Broken pens, Bic lighters, and sticky dimes and pennies floated up through the cushions of the sofa and pinched the thighs of the teenagers who were all supposed to be somewhere else. Someone fiddled with the six-disc changer. More bodies found space on the carpet stained with Heineken and trodden by Converse and combat boots into intricate patterns like a batik tapestry of filth.
It was Lynn’s turn. She sat in a dry spot on the carpet near the window and loaded a cartridge into the whipped cream dispenser. The cartridge made a whooshing sound as she twisted it into place, like it was sighing with satisfaction at what it was about to do. She put the end of the nozzle in her mouth and gripped the lever.
Lynn’s mom didn’t know she was at the apartment, or sucking on an empty container designed to transform heavy cream into a whipped dessert topping. Minus the cream (a kid one year older than Lynn had recently discovered) the container acted as a simple and cheap nitrous oxide delivery system-if you could get the old ladies at the kitchen supply store at the mall to sell you the cartridges. If Lynn’s mom had known where and what she was doing, she might have said something like Didn’t we raise you better? or Who do you think you are? but maybe that was the before mom. Lynn’s now mom was busy crying in the dark to Barry Manilow records. Now mom was busy staring out the kitchen window and not responding.
A darkness filled Lynn’s head. It was a sweet darkness that tasted like confectioner’s sugar, or the trace of bubble gum left on your lips a few minutes after you’ve blown your last bubble. The room within Lynn’s view got smaller, filling in from the edges like the aperture of a camera closing. Lynn leaned forward and hung her head.
The sweet darkness traveled through her body via her great saphenous and femoral arteries, popliteal and tibial, axial, radial, ulnar and brachial until for one quick moment, Lynn’s entire self and all it had ever known did not exist. No Levis, no Phantom of the Opera t-shirt. No taking the train to visit her dad in Colorado Springs and spending the whole summer in his living room watching The Price is Right while he drywalled other people’s houses wondering whether he wanted her to come all that distance every year or if it was just her mother’s way of getting rid of her. No standing up at every stop on the way home thinking about getting off. Simply grabbing her bag, departing the train car, and walking into a new life in Denver or Omaha or Sioux Falls where she could say she was eighteen and get a job waiting tables in one of those diners where you get to wear a little pastel dress with a nametag and a flip notebook to write orders on like that smart and courageous woman on the TV show she used to watch after school who took her son to Arizona or someplace like that after her shitty husband died and they both did just fine.
Lynn felt a warm hand on hers and a boy wearing a Cobain-inspired cardigan passed the container to the next person. Lynn’s aperture widened and she saw the kitchen to her right with stacks of pots and pans crusted with Ramen noodles and days-old mac-n-cheese. She saw the sofa to her left with the shins of the girl from history class who’d driven her there and the knees of some guy she’d seen around, knobby and covered with hairs poking out of the rips in his bilateral denim.
Who wants Queen? someone across the room asked before pressing play on We Are the Champions and Lynn returned to her body like a low cloud settling into a gulley. The next nitrous cartridge hissed. As the girl from school kissed the boy on the sofa, their lips made small wet clicks. Someone handed Lynn a Marlboro and she dug in her pocket for a lighter, lit the end, and inhaled deeply to make the red embers draw far back into the white paper.
A car door slammed in the parking lot on the other side of the wall. Other people had it worse, Lynn knew. Kids got hit, she was aware, and much more. She should be glad, she understood, exhaling the sweet smoke that tasted inexplicably like raisins. No one ever laid a hand on her. Not as far back as she could remember.