Page 59 of A Very No Strings Halloween
“You were magnificent.” I reach for him. With the tip of an index finger. There’s that buzzing again. “Do you hear that? The buzzing? Why is it so loud?”
“It’s your phone. You want it?”
I sigh. “I don’t want to open my eyes. Can you check to see who it is?”
I feel him reach under my pillow. “It’s your friend from last night. Chelsea.”
“From last night?”
“Yeah, she’s textin’ to make sure you got home okay. And she thinks I’m hot. And she sent you a bunch of pictures and a video.”
“Huh?”
I squint my eyes to watch the video that’s playing on my phone. It’s of me and Billy on a small stage, singing “Monster Mash” into microphones. The camera pulls back to reveal Declan dancing and Nolan playing the keyboard. Declan appears to be taking his shirt off. And then it pans around to show one or two hundred people in Halloween costumes singing and dancing along with us. Then there’s a close-up of Harley Quinn, who says, in Chelsea’s voice, “That’s my bestie, bitches!” right before the video ends.
I get strobe light flashes of memories of being in a motor boat and climbing up onto the side of a yacht. “Did we crash a Halloween party cruise?”
“Well, that depends on your definition of crashing a party,” Billy says. “Is it crashing a party if your friend tells us where she is and we decide to join her even though we don’t have tickets and then we make that mediocre party awesome? I think not.”
I text my friend a thumbs-up emoji and close myeyes again. “I’ve never done anything like that before,” I tell him.
“Well, if you hadn’t been there that guy might have died.”
“What? What guy?”
“After we did the Time Warp that guy started choking on an eyeball grape and you Heimliched him.”
“What’s an eyeball grape?”
“You know. Grapes that are decorated like eyeballs.”
I save the pictures Chelsea sent me to my photo library and scroll through some other pictures. I bring the phone closer to my face, blink, and look closer. “That is a fantastic Steven Tyler costume,” I marvel. I am such a huge Aerosmith fan. “That is great makeup. It looks just like him.”
“That’s not a costume,” Billy says matter-of-factly. “That’s Steven Tyler. You don’t remember being at his estate?”
“What? Doesn’t he live in Marshfield? How did we get there?”
“I know a guy with a helicopter.”
I scrunch up my face, hoping that will help squeeze memories out of my brain cells, but I got nothing. “Oh, wait. Did I cry on his couch?”
“For a little while. But it was a happy cry. You told him about how you lostyour virginity to ‘Dream On.’”
“Ohhh noooo. I carved penises into all of his jack-o’-lanterns.”
“Yes, but in your defense, he didn’t say you couldn’t.”
I try to cover my face with my hands but end up smacking myself. “Ow.”
“You okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me what you need.”
I smile again. With my face. I think. “Mouth,” I say.
“Mine?”
