A Matter of Unimportance

16. Gloria

Sometimes the only thing to do is nothing at all. It's comforting to just give up. The weight just sort of releases, at least for a little while.

I was wine drunk on Bonnie's bedroom floor. We hadn't had joints during our Wednesday night catch ups in a while, but Harrison posed as an adult and got us two bottles of Rosé. His broad shoulders and stubbled chin were always good for things like that. Nobody even asked for his ID.

I specified that I was drunk because Bonnie wasn't. She'd had a glass, but it was unlike her to be as reserved as she was being. Bonnie only really drank when she was nervous or happy. It seemed like she was neither at this time, because she did more watching the drink swirl in her glass than she did actually drinking it. By comparison, I'd drank an entire bottle. I was having a hard time holding my head up, and had resorted to leaning heavily into the closet door behind my back. I was contemplating the merits of putting my face on the floor.

It had been a week since Adeline had leaned on the gate. I was currently in a downward spiral about it. It didn't help that I didn't feel like I could tell anyone about what was plaguing my mind. Not even my friends. Especially not Harrison, who called my own personal sleep paralysis demon his Uncle Roy.

So I was wine drunk and giggling and my face was now fully on the floor while Bonnie watched me with a furrowed eyebrow and a smile that was most certainly fake. Then she laid down infront of me and put her face to the floor too, directly across from mine and just a few inches away. If I leaned forward, our noses would touch. I thought about kissing her. I thought that probably wouldn't help. It wouldn't do anything productive actually.

I did it anyways. I'm certain it wasn't a good kiss, but I pecked her lips and she smiled and ruffled my hair that was becoming quite unruly. I appreciated that she let me have that moment with her on the floor, even though I was so drunk that I didn't think I could fully understand appreciation, or the fact that Bonnie loved me in a way nobody else could ever emulate. Best friends were just like that.

"Are you doing okay?" She asked me. Then she talked and I was too infatuated with the way her lips looked when she spoke that I hardly listened. I just know she mentioned my dad. She thought I was falling apart like this because of something to do with my dad. It had been more than a month since I'd seen him and his other family, but I really hadn't told her any of that, so I didn't know why she was asking about him. I hadn't even mentioned the letters he'd sent me, notably addressed to River.

I was evidently too drunk to understand that Bonnie and Harrison and even Cameron, even though they weren't all hardly speaking together, had been worried since I got back. I'd been weird and closed off. I'd gone to see him very suddenly, and I'd come back and stopped going to parties, and I'd started acting like I was afraid all the time, and I had good friends that cared to notice things like that. It was all very odd for me to consider that people cared about me. Before, all I had was my mother and Whaya. These friends I'd made just a year or so ago were foreign to me. Why did they care so much?

I got drunk like that every Wednesday until my birthday. I told Bonnie nothing of importance. I ignored the way my friends whispered about me in concern. Then I turned 17, and I realized I had 365 days to get my life sorted.

Even though I drank my feelings on Wednesdays, other things were indeed happening.

I was acing French and failing science. The rest of my grades were good, but science was weird for me because of the absolutes. It wasn't like math. Math was numbers. Science was life. I hated the idea of hard lines in life.