The Morning After

There's mud on my face and my neck is a bit sore and I seem to have forgotten where I fall asleep. But, I fall asleep.

I sit up, warm bodies hugging my legs. I slip out from under Billie and the girl, stepping into my boots in the dim of the dawn breaking. The leather shimmers gold beneath the dawn.

Billie's dead. I look at her, hair black like ink against the treehouse floor, face calm and sweet. Her naked body flushed and tiny, lumpy and perfect. Her chest, bare and supple, rising and falling.

I touch her cheek, feeling the realness of her beneath my bruised fingertips. I take off my hoody, shivering a bit in the coolness of the morning, and cover her body the best I can.

While I walk home, I'm thinking too much about Billie's chest and her lips and the boy at the party and my fingers that got burnt. I tuck my raw hands into my pockets. Pretending. Always pretending that things went better than they did.

Dad's in the kitchen, dressed in pajamas, sipping black tea. There's a pot boiling over on the stove. But, he doesn't seem to notice. He's vacant. Somewhere far away.

I remove the pot from the heat, washing my hands in the kitchen sink then sitting down beside him, tea burning hot through the cup in my hands.

"I'm sorry," I say quietly, awakening a mist of herbal tea.

Then we just sit there, staring vacantly into the brown of our cups, thinking too much about last night. My face ripples in the blackness of my tea. Only, it's not my face. It's the face of a stupid kid who had no reason to be at that party last night.

I imagine myself kissing Shay instead, disappearing into the forest with a boy that would belong only to me. A boy who would ask if he could kiss me. A boy who would ask.