged doorway, we reached what appeared to be a courtyard encapsulated inside the four walls of the building, where bodies shuffled and crowded around strategically-placed kegs in buckets like ants on a fallen box of Cracker Jacks. A sea of red Solo cups littered the floor. Floodlights sliced through the surrounding darkness with an uneven light. A DJ had been set up at the south end of the wall—nothing fancy, or elaborate—just a computer with some speakers. At either side of the DJ booth stood two gables with busted out windows that, once upon a time, might’ve peered down into the lower level of the building.

I could see why the party planners had chosen the place. It was unsuspecting from the outside, completely unseen from the road.

“Let’s grab a drink!” Simone’s voice only just carried over the bass thumping against my ribs, but I followed after her, mostly because I didn’t know where else to go.

The crowd closed in on me as we weaved our way toward the kegs, and as the heat of the adjacent light beat down on my face, my instincts urged me to tuck my chin into the neck of my T-shirt. A half dozen surgeries over eight years couldn’t entirely hide the destruction of one split second that changed my life forever. I’d had to train myself not to hide the shit souvenir fate had given me as a token of my crap luck.

Fifty-three degrees of early September melted into the warmth of moving bodies, as I waited for Simone and Bea to fill their cups.

The crunch of plastic hit my chest, and the cold, wet slosh of beer saturated my favorite Nirvana tee. “Drink, freshie!”

I pushed the cup away, scrambling to wick the sour beer from the front of my shirt with my sleeve. “No thanks!”

More liquid seeped into the cotton, as she adamantly held the cup to my chest, until I had no choice but to take it. Although, holding something kept me from smacking her for soaking my shirt, so there was that.

A tall guy sidled up beside Simone, and she hugged him like they knew each other well. “Dax! How goes, my brotha’ from another motha’?”

The guy sported a dark, short crop, olive skin, and a tight pinch of his brows that made him look pissed off. Blowing smoke from his vape off to the side, he squeezed her tighter, then planted a kiss at the top of her head.

“Where’s your drink?” she asked, holding up her cup to him.

The beefy-looking male pushed away her proffered drink, eyes scanning over top of me, as if looking for someone. “I’m here on business, not pleasure.”

“Ah, then, tell me about some Hedonic.” She lifted up onto her tiptoes and whispered something into his ear, to which he shook his head.

“Nah. I don’t do that. Stay away from that shit.”

I’d only heard of the newest date rape drug on a special news report, and from what little I’d gathered about its crazy side effects, I couldn’t imagine why the hell she’d want anything to do with it.