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This is all wrong.
Senior year.
Prom.
Hell, everything.
Students converge toward the center of the gymnasium, navy and white balloons floating and fluttering up between and around the weaving bodies. The high ceilings and pushed back bleachers are strung with streamers made of gauze and woven-in paper stars with twinkling fairy lights, giving the space an ethereal vibe that makes it all the more dreamlike.
Surreal.
The DJ posted against the back wall, mostly hidden by the undulating bodies gathered together, dancing and waving their hands in the air without a single care in the world, spins one song into the next…into the next…into the next.
The music is grating, as is the laughter and smiles and kisses filling the gym. If I had more energy, and maybe a few less fucks to give, I’d do something dramatic, like pull the fire alarm, or hell, take a baseball bat to each of the speakers.
And maybe to some faces.
Like the ones that keep shooting me plastic smiles reeking of pity and nosiness.
But alas, I’m not quite drunk enough for that.
Yet.
Currently, some predictable-ass pop song is playing, singing something or other about dancing and lighting up the night. Students decked out in dresses and tuxes jump and sing along from where they all press together in the middle of the room.
A bitter snarl edges along my mouth as I slouch back against the wall of bleachers and bring the flask Waylon and I snuck in to my lips, wishing the shadows would just finally fucking devour me, and save me from this newest layer of Hell I’ve descended into.
The thought prompts a memory of a movie I’ve seen—and by I, I mean we…
Izzy and I.
As Above, So Below.
It’s one of the very few horror movies to actually freak me out a bit.
Izzy loved it…made me watch it twice…
Anyway, in the movie, the chick is basically this greedy treasure-seeker, and she more or less cons a bunch of people into venturing with her through the catacombs in Paris, all in search of this mystical stone.
Something to do with alchemy. I don’t fucking know.
But to find it, they have to go well past the point of where tourists are permitted.
And surprise, surprise—they get fucking lost.
Or rather, they basically stumble their way into Hell. Literally.
I wasn’t paying too close attention—either time—seeing as it was just Izzy and I watching it, on the couch, in her basement, in the dark, under a blanket…
Obviously, I was busying myself with other things.
But I remember enough—like how it was basically built on the idea of Dante’s version of the underworld, with all its circles and layers funneling down, down, down, going impossibly deeper…
Until it flipped.
Basically, the only way out was to go through.
The only way back up was down.
