A Deer in the Headlights

            You’re not a party guy. You like to hang out and drink with your friends, but you don’t like parties. Too many people you don’t know, you end up standing there like a statue because everybody you know is in a conversation with someone they know and you don’t. You look around, watch the beer pong table that you can’t join because the same guys were there all night. You try to pretend like you’re included in your friend’s conversation even though you can’t hear a thing. You’ve accepted it. You’ve decided you’re just not a party guy. That’s fine. You can spend your night at home, just hanging out with friends, or playing some video games. Your friends still try to get you to go to parties though, and every once in a while you end up at one. And every time it happens you know it’s going to be an ordeal for you.

            “Come on! Don’t be weird, come to the party, be social for once,” Charlie told you. You’re social. You just don’t like parties.

            “I don’t want to. I don’t like parties,” you tell him.

            “That’s because you’re awkward. You need to learn to talk to people. You can only get better if you try.”

            “I don’t want to. I told you, I don’t like parties. It has nothing to do with me being social or not.”

            “So you’d rather sit at home, play video games, jerk off, and go to bed, than hang out with your friends?”

            “It’s not that I don’t like my friends. I don’t like parties. Besides I’ll only know like three out of the fifty or however many people are there.”

            “Well then come meet some new people. I won’t leave you alone till you say yes.”

            “Fuck you.”

            “That doesn’t make me want to leave. Are you going?”

            “No.”

            He leans over you and starts breathing directly on your neck to try and annoy you. You say nothing. He stands up, and starts doing some dumb fake stretch to shove his crotch in your face.

            “Fine, just get the fuck out, I need to finish my homework.”

            “You can’t take that back!”

            He left, finally. The party can’t be that bad. At least you won’t have to see any of the people at it afterwards, so it really doesn’t matter if you get embarrassed. Fuck it, you should just act like a fucking idiot, because fuck that party.

            You sit in the back seat of Charlie’s car, next to Jason, with Tyler riding shotgun. You’re just going to have a couple drinks, pretend to be the lightest lightweight to ever live, and act like you’re shitfaced. Then you can just be an idiot all night and go home.

            You and your friends get there. Charlie says hi to half the people you pass. You go with Tyler to the table with all the drinks. You just sit there drinking for about ten minutes talking to Tyler, and Jason too once he showed up. Charlie returns with some chick he went to high school with, and introduces her to everybody. You just sit there, silently drinking. After another twenty or thirty minutes you’ve had enough to make the lightweight you’re pretending to be get pretty drunk. You go over to the room where everybody’s dancing to some shitty song and stand on a chair.

            “I am the queen of France!” you yell. That was the first thing you thought of. Everybody looks at you.

            “What are your orders, your majesty?” some voice in the crowd says.

            “You!” you yell, pointing to a random spot in the crowd. “You’re sentenced to death at the guillotine!” The person you ended up point at starts walking out of the crowd towards y- holy shit she’s fucking hot. You suddenly become more conscious of what you’re doing.

            “What did I do?” she asks playfully.

            “You stole! We put thieves to death here in France!”

            “No! I don’t want to die! I don’t know what I stole!”

            “You stole my heart!” you say, slurring your words even more than you’ve been.

            “Well, you can’t have it back!  It’s mine,” she says. At this point most of the people in the room are ignoring you. You jump down and go over to her.

            “Please, I need my heart! I need it to pump blood!”

            “Maybe I’ll give it back later.”

            Okay, this is getting out of hand. You just wanted to be dumb, and now this smoking hot chick is talking to you. You’re not even really drunk. You can actually hold your liquor pretty well.

            “But if you want it back, you have to do what I say. Now follow me, let’s go get a drink,” she says.

You follow her back to the drinks; your friends are nowhere to be found. She gets one for both of you.  You go back over to the area with the dancing and shitty music with her. She wants to dance with you, but you can’t dance. Maybe you can be an idiot. You got her talking to you by being an idiot; maybe you should do it again. You start dancing like the biggest retard in the state. She laughs at you; she thinks it’s cute. You can’t believe this is working. Some guy shows up and starts talking to her, and she talks back to him. Once you realize you’re slipping away from her, you decide you have to assert your dominance. You walk backwards into the guy, facing the girl. You act like you’re doing it in a joking way, so she laughs. The guy tries to get back into the conversation, but you keep standing half in front of him, and he’s gone in a few minutes.

You end up in a beer pong game with her, and you only end up having one beer, because she’s spectacular at beer pong for some reason. You win and she jumps on you. Before her feet touch the ground again there are different people at the table.  You walk away with her. You end up outside, behind the house. There’s a pool with no people in it. If the hot chick likes you being stupid then you’re going to be a fucking idiot.

“Why is this pool empty?” You yell out to the people outside. “Pools are awesome, why doesn’t anybody want to swim?” She’s laughing. You start taking your clothes off, and you jump into the pool in your underwear. She laughs her ass off, almost falling down. As soon as your head is above water again you hear other splashes. Before long the pool is crowded and you climb out to say hi to the girl again. You don’t even know her name.

“I’m Connor, by the way” you tell her.

She laughs. “I’m Lana. It’s nice to meet you, Connor.”

You put your clothes back on.

“I’m hungry,” she says. “Can we get out of here and get some food?”

“Sure,” you say without thinking. You remember that this party is about 40 minutes from your house, and you’re about to leave your friends behind. That doesn’t really matter though. You and Lana start walking to a diner to have some food. You just listen to her talk about everything in her head the whole time. You get there and share a giant pile of eggs, pancakes, and bacon with her. The check comes.

“I don’t have any money,” she says.

“It’s fine. I think I’ve got it,” you say, as you check your wallet. You have ten dollars, and the check is thirty. You might as well leave a nice tip if you’re going to walk out on the check.

“Go, hurry up,” you say between laughs as you leave with her. You get out, both of you laughing. “Let’s go,” you tell her, trying to get out of sight of the diner.

“We should drink more,” she says. “Are there any liquor stores open?”

“It’s like, one in the morning. I think they have to close earlier than that,” you tell her.

“The party’s so far away. What will we do?”

You smile. “Follow me, I’ll take care of us.” You take her hand and lead her towards the first liquor store you spot. You tell her to wait right around the corner. She knows what you’re going to do and she’s pretending that she doesn’t. She’s playfully asking as you turn the corner. You cover your face, grab a rock, and smash the window on the liquor store. An alarm goes off right away, and you jump in. You grab the first thing you see and jump back out and run around the corner.

“Go, go, go.” You say, laughing with her. She thinks it’s cute and funny that you’re doing these crazy things with her. You can’t stop looking at her, her dark red hair shining in the moonlight. Once you’re a few blocks away you stop and sit at a playground with her. You just now realize you stole some fancy-ass expensive wine. You and her share it; she drinks most of it. She’s all over you by the time you finish it, half from flirting, half from just using you to stay standing. You can’t stop thinking about how adorable it is.

“Do you have a condom?” she asks. You don’t.

“We can get some,” you say.

“Didn’t you spend your money at the diner?”

“That didn’t stop us at the liquor store.”

You lead her to some 24-hour drug store. She waits outside while you go inside. You wander to the rack with the condoms. You take a pack, and you start thinking about what to do. You get a lucky break and some guy comes strolling in with a gun. You use the opportunity to sneak out with your condoms while he empties the register.

“Holy shit this night has been wild,” she says when you meet her again outside. She thinks it’s cute and funny that you’re doing these crazy things with her.

“Where should we go?” you ask her.

“It doesn’t matter, let’s find the nearest secluded spot and rape each other,” she says. You wander with her for a while, and you find a pathway to some train tracks. You walk down them for a little while, and end up with fences on either side of the tracks, and almost no light. You and her half sit, half fall onto a patch of dirt about twenty feet from the tracks.

You’re in love.

She thinks all these crazy things are so cute and romantic, like some movie. By the time she realizes what you’re doing, your pants are off and you’re working on hers. She laughs. She thinks your eagerness is funny. She thinks everything is funny. She’s great.

Here’s the moment, the climax to your night, amongst other things. And it’s over. You breathe for a second, and then reality finally comes rushing back to you. You’ve been blocking it out progressively throughout the night, and it’s not even because of alcohol. No more being willing to do literally anything to get laid. You realize the terrible things you’ve done tonight. Someone could have gotten shot at the drugstore. You could get arrested for what you did at the liquor store. You’re also even farther from home than before, and you don’t even know where you are. You’re just sitting here, next to this chick, who you now realize probably won’t want anything to do with you once she’s sober. Like a deer in the headlights, you’re frozen, no idea what to do. You just sit there, waiting for the world to figure out what’s going to happen because you can’t.

She’s passed out there. You don’t know what to do. You can’t wake her up now. She’d be sleeping lighter if you’d roofied her. You can’t leave her alone next to these train tracks, and you don’t want to sleep here. You can’t carry her down the tracks far enough to get off of them either. You have no idea what you could possibly do.

By morning, you’re still there. You somewhat slept for a little while there, so you did make a choice, sort of. She’s starting to stir. You pretend you’re asleep.

“Oh shit,” is the first thing she says when she’s awake. You don’t know if it’s the hangover or you, and you’re still pretending to be asleep. She shoves you to wake you up.

“Where are we?” she asks.

“Train tracks,” you say.

“No shit. Where are these train tracks?”

“I don’t know. I think we were walking around for an hour or two after we left the party.” you say. That’s great; she doesn’t even know where you are.  You get up, and she does too. You both start walking. She won’t say anything to you, and you’re too nervous to say anything to her. She walks ahead of you by a few feet, and you can’t catch up with her no matter how hard you try.

You find society, and she’s making a call. She’s still beautiful, like last night, but you somehow can’t enjoy her beauty. It’s like she was projecting it at you last night, and doesn’t want to project it anymore.

“So,“ you say, pausing to try and break the awkwardness “you got a ride coming?”

“Yeah,” she tells you. You think about asking her if you can ride with her, but then you think that she might live even further from you. She stands, looking everywhere but at you. It feels like hours before her friend shows up, and takes her away. Neither of them says a thing to you. You reach for your phone, because calling for a ride is the only way you’ll get home before tonight, or even later, and you need to get away from here before the police find you. You left your phone at the party.