A Comedy of Errors

There was nothing to smoke, well, save cigarettes, but they were easy to get. And drinking was out; they had to wake up early, and nothing is so miserable as waking up early, being functional, with a hangover.

“Well…Mike left me his DXM,” said the blonde. She was tall, willowy, with a soft delicacy to her features that was punctuated by too-intense eyes. Her eyes flicked idly towards her companion, a slouch coming easily to her shoulders as one hand pressed to the pavement, propping her upright.

“DXM? You sure?” answered the brunette. In contrast to the girl beside her, she was of a more middle height, voluptuous, with a refined, unquestionably beautiful face. Leaning forward, onto her knees, she considered the idea, their past experiences with the drug. “Don’t you always… barf when we take it?”

Shrugging, the blonde lifted her cigarette to her lips and took a healthy drag, finishing it and flicking it into the void of parking lot, between cars. “We’ve never done straight DXM. This is pure shit. No acetometaphine attached to it. I almost hit my LD50 of acetometaphine last time, that’s why I was sick,” she promised. Despite her height, it was doubtless that she was smaller; her fragile body was certainly ill-suited to the abuses she inflicted on it regularly.

Her friend pursed her lips, pondering this. It was miserable to take care of a sick person, moreso to take care of a sick person who was not in their right mind, while you, the caretaker, were in a similar state. “Alright… I just don’t want to be sober, ya know?”

“Deal.” She stood, giving the cue that her companion should stand as well, and made her way to the door. After the usual fumbling of her keys—all matched, and she could never tell them apart—she unlocked the first door, and they made their way upstairs.

An hour later, they found themselves on the same concrete steps, admiring the starlight under the faintest traces of a haze.

“See, just a little high?” grinned the blonde. She was proud of herself, portioning the pills so well, so that neither one was hallucinating.

In the middle of the night, she awoke, her head swimming, and made her way to the bathroom. Hovering over the toilet, she tried to decide if she was, in fact, going to vomit, the world rippling around her in rhythm to the washes in her brain. The effect was disorienting and sickening, and she realized that she had made an error in taking so much.

Lying in bed, she tossed around, clasping clammy hands over her temples in an attempt to steady the motion in her head. It did no good; the movement was internal, and she filtered through hallucinations, unsure whether they were waking or sleeping, to drift at last into uneasy sleep. This occurred twice more over the course of the night, and finally she awoke in the morning, dressed herself, and swayed into the living room to wait for her friend to wake up.

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They were on their way to meet a friend of theirs, a girl both had worked with, a girl who’s personality meshed in unison with theirs in a rare way worth keeping track of. She was giving them weed, two dimebags’ worth, and could only meet them early in the morning.

“You’re still fucked up, aren’t you?” asked the brunette, eyeing her friend with a sort of morbid amusement. It was painfully obvious in the vacant stares, the way her eyes would pop out, and the endless chain of cigarettes she lit for herself.

“Soda tastes like Tussin,” mumbled the blonde, and they both laughed.

Within fifteen minutes, they’d met their friend, who remained blissfully ignorant to the driver’s condition, and eyed the bags they’d been provided with.

“Pretty fat dimes,” commented the blonde.

Her friend nodded, eyeing them. She was to be at work in an hour, but the temptation sat, fat and green, in her palm.

“What if we… just had a little one?” she suggested hopefully.

The blonde was not hard to convince, just those words, and they soon had their prize prepared.

For the remainder of the day, the blonde girl lay around her house, absorbing the chill of air-conditioner and sipping water that had an odd, syrupy taste that water had never possessed, to her recollection. She was functional, if a bit giggly, but her head shifted madly every time she stood. It was unpleasant, at the least, and nauseating in its worst moments. Her shoulder dragged against the wall as she made her way up from a cigarette break, her feet tracing a jagged path on the stairs.

When she arrived at work, she was still in a shaky state of non-sobriety. It was nothing unbearable, and she knew that she had an easy job for the night. The manager on duty was a friendly, pleasant boy who liked her better than most of the employees, in part because she was a competent, effective employee, and had assigned her to work wiping tables in the air-conditioned dining area of the restaurant. It was a too-easy job, but it was cooler than standing near the grill, and she was grateful.

Sitting on the rickety picnic table designed for employee cigarette breaks, she lit herself one, a last gift before the beginning of her shift. She knew she could have as many breaks as she wanted, that her manager would let her go whenever she said she was, so long as she let him know where she was going. It helped that she would wait to reward herself until lulls in the service, when the tables were all cleaned and there was no task he could assign her before leaving.

As she’d half-expected, he came bounding out to stand with her, movements jerky from the energy pills he indulged in at the start of each shift. It made him more effective, so she wouldn’t complain, because he had greater attention to detail than many of the staff, yet still remained friendly, in a sarcastic, laughing way.

“Oh, god, it’s so fucking boring in there,” he said, leaning against the table she sat on.

Her gaze swiveled to him, and she grinned slightly, holding her cigarette in her teeth as she did. “I did DXM last night.”

“DXM?” he said. He started to laugh, with unsympathetic delight. It was characteristic of their bond: a cynical perspective of the drawn-out night shifts they worked together, the union of two people in too many unpleasant situations, yet able to discover humor in their sadistic amusement at the misfortune of others, including one another.

“I’m still fucked up.”