Author Games: Murder & Margaritas

Task Three: Males

Santiago Diaz

The drinking was a mistake.

Santiago had entered the mansion terrified, his palms sweating, his breath short. Parties never did this to him, but the opulent environment had struck him as too familiar; he'd viewed Villa Katsura through quavering tunnel vision, not allowing his eyes to stray further than the front door up ahead, or a slightly-buzzed Adelard greeting the ferried guests, or the bathroom just behind his silhouetted frame. With a handshake and a firm nod, he'd fled into that bathroom after first stepping foot in the mansion, slumping on a lidded toilet until ten minutes had passed and people would start to notice.

Matías had probably noticed sooner. Honestly, he would have been grateful for Santiago's absence; Santiago had spent the previous horrible hours drilling "party ground rules" into Matías's head after realizing he couldn't talk him out of the party itself. "You're ditching Mom to go to this," Matías had said flatly, deliberately avoiding eye contact. "I can do the same." He'd missed the point, of course—Matías was underage, part of the group Camille had ordered Santiago to intercept, and he lacked the emotional maturity necessary for a large-scale party like this—but Santiago had been unable to stop him.

At Villa Katsura, the alcohol had been unavoidable. Under the watchful gaze of fellow guests, he'd been forced to take a martini from the bar and sip. The teenagers next to him had stared, eyes narrowed—perhaps they'd recognized him, perhaps they knew he was a student officer—and they hadn't looked away until he'd taken a shaky sip. He was only here to have fun, the action had seemed to say. Of course, his trembling fingers and the sloshing liquid in the cup had spoken differently.

He hated alcohol. He hated the taste of it, the smell of it, the feel of the glass in his hand; he hated the way ghostly lacerations in his soles ached at the sight of a drink. Here, the feeling was magnified, so much so that it squeezed his windpipe shut. He was so anxious, so anxious, and people were noticing; he wasn't speaking to anyone, and handfuls of partygoers would glance at him and whisper to each other. He was losing face. He could not lose face.

So he'd swallowed his fears, and he'd blocked everything out. The mansion had dissolved around him. The marble countertops had vanished, so much like the kitchen island from years before, and the needling conversation had faded away, and the distant crunch of glass under someone's sneaker had fizzled out. In his mouth, the alcohol had turned flavorless. It no longer burned his throat, and at last he could breathe, and at last he could drink.

He drank, and he did not stop. The motion was robotic, as he detached from the bar to mingle with guests his age. The up-and-down motion of cup staved off his sensation, leaving the mansion comfortably numb; soon the martini itself was doing the same thing, and the martini after that, and the margarita after that one. Santiago laughed longer and smiled easier, and he felt absolutely nothing. The air swam, blurring the mansion so that he no longer needed his tunnel vision.

Everything was okay.

The blackout didn't faze Santiago. In response to this frightening stimulus, other guests screamed; in response to hundreds of frightening stimuli, only one of which was the blackout, Santiago laughed. "Weird," he mumbled, though no one was around to hear—they'd all swarmed the light switches, fled to the circuit breaker, hunted for flashlights under sinks. Noting his isolation, Santiago laughed again.

Everything was okay.

The next half hour passed like a dream, during which Santiago continued to drink and the guests continued to panic. Flashlights appeared around the room, lighting up panic-stricken face, but Santiago only sat at the bar and chuckled softly to himself. Tom, the saintly bartender, served drinks throughout the outage, but he refused to give anything else to Santiago, whose mouth could no longer form the word "margarita." At one point, he thought he saw Matías across the room, gaping at Santiago, but Santiago could not piece together why he'd look at him that way. He'd lightened up that night, hadn't he? He'd stopped being such a tight-ass, right?