Trapped in Forever

67 ~ Mandy! Mandy! Mandy!

A/N: This chapter is kind of long (sorry!) but I didn't want to break it up into two chapters because I felt like it needed to be continious, but don't worry, the next one is pretty short to make up for this super long one. :)

I didn’t know if it was that I had left her in her bedroom after I mumbled that I would come back after listening to a message a few days ago or that now that she had told me that she and Roxanne had been friends until she met me, her lingering feelings of resentment began to bubble and brew, slowly rising to the surface, but her attitude toward me was standoffish, maybe even guarded and reserved, and her glances in my direction were brief and fleeting as we stood in the foyer of someone’s house with bottles of light-calorie beer, eyeing the rustic bricks that were aligned on one side of the wall and the pristine white walls on the other three sides, narrow photo frames adorning the walls and vibrant green plants pushed against them. She was quiet, looking down at the rim of her bottle, and scraping at the label glued to the tinted glass, and glanced halfheartedly around the room. A part of her almost seemed hurt, or maybe betrayed, but as I sipped my beer slowly, I couldn’t determine if it was me or Roxanne that had hurt her or it were a combination of us both that had. I wondered if Reese started throwing up after Roxanne stopped hanging out with her and with me instead, if her thinning arms and slender waist were supposed to catch her attention and draw her away from me and back to her.

Veronica seemed undecided as she stood in between us, bringing the top of her bottle to her lips and chugging back her drink whenever silences grew too tense and awkward, despite the muffled beat of music in the background as Louis and his band tinkered around on their various types of guitars. A part of me wanted to excuse myself from the silence that was Reese and the awkwardness that was Veronica and amble towards Louis, seated on an old couch with faded stains on the cushioned arms, with his guitar propped in his lap, and ask him about Kara and try to stop my gaze from gravitating toward his lips and thinking that those lips have kissed my sister, repeatedly. But instead of doing this, I continued to idle in the foyer and a group of high school freshmen cautiously walked around the rooms, their eyes wide and sparkling with excitement and fear, still adorning their jackets as if ready at any time to be kicked out by a senior or a couple of drunken jocks with numbers painted on their hairy chests.

Reese took a gulp of her beer, her shoulders visibly relaxing as she swallowed and I heard the sloshing of the remaining liquid in the glass bottle as she brought it away from her lips, and her eyes fell on me. “Mandy,” she said, and then she smiled at me. Her smile felt unnatural and stretched, almost as if she were afraid that her cheeks would crackle and break if she actually grinned, and I felt myself getting anxious. I didn’t want to listen to her rejecting me, to cast me away from all I felt like I knew, so I guzzled down the rest of my beer and shook the bottle, as if it were proof of something.

“I need more beer.”

I let the neck of the bottle dangle loosely in between my fingertips as I walked past her and Veronica, focusing my eyes not on her transforming countenance as her eyes followed my steps or Veronica’s lack of subtly as she seemed to examine the alignment of the floorboards underneath the soles of her sandals, but instead I looked at the bricks that decorated one of the walls, the roughness and unevenness evident and I felt like reaching out one of my hands and running my fingers across the coarse texture of the rustic bricks. I placed my empty beer bottle on one of the end tables, beside a vase of fake blue flowers and picture frame protecting a family I didn’t recognize with a thin layer of glass, on either side of a black L-shaped couch pressed against one of the white walls, and ambled out of the foyer and toward the doorframe that revealed the granite countertops of an island and the stainless steel of a refrigerator. On the granite countertop, there were various bottles of beer, a few missing their bottle caps, and a couple of opened bags of chips like Lays and Ruffles, and I ventured into the room. It was a pretty large room for a kitchen, with a dining room extended beyond the array of cabinets and countertops that led away from the wall, almost dividing the room in two.