I nearly screamed as I jumped awake, startled. Drool was falling down my lip, my eyes were sleepy. Demi had hit me on the head to wake me up, after I’d nodded off on her bedroom floor one warm April afternoon.

“Man, you sleep too much,” she told me, lighting a cigarette. She offered me one, I thanked her. Somewhere along the line, I’d started smoking.

“Yeah, I know.” I yawned, then exhaled clouds of smoke in my next breath.

“Wanna go drinking with Van and Tyler later?” She asked, leaning her head against the blue wallpapered wall.

“Maybe,” I replied, running a hand through my greasy hair. “Probably.”

“Is Wyatt gonna come over here soon? Man, I wanna meet this guy…” She gave a halfhearted laugh, her face permanently scowling.

“Nah… He’s really busy, workin’ and all.”

“Must be crazy being a musician… Must be pretty crazy.” She stared at the dark ceiling, smoking, and then added, “He’s making an album?”

I nodded, saying, “Yeah.”

We ended up nodding out until the benzos wore off, and Demi called Van. He told us to meet him at the park, so, as the sun began to set, we began to walk downtown to Pleasant Grove Community Park, where Van and Tyler sat on a bench with bottles of would-be Sprite.

Tyler passed the plastic soda bottle to me as I sat down on the bench, lighting a cigarette quietly, while Van talked about someone doing something or other, the usual gossip. I took a large swig from the Sprite bottle, which held a lovely combination of bubbly soda and nail-polish tasting alcohol.

As it got darker, we got drunker, louder, more alive.

The four of us began stumbling down the streets, wobbling and drunk, at nearly eleven at night. We stopped by a bar, which refused us service since we looked like alcoholic toddlers, and the bartender threatened to call the police as we bolted like a herd of wild stallions out of the bar, giggling manically and in unison.

A cop car rolled past, too slowly, the driver, a mustache’d white guy, stared at us with knit eyebrows. I desperately wanted to flip him off, but didn’t, because, even though I was drunk, I was smarter than that. 

And then- bam! We were clambering over a barbed wire fence in a field just outside of town, and Van had a wildly screeching hen under his arm.

I fell over, Demi grabbed my arm, nearly pulling it out of its socket as she pulled me to my feet. I couldn’t feel anything, and my legs didn’t exist. Floating.

“The fuck’s a chicken doin’ here?” Tyler panted as we stood on the edge of the highway, exhausted from sprinting across that field. “Shit- what?”

“Fuckin’ dumbass!” Van whacked him on the side of the head. “We’s just got ourselves a chicken, man!”

“We stole a bird?”

“Yeah!” Demi and I burst into insane laughter together, our arms holding each other upright.

“Fuck!” Van suddenly screeched, as the bird pecked frantically at his bare arms. “Fuckin’ dumb bird! Fuck you!”

“Was your idea to steal a bird, yeah?” Demi commented, glowering at the hen.

“I dunno.” Van tossed the poor, disoriented hen onto the highway, where it flapped to its feet and promptly got hit by a semitruck, whose driver didn’t notice us nor the chicken.

The four of us stared at the bloody, feather spot the hen had just been, then started walking back into town, shivering in the midnight chill.

It was about one in the morning when we got to Demi’s house, where we sat together on the couch, smoking cigarettes and discussing nonsense drunkly.

“Demi, got any Valium? Or Ativan? Or anything?” I asked anxiously, kicking my feet like a child on a swingset.

“You fuckin’ fiend! Yeah, there’s Valium in the bathroom… It’s my ma’s, though, don’t take a lot, please…”

“Thank you, thanks so much.” I scurried to the bathroom, and groped for the lightswitch in the dark. After too many wrong tries, I got it and blinding light flooded the small bathroom. I took a few of those damn blue pills and lurched back into Demi’s living room.

When I sat back down, Demi was sitting there, chugging from a bottle of cough syrup, and then she passed it to Van, who tossed aside the empty bottle into a pile of stinking trash bags that sat dismally in the corner.

Cartoons numbed our minds from the bright TV screen, and I quickly dozed off for a minute, until Demi pinched me and whispered, “Wake the fuck up.”

“Oh, God, where am I…” I looked around Demi’s dark living room, disoriented, dizzy. “Fuck, what’s the time?”

“I don’t fuckin’ know.”

“I’m gonna head home,” I muttered, weary. I had mystery bruises all over my knees from doing something and the Valium flooded my system, pleading sleep.

I walked home alone, in the dark, while I was tipsy and high, but lucky for me, Pleasant Grove had a very low crime rate and I staggered inside unscathed.

I guess my parents had gone to bed earlier, not bothering to wait up anxiously, knowing me. I couldn’t even be bothered to brush my teeth, and crashed into my bed, fully clothed. Instantly, everything went dark.