WHO: Little [narrative] WHEN: Friday night WHERE: All over NYC WHAT: Little going off the deep end... WARNINGS: sexual references, drug use
There was no use in pretending any more for Little, because it didn't work. Pretending she wasn't going to get sick and pretending she still cared about things like school or anything long term was just ridiculous, so she'd dropped it. She started going out to the sort of parties she'd always been against - because she hadn't wanted to look like an idiot in front of the cool kids, because she hadn't wanted to worry her parents, because she wasn't interested in messing herself up like Thomas had done at her age.
She stays out late and texts her mom that she's sleeping at a friend's place. She doesn't know if her mom really believes her, but she also doesn't really care that much. She follows people across the city and drinks in their living rooms and sneaks into abandoned buildings with them to break things. A boy offers her a blue pill he says is amazing, and Little takes it. It makes the night spiral and dance. She doesn't know what it is. She doesn't ask. Other people at other parties have different coloured pills and she takes anyone someone puts in her hand.
A boy puts his hand inside her top while they're kissing and for a while she lets him. But the hot, twitching lump touching against the inside of her thigh makes her scared and sick and she eventually finds an excuse to run away and go dance, a half empty bottle of something or other in her hand. Boys are frightening and Little is trying to get away from frightning.
Sometimes she kisses girls instead. Because it's fun and because there's never any expectation there. She isn't really interested in girls - they don't make her stomach flutter and drop the way that boys do - but she likes kissing them well enough. It makes the boys cheer them on, and Little likes when their cheer her on. They cheered her on when she smashed a window in the old hospital. They cheered her on when she spraypainted FUCK THE POLICE on the side of a parked van. They like Little. They think she's fun, and Little feels fun around them. She feels alive and unstoppable and nothing else can really matter when she's out with them.
At school she half-dozes through classes and her average grades drop far below that. Sometimes she doesn't go to class at all, but instead hides around the back of the old science buildings where they gather to smoke. (She doesn't smoke much herself. She hates the taste of it unless she's drunk.)
She's stopped seeing her old friends. She's stopped visiting Thane and Lyra. She's stopped spending more time at home than she needs to.
It's easier to be out - out of the house, out of herself, out of her own thoughts. It's easier to seek out thrills and adreneline rushes and new highs and run through the city with her hair streaming behind as she laughs like a banshee.