The Girl Who Saw Through Jem

Jem: Hypothetical Friends and Relentless Shakespeare Quoting [edited]

Excited whoops came from the crowd as the chant began: Fight! Fight! Fight! Jason, having missed the first, tried again...and failed. "Get here, you little fucker," snarled Jason, crunching his knuckles as I was light on my feet. Jason was definitely fifty pounds heavier than me and if we were to punch each other, his would definitely be a world of hurt. But the reason why Coach made me the Quarterback was simply because I had the ability swerve and run like my little runty ass was on fire. I was faster than Jason. Much faster.

At the corner of my eye, I saw Ellis grimly watching, hand over her mouth like she expected the gore to start spilling in like one was watching a car crash before its eyes. I managed to locate a white-girl wasted Heath, who had escaped out of Ellis' fleeting notice, climbed up into the kitchen sink and decided to sleep in it (Seriously? I thought, how does the boy even end up in these places?), with Jason's freshmen girl's hot pink bra tied over his forehead as well as lipstick marks smeared all over his chin. Because the world was a cruel place and I ought not to, despite appearances, allow Heath to become the newest social media joke on Instagram, I needed to find a safe bedroom for him to crash.

"You know what?" I said diplomatically, recovering into a casual stance. "I can't be fucked to deal with this, Bricks. I just want to have a good time and clearly, you can't make that happen. I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

"This isn't your house, Leighton."

"Yeah, but it's my fuckin' party." There was a stare down. Jason's steel orbs boring into mine and behind his skull, his set of teeth ground.

"Fine," he relented, slouching off with his freshmen. The crowd murmured in disappointment at a lack of a show, dispersing and returning to whatever they were doing; the hazy memory of the altercation was all that it was: a hazy memory.

"Dude," I shook Heath's shoulder and he moaned, "Wake the fuck up."

His eyes flew open and he yawned, a breath full of alcohol hit me in the face and I gagged. "I...don't wanna."

"You better. You owe me. I stopped Jason Kellington from killing you. And you know better than to flirt with his girl. The last dude who tried ended up in a coma."

"But she's, like, so pretty," enunciated Heath slowly, giggling as he reached out to play with my strands of ruffled brown hair.

"She's passable. You're not just drunk, are you?" I rolled his eyes. "You're stoned too."

"Like a whore condemned for adultery."

"And so it makes racist jokes," I inched away from him. "Don't throw up on me."

"That was one time, you lil' fucker."

"Come on," I told Ellis who was standing by the sidelines and hauled Heath up by looping his arm around my neck, "Let's get this bastard into a room upstairs. Can you help me carry him back into the room so he wouldn't perform any more sexual acts on innocent fourteen year-olds?"

Ellis, who was still kind of thunderstruck by what happened and feeling rather the altruist, she responded rather jokingly: "Sure, I must think of all those fourteen-year-olds."

Simultaneously, she wrapped her arm around Heath's tall body, her 4'9 figure kind of a joke compared to his 6'2, and helped me drag a stumbling Heath across the mass parade of drunk adolescents towards the stairs. They were all dancing or shamelessly making out with each other, displaying the ungodly scene very sufficiently in front of our eyes, and we had to circle around to avoid the people passed out on the several of the weirdest positions.

There was a crew of boys and girls were out of the house by the backyard, just like I knew they would be. Someone had lit a mattress on fire- which I grimaced at because some poor bastard was going to be stuck with cleaning the mess up- and everybody was poking at it with dead branches, throwing gasoline in and basically having a bonfire night. The flames radiated throughout the night, casting an ember-red glow onto the wild crowd. The smoke smelled faintly of wood and burned liquor.