Spring Break

          There’s nothing worse than staring at an empty page. Such un-actualized potential. But does a page have potential that you can measure? In the sense that it could be full, sure, but in what sense is that potential? Doesn’t it matter what the page is full of? I mean, by all accounts a page can be full of shit. And if shit is actualized potential, then perhaps a blank page is better than that.

            When I asked my dad if I could borrow his mini-van for a week, fill it full of teenage girls, and drive it down to Santa Barbara for spring break he said, “Lilly, just--for the love of God be safe.” He had that pained look he sometimes gets when he realizes that I’m basically a grown up now but at the same time thinks of me in diapers. It's kind of sweet when I think about it, but instinctively I wrinkle my nose in disdain and say something derisive and joking but still derisive. I think it's normal to feel bad for your parents though. I mean, they’re so fucking old.

            The beaches in Santa Barbara are noisy and covered in oil. An offshore drilling operation sends little globules of the inky goo floating to the beach where I stepped all over them, staining my feet. I didn’t even see the oil at first. I was just walking along the beach, trying to get away from the obnoxious dub-step DJ that had apparently set up a booth earlier that morning. Why would anyone wanna listen to dub-step at eight in the morning on the God damned beach? I was just walking down the beach, trying to find a nice place to sit and look and I stepped in this oil that was just languishing there on the beach like some kind of black metal jelly fish. Nothing is sacred anymore, I tell you.

            So two days ago I loaded up my dad’s minivan with clothes and friends (and lots of weed hidden in backpacks) and left Tahoe for Southern California. We get a full glorious, amazing week off for spring break! No AP Euro homework, no waking up at 6:30 every morning for classes that frankly waste my time. Ugh... No. My sister’s best friend is a sophomore at UCSB and she told us we could stay with her over spring break, which she says, is fucking crazy there. People are just out in the streets and on the beach, drinking and dressing up and playing games and laughing and all day for a week!

.     .     .

            We stopped for a night in Santa Cruz. Someone in the other car got a motel room at the SeaSide Inn, so we parked next to each other in their parking lot. My cheap ass didn’t get a room, I can just sleep in the car when I have to. It’s no worries I do it all the time at parties. That’s why it's nice having a mini-van. Plus there’s a DVD player in it AND a sub-woofer so I can just smoke a little weed, recline, and watch Goblet of Fire for the seventh time (it’s been in the DVD player for months).

            When we pulled in it was pooouuring rain, but that didn’t dampen our spirits. Chelsea’s got a fake, so we pooled our money together and sent her to the liquor store in my van. Twenty minutes later she’s back with a flat of Four-Lokos (they’re the cheapest) and we crack one each in celebration. Then all nine of us pile into the one room and we play drinking games. There’s this group of Mexican people celebrating something a couple room’s down, doing basically the same thing we are.

            Few hours later I’m shithoused and the squealing and giggling is getting on my nerves. I decide to go out for a cig. I fumble with the door handle and then stumble out into the hallway. The geometric patterns on the carpet seem to squiggle as I walk over them. I go out to the exposed stairwell and light up. The rain’s much softer now and even though I’m swaying I notice how beautiful it is, the little droplets falling from the gutters onto the asphalt making little pitter-patter sounds that refuse to conform to rhythm.

            I finish the cig, walk to the glass door, slide my key-card through the slot and head back in. It feels uncomfortably warm and cramped but I walk back anyway. I keep my eyes on the carpet as I walk, looking up when I think I’m close, and I see this Mexican guy, about my height, standing in front of the door to our room. I pause for a second... where am I? I look at the key-card. Room 212. I look at the door. Room 212. I look up at him for the first time and real backwards.

            There’s a half-full beer in his hand and he’s leaning with his back against the door and his chin in his chest. Vomit’s stringing from his open mouth, spilling down his shirt, and falling to rest squishily on the carpet. He looks up at me with watery eyes and grins.

            “Are you okay?” I ask, concerned more for my own safety than for his.

            “I can no find me amigos,” he says back, still smiling, “You know?”

            I did know. Seeing now that he was just lost, not terrorizing my friends or anything, I tell him that I’ll take him to his friends. I grab his non-vomity arm and lead him, bouncing from the walls and tripping constantly, to his room (which was 221) and knock. No one hears me at first, they’re cheering too loudly about something, so I knock again more forcefully. Finally they hear me and although the music continues, the cheering stops. A man in a cowboy hat answers the door, “Si?”

            I don’t have to answer. He sees his friend, whose name is Alex, and practically falls to the floor laughing. “Ayyyy, Alejandro!!” he yells, “Having some fun, eh? Gracias little chica, gracias. We take care of him now, okay? Gracias, vaya con dios!”

            The man grabs Alex by the collar and drags him into their room laughing. As he does, the room erupts into even more laughter and the cheering resumes its former decibel. The door closes and I’m left at the threshold smiling, but also kind of feeling bad for Alex.

            I consider walking back to the room but I decide to go to bed instead. I text Chelsea saying that I’ll be in the van and then head back out to the exposed stairwell. I use this opportunity to light up again, even though my throat feels pretty dry, and I smoke as much as I can before reaching my car. I climb in absently, feeling heavy and tired. I’m just gonna throw on Harry Potter, smoke a bowl, and then pass out like normal.

            But when I climb in, I hear this clicking sound. Rhythmic and persistent. After several minutes of drunken investigation I conclude that the sound must be coming from the amplifier, which sits in the very back of the van right under a window, which fucking Chelsea had left open...in the rain. I try the stereo and nothing comes through, just the tap-tap-tap of the amplifier. Even when the car’s off the tapping continues. Frustrated, I unplug the amp from the sub but STILL it persists!

            I smoke a bowl to chill out but the incessant tapping touches something anxious and furious in my soul. I open the hood and disconnect the battery but it makes no difference. I call my friends, my voice high and my thoughts unclear, begging for help or at least witnesses to my futility. They come down to help but no one else can figure it either out so they go back upstairs.

            Come midnight and I’m still alone in my van, sitting in the back smoking and getting to that point in inebriation where I feel sick and scared instead of jubilant and energized. With every passing tap I remember things about myself that I don’t like. I remember that I feel overweight and I remember that I got a B+ in Algebra 2 and I remember that time I pissed my pants in 1st grade and I grab my head. Pressing my face into the back of a headrest, I scream and cry until I collapse, exhausted and desperate, to the floor.

            With a primordial rage that I’ve never felt before, I snarl and I punch the amp over and over screaming at it to shut the fuck up and leave me in peace. It does. Broken and smoking it sputters twice before giving in completely. Finally able to rest, I slump crookedly to the ground and pass out next to the debris.

            .     .     .

            The sun’s shining brightly as we enter Isla Vista and I put on my biggest sunglasses to hide the fact that for some reason I still feel weird about the night before. It feels like a metaphor for something but I can’t tell what, like maybe it's prophetic. I don’t mind losing the amp, we can just play music through our phones and laptops, but something about the ordeal feels ancient. It feels like I’ve done that same thing a hundred times before and that I’ll do it a hundred times again.

            We park at my sister’s best friend’s house and pour haphazardly from our vehicles. She has 40’s waiting for us on her dinner table, which she clearly uses more for drinking games than for eating. The next several hours fast-forward until the sun sets and we begin to hear various bases thump from various parties. My sister’s best friend crushes up a couple pills and organizes them into neat white lines on the table. Chelsea takes a blue hundred-dollar bill (used specifically for such occasions) from her purse, rolls it into a cylinder and passes it around. When it gets to be my turn, I take the blue cylinder, stick it inside of my left nostril, and hoover the ecstasy. When I lift my head from the table I’m smiling and my skin feels a pleasant prickling in the warm air.  

            We follow my sister’s best friend to a house party where a DJ’s set up on the roof (playing fucking dub-step) and several hundred people are moving jaggedly in the court-yard below. When we open the front door a blast of sweat and heat hits us like a wet cloud in the air and my skin still feels nice but different nice. Hundreds of strangers gyrate and twist with perceived agility. This guy, his face I cannot recall, hands me a drink and I drain it so he hands me another.

            Within what feels like seconds, I’m dancing. I can’t see my friends. The music sounds SO good, how did I not like dub-step before? Time feels like its skipping but I don’t care, I feel so good, until this big fat guy grabs me by the hips and drags my ass into his crotch. For some reason I arch my neck around so that I can kiss him. Why am I doing that?

            The next thing I remember I’m on the roof with thirty other people dancing around the DJ. The fat guy’s nowhere to found. Phew! The roof feels like it’s about to give way, is it bouncing with the beat? Am I just high? Getting scared I see that some people are jumping from the roof onto someone’s car below. I follow them. Leaping from the roof onto a Chevy Nova that’s been demolished by countless feet.      

            I step from the Nova and for the first time realize I haven’t seen my friends in a while. My stomach rumbles so I vomit in a nearby bush. Righting myself, I walk without direction into the street, but when I look back it isn’t the same house I remember leaving. A white guy wearing a sombrero and holding a bottle of tequila stumbles out of the front door and yells, “Lilly...come back, babe, where ya goin’” Who the hell is this guy? How does he know my name? Scared, I start to run but my legs don’t work properly so I trip.

            The guy starts following me. “Leave me alone!” I scream at him, “Where’s Chelsea?” But he only laughs and says, “Who’s Chelsea? Come back to bed!” What the hell is he talking about? I’ve never seen him before! I yell at him to leave me alone again and then these two drunk guys, seeing me crawling on the asphalt, come over to help.

            “Dis guy bothrin you?” the first one slurs. I say something high pitched but affirmative, so the two new guys turn to confront the sombrero wearer. The sombrero wearer assesses his two opponents and decides to break the tequila bottle, brandishing it in front of his face as a warning. The two drunk guys circle the sombrero wearer clumsily, one standing in front of him and the other sliding obliquely behind him. They test each other for a few seconds until the drunk guy ambling behind the sombrero wearer rushes him. The sombrero wearer evades the rusher deftly, spinning from his reach and causing the three of them to dance around for a second. They’re all within a foot of each other. The rusher loses his footing momentarily and trips. As he regains his balance, he sees the outline of a man in his peripheral vision and swings.

            His fist connects, not with the sombrero wearer, but with his fellow drunkard. The two of them then, too intoxicated to understand what's going on, begin fighting. The rusher slams his fist into his friend’s face repeatedly, blood and teeth flying, until his victim lays still. The sombrero’d man laughs jocularly, sees his opportunity, and kicks the rusher in the mouth, knocking him out and continuing toward me. Still holding the broken bottle. I’m dragging myself away and I start to cry which only makes him laugh harder. He starts teasing me, “Where ya gonna go, Lilly? Where ya goin’, huh?”

            Is he going to kill me? What does he want? I begin to shake and catch and I imagine that broken bottle going inside me over and over again. I imagine my dead body lying in this exact spot forever. No one ever finds me here, dead on the ground like a monument for all eternity. But right before this smiling, laughing, murderer reaches me, I hear my name.

            “Lilly? Lilly is that you? We’ve been looking for you everywhere, girl!” When I look back, the menacing man has vanished and then I feel small, warm hands picking me up under my armpits. I break down, unable to to articulate why. I ask them if they’ve seen a guy in a sombrero holding a broken tequila bottle in his hand. They shake their heads.

.     .     .

            I wake up the next morning with spotty recollection and stomach cramps. Everyone else is still sleeping. I don’t know why but I feel this greasy shame that’s like someone poured syrup all over me. Wearily I go to the fridge and find a beer. I open it, find my phone on the floor in the kitchen, and walk out the front door. I Google-Maps the beach; it’s only like a mile and a half away. That’s not too too far so I decide to walk. I’ll meet up with my friends later.

            The street is strewn with evidence and destruction. Beer cans everywhere. Blood pooled into a divot--does that revive a memory? More like a feeling. More syrup. I keep walking. Ugh my stomach hurts. I shake the feeling and continue walking.

            Half an hour later I get to the beach but even here there’s no peace. Some asshole’s set up a DJ booth and is blasting dub-step into the water. I walk for another twenty minutes along the sandy rim but even here I can hear the faint thumps of his performance. Weary, I let myself fall back into the sand. I look up at the sky and drink in its light but saddening blue.

            After a few minutes I sit up and gaze at the ocean. Its constant roiling calm hypnotizes me. I can still feel remnants of last night tickling my arm hairs as the breeze rolls in. Whether consciously or not I think about tomorrow instead of last night. I watch the sea and feel connected. I feel that thousands of other people are feeling what I feel right now, which in turn makes me feel both grateful and horrified.

            A couple hours later I return to my sister’s best friend’s house to find my friends still fast asleep. I sit down on the couch, connect my iPhone to the speaker-system and play some Marvin Gaye, who nobody likes besides me so I feel glad that they’re sleeping. I cross my legs and for the first time, notice black sludge on the sole of my right foot. I scrub it but it won’t come off. I scrub and scrub until my foot’s raw but the spot remains. I hope and hope that it wont stain me forever. I can’t believe we’ve gotta stay here for five more days, I just want to go home.