“Right, well you have my offer now. So, call me if you need to. And er, make sure that you have a good night. I’m sure you will.” I don’t tell her that I wish I was going with her, but I’m sure she can feel it anyway. “Don’t worry whatever the time is if you do call. My cell phone will be on.”
Serena gives me a strange look as she walks away from me, almost as if she is trying to suss me out. Her eyes run all over me like she wants me to say more to her, but I don’t. I could, there are a lot of things that I can say to her, but she’s off on a night out with her friends and I don’t want her to spend the whole time thinking about me.
I head back inside, glad that she made the choice easy for me, and now that I don’t need to go anywhere. Serena might not call me, she may not need my help tonight, but it feels good that I can offer her that much assistance, that I can just be there for her if she needs it. We started out our relationship with me helping her, and perhaps we can rekindle things in the same way. I would love nothing more than that to happen.
Chapter 13 – Serena
Oh God, this is a bit too much. The music is louder than I was expecting, the strobe lighting is giving me a headache, and there are surely too many people in this night club for the legal limit. I can’t move anywhere without banging into someone else, so it’s getting a bit ridiculous now. It’s driving me up the wall.
I’m struggling to keep track of everyone else from my group as well. Alisha keeps vanishing roughly every five minutes since we first reached the club, I barely know where she’s going or who she’s hanging out with, but I haven’t seen much of her. I do feel a little bit like I have gotten to know everyone else tonight, I’m glad that we have seen one another out of the office environment, but the night is beyond that now. I don’t know where any of them are now. I’m pretty much alone here, and it isn’t as much fun as it should be. I’m pretty much ready to go home now.
Perhaps it’s a good job that I didn’t go to the high school parties, because I think I’m out of place in this sort of environment. It doesn’t suit me at all, so I would have stuck out like a sore thumb. More than I already did. I was never really picked on, more just ignored, but that might have sparked bullying coming in my direction.
I am much happier being at home with my beloved books and movies. That’s more me.
“Hey, Serena.” Dan suddenly appears and rests his hand on my shoulder. “We’re about to do shots. Alisha is buying. Apparently she’s found this awesome group of people who want to take us to an after party.”
“Oh, right.” God, I was just thinking of leaving but now it seems like I am about to be dragged into something else. Another party where I won’t fit in. But the fear of being left out allows me to get dragged along with Dan.
Alisha and her new group of friends, who I can already tell are much too wild for me, maybe even worse than the people who I work with, are at the bar with more shots that I would assume is humanly possible for anyone to drink. But they are passed around to everyone and there is a lot of cheering before the liquid vanishes completely. Well, everyone else does. It takes me a lot to glug back my drink because it burns my freaking throat. It is so hot that it burns like crazy. I don’t know how anyone would drink this with that kind of ease. It’s insane. It’s disgusting. I’m only doing it because everyone else is and I want to fit in the environment. I feel this intense need to do because of everything that has happened to me in the past. I need these friends to make my brand new life complete.
“I’m getting more shots,” Alisha cries over everyone else excitedly. “Same again for everyone?”
I don’t want anything else to drink. I can barely handle it. So, I tell Dan that I’m heading to the bathroom for a moment because I’m too much in need of a moment away from all of the booze. I’m hoping that once I come back to the group, everyone else will be done with the shots and we can move on to something less dreadful.
But I can’t make it to the bathroom, there are too many people in the way and a group of angry looking women waiting in the queue to get inside and I know for sure that I won’t be able to go inside that room for even a moment without a bunch of people screaming at me that I am pushing in the queue. Instead, I decide to go outside because fresh air will do me good. That will help me get my head back in order because right now the booze has made me a mess.