Chapter 1: Reaching the Milestone

A muffled thump was the first thing he woke up to that morning. Then came another and another when he wasn’t stirred from his rest. By the time the fourth or fifth one had caught him, Desmond had rolled over and began to blink in the morning light.

His reaction was too slow to the beating he had taken, because the last hit had come directly to the side of his head. The attack from his extra pillow was stopped though with the burst of laughter that followed it. It left him dazed and a little confused.

The young man moved a hand up to wipe some of the sleep from his eyes. It was almost like he hadn’t just been pelted with a pillow over and over again until he had been stirred from his sleep. He had no idea what time it was or how long he had been asleep for.

Honestly, he wasn’t even sure what day of the week it was. The reason behind this was littered around his room. Half drank bottles sat by his bedside and a few more empty ones had been tossed carelessly aside. The wake up after a night of drinking had always been rough or so he had been told. Now he had experienced it first hand since it took him longer than usual to come back to his senses after being woken up.

It didn’t come until the roar of laughter from the other individual that had barged into his room stopped. Desmond turned his head over in the direction of his friend and now that he was more aware, gave him a dark look. While he didn’t know how long he had been asleep for, he didn’t care about being woken up the way he had, either.

There were a million other ways he could have thought to wake a friend up after a long night and assaulting them was not one of them. If it wasn’t for the fact that the other young man that stood in his doorway was a long time friend of his, he might have considered pushing them out of his room and slamming the door in their face.

Instead, Desmond released an aggravated sigh and turned his attention away from the stupid grin on his friend’s face. It was still too soon for him to want to know what it was Ryan was grinning about.

The sleepy boy moved slowly to climb out of his bed, deliberately taking his time. Once he had gotten to his feet, he stalled for time further by stretching his arms wide. From the corner of his eye, he could see that his friend’s grin had fallen from his features and instead he seemed to be watching him impatiently.

Desmond knew he was waiting to be acknowledged, but again he had decided to purposely take his time in doing that. How long would it take before the other boy would lose his patience and just come out with whatever it was he had come in to disturb him for?

He figured he would find out sooner or later, if he proved to take too much time in readying himself for the day. After the stretch, Desmond would need a fresh change of clothes. Sure, he probably should have showered after a night of drinking but something told him that that would be pushing the patience of his friend a little too much.

So, instead he settled with just shedding off the loose, cotton t-shirt that he had allegedly passed out in the night before. It was given a careless toss to the side while he went to fish for a fresh one from the dresser on the other side of his room.

“Dude, did you get a new tat?” Came the voice of his friend.

Desmond turned to him from where he stood in front of his dresser. He was holding a dark t-shirt in his hands. “What do you mean?” he asked.

His friend gestured to him. “You got a sick looking design on your shoulder, man. That wasn’t there a few weeks ago.”

At Ryan’s words, Desmond turned his head so he could catch a better view of his shoulder. Sure enough, there was a dark marking painted across his skin. It reminded him of one of those band or tribal tattoos that were popular. Not something he would have chosen for himself, personally, though.

He moved a hand up to smooth it across the skin that the marking inked. There were no signs of scabbing or soreness to it all, almost as though it had been there for months. The design looked more like a letter of some sort from a language he couldn’t identify and its size was about the size of his palm.

If this had been a tattoo he had gotten, even while he had been drunk, surely he would have remembered it. Desmond dropped his hand to his side and his brows furrowed while he took a look around his room.

He couldn’t have drunk that much to completely black out getting such a tattoo, could he? He didn’t even know what it meant or if it meant anything at all. It was even more strange that there didn’t seem to be any signs of healing on it.

Chalking it up to probably a night he had drank away, he responded to his friend with a shrug before he threw his shirt over his head. He didn’t want to think too much about it because he knew there was no sense in trying to force a memory forward that wasn’t there. At least the sleeve of his shirt covered most of it, so he wouldn’t have to think too much about it during the day.

“Alright, Ryan, what’s the deal with you barging in here to wake me up?” Desmond asked. He decided to drop the topic of the mysterious tattoo for now and had instead shifted to pull his jeans back on.

“Did you forget already? Tonight is the party for your twenty-first! You’ll be able to drink…you know, legally,” Ryan responded.

A groan left Desmond and he moved a hand up to run it through his messy, raven locks. “Didn’t we do enough drinking last night?”

“Yeah, but that was a you-and-me celebration. This party is for everyone! Come on, dude. We have a lot to do before tonight,” Ryan beckoned to him and then disappeared from his doorway before he could protest any further.

Right. He supposed that was the normal ritual for anyone who was supposed to be coming of age, so to speak. The thing was, ever since he had left his parents’ house when he was eighteen, he had been dabbling in drinking and partying.

None of it was legal of course, just like the ID he had been using to acquire such things. All of that was about to change though and to be honest, he wasn’t as excited for it to come as Ryan seemed to be.

It was just another birthday for him. Another day of the year. The time for celebrating birthdays had stopped in his family long ago whenever he had been on the brink of puberty. It was his guess that being fifteen was old enough for his parents to decide that it wasn’t important anymore to celebrate the day that their son had been born.

Probably nothing that should be so surprising, given his background and the relationship Desmond held with his parents being rocky at best. He would be lucky if he had a ‘Happy Birthday’ message from either of them.

No, they probably wouldn’t remember they needed to at least wish him a happy birthday until a day or two after the fact. That’s how it had been for the last few years. So, was he excited to be going out and doing the same exact thing he did almost every weekend? No, not really, but for his friends’ sake, he would go ahead and try to act like he was excited for it.

Desmond grew up in a broken home. His parents struggled both to make ends meet and to make their relationship work. He had been one of those attempts at trying to make things better between the two of them. In the end, it hadn’t worked out for his parents.

Naturally, Desmond tried to spend as much time away from his house as he could. He had tried to move out to his father, but had found that there were too many conditions to his moving in with him to deal with.

Honestly, he had always felt it was just a way for his step-mother to keep him at arm’s length. With nowhere else to call home and no relatives willing to step in and help him out, he had made sure to move out of his mother’s house shortly after he had turned eighteen.

His go-to roommate of choice had been his best friend since he was a kid and probably the only person he felt that he could depend on, Ryan.

Wherever and whenever his parents had disappointed him, Desmond could always count on Ryan to be there for support. He was always coming to Desmond’s rescue when things would get rough and he could always count on him to pick up the slack on celebrations.

He should have known that this milestone of a birthday would be no different. While his parents might be too busy in their own worlds to remember right away the son that they had tried to raise, his best friend was ensuring that he would have the night of his life.

Desmond turned to follow after Ryan, intending to ready himself for whatever it was he had planned but something had him pausing in the doorway. For just a moment, he could have sworn that there was an elongated shadow standing beside him along the wall. That couldn’t be right though. There was nothing else in the room with him.

He turned to take a look around his empty bedroom, as though he was trying to find the source of the shadow. When he looked back to find it again though, the shadow had disappeared and left his own standing there alone. It left him feeling nothing more than a little creeped out, but he chalked it up to his having just woken up and rushed out of the room. If there had been something really there, he honestly didn’t want to think about it.

The day had already started out stranger than usual. First with the appearance of a tattoo that he didn’t remember getting and now a glimpse of a creepy shadow that was gone in the next moment. Desmond just hoped that the rest of the night would make up for how off the morning had proved to be so far.