Out of Order Read Online Free PDF Page B

something; I couldn’t remember.
    “I don’t feel so great anymore,” I said after what felt like hours but what could have been only a few minutes. “What if someone finds out we did this? What if my mom finds out?”
    “No one will find out,” Kate sighed. “Unless they’re spying on us. Could someone be spying on us?”
    We got up, still wrapped up in each other, and went to the window. We squinted outside through the frosted glass, but there wasn’t a nose squished to the other side. We were on the second floor.
    “What if they’re hiding in the bathtub?” Kate asked in a stage whisper, her breath hot against my ear. I shivered, and then eyed the bathtub skeptically. Rationally, I knew there wasn’t anything behind the shower curtain, but I felt a chill creep up my spine and a paranoid voice in my brain began to whisper, “But what if there is ? What if they hurt Kate?”
    I wrenched myself out of Kate’s frightened grip and flung open the shower curtain, ripping it from its loops by accident. (One of us had to be the brave one.)
    We sighed with relief; there was no one in the bathtub.
    “Let’s do some more, I think it’s wearing off,” Kate said, opening her purse. She dabbed some more out of a little plastic baggie onto the back of her hand and snorted it loudly. She put more on and held it up to my face. I followed her lead, took another hit.
    The second one didn’t feel as good as the first. It went away faster, didn’t bring the same elation, the same floatiness that I was craving. I wanted to transcend time and space; Kate’s fingers in my hair felt good, but not amazing .
    We took another hit, chasing that first good high.
    We each did a line instead of a dab the fourth time, drawn with Kate’s bank card and snorted with a rolled-up twenty dollar bill just like in the movies. That was it—we were out of cocaine. She’d only stolen a couple of grams from her brother’s stash.
    “My face is numb,” I said, twiddling my thumbs. I had a pain behind my eyes that I couldn’t blink away, like the beginnings of a headache. “Is your face numb?”
    “A little,” Kate admitted, rubbing the raw skin just under her nose. Her cheeks were still flushed, her eyes a little wet. She’d done more than me, having started before she came over. She leaned in and rubbed the tip of her nose along my cheek. “Yeah, numb.”
    I hummed in response, tilted my head to catch her lips in a kiss. Kate kissed back eagerly, her mouth slick against my own, a little sloppy. Our teeth clacked against each other in a way that might have been painful, but I didn’t feel it. I was floating again, so good.
    Kate pulled away, glassy-eyed. “Totally numb,” she said, blinking at me slowly. “I barely even felt that.”
    “I felt it,” I said, bumping my nose against hers. She kicked out a leg and knocked over the wastepaper basket beside the toilet.
    “Oops,” she giggled.
    I kissed her again, wrapped my arms around her. She went with it, stopping to laugh a little and then sucking greedily on my tongue. I felt higher off of her than I had on the first hit of cocaine.
    We ended up horizontal on the bathroom floor, my head on her arm. I rubbed my numb nose into the crook of her elbow, feeling blissed out. We’d only kissed, but it felt like so much more than that. I’d kissed people before, boys, but it had never felt so good.
    “Your arm is so soft,” I said, licking at the blue veins visible through the pale, thin skin of her elbow. “And you taste so good .”
    “Thank you,” Kate laughed, pushing my bangs off my forehead. “I’m tired.”
    “Me too.”
    We closed our eyes, but couldn’t find sleep. “I can’t sleep here,” I said. “Let’s go to my bed.”
    “You propo—prop—prop’sitioning me?” Kate said, a slur on the edge of her voice. “Because I wasn’t actually going to sleep with you. I was joking before. I didn’t mean it.”
    I tried not to feel disappointed. “No,” I said.