Week 1: New Years Day
Her eyelids were heavy. They didn’t want to open. Didn’t want to fight against the bright light that filled this space. The room smelled of stale beer, cheap whiskey, old cigarettes and vomit. The pain in her head was blinding and every muscle in her body burned in protest. She yawned and the taste of too much fun made her gag slightly.
“That you, Adeline?” a voice in the distance asked. It was gruff and hard.
She managed to contort her body into an upright, if seated position and found that she was laying on a dirty futon in a room she was positive she’d never seen before. Empty beer cans, an overturned fifth of Old Crow and two or three little orange pill bottles littered the floor.
“Yeah. Who’s ‘at?” she rasped. Her mouth was dry and sticky. The light blasting through the white blinds in the window took direct aim at her eyes, and she held up a hand to block the beams.
“S’Ray. From last night. You remember?” A man wearing lime green basketball shorts and a white tank top stepped in from the other room. He was older, late forties Adeline thought, with a horseshoe of orange hair and a scraggly beard to match. Rail thin with skin hanging loose around the edges, a broad nose and sunken eyes, Ray was not what one would call classically handsome.
Adeline looked down and saw that her shirt was mostly unbuttoned. “You feel me up last night, Ray?”
He gave a wry laugh and took a long drag from his cigarette. “Hell, I probably could have. Doubt you’d remember.” Adeline began buttoning her shirt back. She noticed a large vomit stain on her pants that ran down to her shoes. “But no, I didn’t touch you last night. One, you ain’t exactly my type, if you take my meanin’. Plus, don’t think many folks wanted around you after ya went and yaked all over ya self like ‘at,” he continued.
Adeline went to stand, but her head felt like she was turning end over end, forcing her to choke back another round of puke. She fell back to the futon and held her face in her hands.
“Best you just sit for a few. You take coffee?” Ray asked.
“Not if I can help it,” she replied.
Ray disappeared into the darkness. The sound of glass clanking and a refrigerator door opening and closing could be heard coming from that end of the house. In a moment, he was back caring a glass of thick, red liquid. “Mater juice? It’s good for what ails ya. Canned it myself”
She nodded and reached up for the tall glass of juice. The earthy smell caused her stomach to turn, but she managed to get a few gulps down. The sour-sweet taste wasn’t unpleasant and anything going into her body that that was organic was a plus at this point.
“So, who the hell are you, Ray?” she asked as she took another sip of the juice.
“Jus’ Ray. This my place.” He shoved a few dirty shirts off of a chair and sat across from her.
She sat back into the futon, closed her eyes and took a long, slow breath in. Bringing her leg up, she went to cross it over top the other, but the sight of puke along her pants and shoes, she decided to place it back on the ground. “Question, Ray. What in the absolute HELL am I doing here?”
He chuckled. “Didn’t figure you’d remember much. You’s goin’ as hard as anyone I ever seen last night. Before the ball dropped, we’s takin’ bets to see if you’d even make midnight. You did, by the way. You made sure we all saw you when the clock stuck 12.” He looked around the room and found an empty beer can to discard his cigarette butt.
“Yes, but what am I doing here? Where are Lauren and Taylor?” She was getting annoyed. Ray wasn’t helping as much or as quickly as she would have liked.
He scratched his bald head and hacked out a brown wad of phlegm into a nearby soda bottle. “I guess that’s the girls you showed up here with. One of ‘em knows my buddy Oscar that was shootin’ off fireworks out in the yard. They stuck around ‘bout an hour. Left before midnight if I ‘member right.”
Rage blasted through Adeline like one of Oscar’s Roman Candles. “You mean those bitches left me here?”
“No, it was more you wouldn’t leave, to be honest.”
She drained the last of the tomato juice and sat the glass on the table in front of her. Almost none of last night was coming back to her. She remembered getting in the car with Taylor and Lauren around seven. Taylor had some wine coolers and Lauren had scored something called “Lemon-heads.” She said they would make the drinks kick. “Damn understatement!” She thought, looking back. “What do you mean, I wouldn’t leave?”
Ray reached into the pocket of his shorts and pulled out a box of smokes and a small red lighter. He lit a cigarette and blew a gray cloud toward the ceiling. “You done much partying, Adeline?” he asked.
“Enough,” she replied.
“I ask because most folks that like to party don’t hit it as hard as you did. You shotgunned a pint of Southern Comfort that I had been lookin’ forward to drinking for a week. I don’t know how many beers you drank and then there’s the pills.” He told another huge drag off of his cigarette.
“Pills?”
Ray stood up and walked to the corner of the futon. Just out of Adeline’s reach sat a denim purse. He picked it up and tossed it her way. “Check your wallet,” he said.
“Did you steal from me asshole?” She yelled. He laughed to himself. Adeline tore open her purse and began rifling though it. She found her wallet and cracked it open to find nothing inside. “I had four hundred dollars in here! What the hell?”
Ray walked back over to his seat by the dirty laundry and plopped down. “You made every person holdin’ very happy last night. Didn’t matter what they had, you wanted it and you bought it.”
Suddenly, Adeline spewed thick red vomit all over herself and the table in front of her. It was uncontrollable. Without missing a beat, Ray stood up and grabbed some towels from the pile of laundry and tossed one to the girl while he laid another on the puke covered table. “Oh, Gawd!” Adeline moaned.
“More room out than in, I reckon,” was his only reply.
Ray headed back to the kitchen and returned with a can of Sprite and handed it to her. “Maybe this’ll do the trick.”
After wiping the sick from her chest and off of the table as best she could, Adeline reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone. “You got a charger, Ray? Phone’s dead.”
“I got one a them Obama phones, but it ain’t like that one. Sorry.”
Adeline put her palms into her eyes and rubbed gently. “You mind if I use your phone, then? I really gotta get outa…get home.”
Ray tossed her an older model flip phone. She opened it and banged a few numbers into it. After a second or two, she began to speak. “Granny? Hey it’s me. Yeah, I’m on a friends’ phone. No, I’m not a Lauren’s. Can you come and get me? I’m...” She paused, realizing she still had no idea where she actually was. Shooting her eyes over to Ray, her face pleaded for some help, but he was oblivious to the situation. “Ray, what’s the address here?”
Ray jumped a little. “Oh, it’s 1136 Hwy 433 Mayton.”
“I’m in Mayton, Granny. 1136 Highway 433. Yes, I know how far that is. I’m sorry. I’ll see you in a little bit.” She tossed the phone back to Ray. He stood and walked to the other end of the house. When he returned, he was carrying a pair of jogging pants and a clean tee shirt. He placed them next to Adeline on a clear section of the futon.
“Why you bein’ so nice to me, Ray?” She asked.
He rubbed his bald head and scratched his chin. “Well, you made some bad decisions last night. And was fixin’ to make a few more with Oscar and his brother. I just thought if that was my sister or daughter, I would want someone to step in and do somethin’. So, I brought you in and sat you down. You didn’t much care for it at the time, but I reckon it was best in the long run.”
Her eyes watered up slightly. She quickly blinked and began looking out the window. The sun was giving way to dark storm clouds. “Well, I should say ‘Thank you’ I guess.”
“Awe, ain’t no need. Just keep ya head on your shoulders next time you go out a’partying.”
“Ray, I’m seventeen years old,” she confessed.
Ray nodded his head, knowingly. “Yeah, ‘at’s about what I figured.”
Adeline made her way to the bathroom and stripped off the vomit soaked clothes and put on the new ones Ray had brought her. She splashed her face in the sink and looked at herself in the mirror. “Never again,” she promised herself.
Back in the living room, Ray was picking up beer cans and placing them into a garbage bag. After half an hour of uncomfortable silence and light cleaning, it was time to go. The honking of a horn let Adeline know her grandmother had arrived.
“Ride’s here,” she said.
“You take care of yourself, now. Ya’hear?” He tossed an empty bottle of Rebel Yell into the bag.
Adeline stood there, still and silent for what felt like an eternity. Then, suddenly, she approached Ray and wrapped her arms around his neck. She embraced him with all that she had. “Hey Ray, thanks,” she said. She let him go and made her way to the door. As she twisted the handle, she looked back at the man cleaning up the mess she helped to make. She smiled sorrowfully and gave him a wave.
Ray held up his hand and grinned back at the young girl.
“Happy New Year, Adeline.”