Don't Sleep With the Drummer

♤ 2. Kayla ♤

Kayla was thinking about Jimi Hendrix and acid, multitasking with the thought. She fiddled with a ball point pen, noticing the sky had changed colors. From outside her window, she saw that it was an ashy, white fog, but transformed into a fiery orange—muted across a distance. When she strained her neck, looking further to the west, she noticed pillowy clouds of smoke trailing the tops of the mountains.

"The world is ending."

This wasn't her imagination chattering away.

She hadn't depended on her creativity to conjure up such a pretty boy. His skin was a dusky complexion, copper, but not copper enough for her to consider him bronze, but rather a hint of a tan hue one got on a summer vacation.

A kiss of the sun, she proposed, picturing the way his hair must look when driving in a drop-top coverable corvette.

She bet he owned one, watching the pattern in which his brown hair cascaded past his chiseled cheeks. He was a frozen art piece, she concluded, far too amazed at how his skin could be so blemish-free as a teen.

Kayla purposely pushed her hair to the left of her face, creating a curtain whenever she saw him gaze her way. Hiding the pimps on her round face was her new task, and also answering the pending questions the nurse kept asking.

He had spoken to her when the nurse had taken his blood pressure.

"The world," he proclaimed, "is ending."

"I don't see why you have to be so grim."

"I'm not being grim."

"You are being pessimistic," she said pointedly. Her hand patted at her waistband, periodically doing it out of habit. She had a pack of Camel Crush menthols in the pocket. It was an erratic tick of hers, checking up on the box every now and then as if to expecting them to disappear at one point. "The world seems to be far from ending."

"Haven't you heard?" he craned his neck. "California is having not just seasonal fires, but fire tornados."

"Fire tornados?"

"It's where the wind creates a vortex within an ongoing forest fire."

Her eyes widened. "That's terrifying."

"They say over a million acres have burned."

His eyes went up to the hallway where his sister, or whoever that beautiful girl was, had scurried off to. Kayla thought this couldn't have been their first visit. They asked them different questions than what they said to Kayla. They handed her papers that were blue and green. However, the boy and girl got white sheets. Kayla wondered what they were in here for, but found it to be too personal to ask them.

Kayla had her mind fixated on the boy's beauty more than their conversation. Sadly, their discussion had to come to a stop and Kayla was stuck with her own thoughts again. She wandered inside her mess of a mind, playing out what it would feel like going to a concert for the first time. That was when she thought of Jimi Hendrix and acid.

The legend, as it goes, was behind the bandana he wore. Kayla found the story interesting enough to tell the pretty boy. As the story went, Hendrix would place a tab of LSD on the center of his forehead—acting as his third eye. He would go out, and every night, perform with a tab to the head. It was said to have awaken his inner talent, but that part was something Kayla doubted. The boy, barely listening to the story, said that he doubted it as well the second Kayla finished.

He was doing that a lot—hardly pay attention to the details. Kayla knew when someone stopped carrying in a conversation. Their eyes would drift off, their feelings would be transfixed on something else, and their tone slipped like sand falling between a forming fist. He had lost interest in her, or rather, the entire atmosphere of the Urgent Care mental health facility.

"What are you in here for?" she asked, shocking herself instantly after asking. She wanted to swallow the words back into her mouth. "I sorry—"

"Don't be."

"I'm being rude and overreaching."

He flipped their hair in front of his eye. "Aren't we all? With the world ending, I don't see why I can't indulge on the end of my life."

"Your life isn't ending."

It came out like a screech, and Kayla was embarrassed at how clingy she was getting for a boy that she didn't know the name of. His eyes kept checking for his sister – oh God, please let it be his sister, she prayed.

"I have borderline personality disorder," he said as if it was an order off a McDonald's menu, casual and cool. "I'm self-diagnosing myself."

"What makes you think you have that?"

"I think of religions too much."

"I don't see that as a problem, or even—"

"I think all religions—all at the same time. So much so that I try to become the prophet I'm studying," he divulged.

"That could be fun."

"It could be terrifying."

"Which prophet made it scary?"

"That's not my point," he shook his head, ruffling it with his right hand and combing it out of his face. Kayla melted, masking it with a muffled moan and a sad cough. He dazzled his teeth at her, and Kayla forgot how to blink.

"Jesus is a jacket."

"Huh?"

"I see Jesus as a jacket."

"You lost me there."

"Let me simplify my reasoning," he puffed, leaning on his knees with his elbows. His face was propped on his palm, placing the chin at the center. She could see his dirty fingernails at this point, grimy with black nail polish and chapped skin against the cuticles of his nails. He probably spent hours gnawing on them; he was a fidgety one. "It's a metaphor for religion. When it's cold outside, or in this case things get bad, then you might consider taking protection—a jacket. There's people out there who always need a jacket no matter the weather. Be it health reasons, or simply because that's their style. They always bring that protective layer."

"That layer being Jesus," she said, bubbling with laughter.

"Let me finish."

"Okay, okay." She nodded. "I was just going to say you could use a condom as a better—"

"No, it's a jacket, and it's always been a jacket. It's gotta be a jacket."

"Sure."

"So, you take in consideration those people who always have them, or then you've got people like me. People, no matter the weather or temperature, go without the jacket. They know where it is, they know exactly where to penpoint it. But they never take it. I see religion that way. And that's why I said what I said. To many people, Jesus is just a jacket."

"Again with that Jesus is a jacket nonsense."

It was the girl.

She had her clothing from earlier in a bag. She was dressed entirely in black when they first arrived—they both were in black. They looked like a couple now that Kayla saw them side by side. Her eyebrows were bleached, and you could tell they were, like she was some kind of supermodel and it was her challenge for the episode. Kayla mumbled a few words her way, but they were ignored and dismissed like whispers in the wind.

"Let's go, babe. I'm hungry."

Babe hit Kayla's eardrums like a blade.

"It was nice chatting." He waved, "I'm Kasin, Kasin Gill."

"Maya—I mean Kayla," she messed up on her own name.

"This is Arrow Mendoza," he motioned to the girl, "the one, and the only light in my life."

Then, in that cloudy afternoon, met with ash falling from the burning mountains and the debris of the forest fire, Kayla declared that she would be the only light in someone else's life. She wanted someone, anyone, to want her as badly.

"I heard you talking about Grand Arts with the cops," Arrow noted. "We go there, too."

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