Mickey's POV:

It wasn’t unusual to see me intoxicated somewhere in the city or any other random road I had access to. However, it was unusual to see me in that state all by myself. There were often people around me while I was hanging off the arm of my prey that night. Now, I was most likely in the presence of my ‘boyfriend’, Devon, and the friend group that surrounded him. There was a seventy-percent chance that if you caught us together at night, we’d be either high, drunk, or both. It’s just how things went.

Except for that night.

You see, that night, I was all by myself. Rather than using my fake ID to get into some sweaty and stuffy club so I could use my body for all the right things and rub against people, I used it to get into a fairly quiet bar. With fairly quiet, I meant you had the same old people watching a sports match on the low resolution screen above the bar, your guys staring at the ass of a girl I’d usually be like, miserable dates, friend groups, and that one guy who felt out of place because he was the designated driver and had to drive everybody home.

I wasn’t there to have a good time and hook up with somebody older than me. After the day I had had, I didn’t feel like having any proper fun. My cheek still hurt to touch and felt tender, and my confidence wasn’t exactly at its peak. After picking me up from school, my biological father made sure to show me how disappointed he was before disappearing again. It wasn’t difficult getting up and leaving the house, and I knew for a fact that he would never know I had escaped. He was going to be too far gone for that himself.

Despite the unhealthy amount of alcohol I had consumed, I knew better than to get in my truck and drive. With my experience of drinking, I knew my boundaries even though I--just like everybody else with a sane mind--did not want to admit it. That didn’t mean I was smart enough to do the responsible and find my way home, whether that be at my parents’ house, or fucking Michael’s house. I, of course, preferred not to have to go back to my father, but I also didn’t think of the possibility of just going home. Alcohol really did strange things to people… as I had learned at an early age.

So, stumbling down the strange roads it was; no destination and no willpower to find out where I was walking myself to.

Nobody even seemed to be bothered to stop the drunk girl who obviously wasn’t doing ok. All the faces either seemed disgusted or frightened. I wasn’t going to hurt anybody, I just needed a place to stay for the night. But without knowing my whereabouts, the options were limited to sleeping on the sidewalk. And to me, asphalt wasn’t the most comfortable pillow and mattress.

My journey continued until I was in the suburbs and recognized my surroundings. Letting out a high-pitched drunken giggle, I staggered towards the cream-colored two-story house. When walking up the driveway, I let my fingers trail over the smooth metallic colors of the cars. They looked so much different from my rusty car that was slowly losing all its red paint. I would have given anything for a new car that didn’t break down every single time there was just a little more rain than a drizzle or every time I went a little bit too fast. But, hey, life didn’t work that way and at least I had a mode of transportation.

I rang the doorbell and waited for an answer. When nobody came and all I could hear was my breathing, I grabbed a handful of gravel that I found next to the path and started throwing the small stones at a window on the second floor. My aim was absolutely horrible, the stones often hitting the wall instead and some even flying way past the house. But a couple still managed to hit the glass, as evident by a light turning on behind the curtains.

I quickly toppled over to the front door and rang the doorbell again, holding myself up by pressing the palm of one of my hands flat against the wall. Without the support, I would have fallen over in no time. The last couple of drinks I had were still taking their effect. No matter what was going to happen, I knew I wasn’t going to remember a thing, and that was my intention. Getting drunk without a reason just seemed unreasonable… In my drunken state, that pun sounded hilarious, and I was already laughing to myself before the door opened.

“Mickey, what the hell are you doing here?” Alex whispered aggressively as he looked around behind me to see if I had brought anybody else along.

“Alex!” I cheered and raised my hands as if I were on a rollercoaster, only causing me to lose my balance. Luckily, Alex caught me as I started tumbling in slow motion. If he hadn’t, my hair probably wouldn’t have been the only deep red substance surrounding my head on the floor.

“How much have you had to drink?!” He used all his strength to keep me upright and not accidentally make me fall over towards the opposite side.

“Like, this much!” I gasped, making large gestures with my hands, showing a length of about five feet, as if that were supposed to answer his question. To me, that quantity made complete sense, but to an outsider, it must have only looked funny and confirmed that I was too drunk to think properly.

“As much as I am surprised to see you here, you can’t just show up and ring the doorbell at three in the morning, Mickey.”

“Oh…” I stared at him, my eyes showing guilt. I didn’t know what else to say; I hadn’t even realized that what I’d done wasn’t as acceptable as I originally thought. He was always trying to figure out a way to be around me, but now I was here and he didn’t even care.

He sighed and shook his head, still holding on to me. “You know what? Come in, I can hardly leave you outside like this.”

I was guided inside the house I had only been in once before on the very first day of school. Back then, I hadn’t paid much attention to what the house looked like, and in my drunken stupor, I didn’t bother to do so this time either. I was more focused on not hitting any furniture and not making my balance any more difficult on Alex than it already was.

He tried to sit me down on a chair at the dining table, but it was a whole lot more difficult than either of us expected. I couldn’t sit down myself without making all my weight fall on top of Alex, and he couldn’t exactly do the sitting for me either. So, eventually, all we could do was that he in a way just had to push me on the chair while trying to lower my weight. However, that didn’t work as planned either. I was almost on the chair when I suddenly fell beside it and made another chair scrape the floor at the same time. In the end, I was laying on the floor and laughing at the whole situation.

“Mickey, you’ve got to be quiet, my parents are still sleeping.” Alex cringed and rushed over to help me up again.

My giggles didn’t help at all. If I had been weak before, I was basically a sack of potatoes then. All my core muscles turned to mush as I laughed. Alex, however, easily picked me up and placed me on the chair. As he pushed on my shoulders to keep me up, he begged me to quiet down again. I did so this time, no longer knowing what I was laughing about, and managed to sit ‘normally’ without any further help. All he had to do now was figure out what to do with me.

His plan of trying to make as little noise as possible so his parents wouldn’t know what was going on didn’t exactly work. We had been in the house without any lights on except a small light in the hallway that turned on whenever it turned dark. However, somehow the real light magically turned on, making me gasp in amazement. I didn’t know Alex was a magician! With tricks like this, he could easily become world famous!

But then a voice accompanied the action. “What in the world is going on in here?” A woman appeared from the hallway and looked at the pair of us. “Alex?”

“I swear she just showed up, I couldn’t just let her fend for herself in a state like this!” He was quick to defend himself, raising his hands up to show his innocence, just to make sure that he wouldn’t be accused of hanging out at a bar as well. But let’s be honest here, would he really have been standing in just a white t-shirt and boxers if that were the case?

“You have a very nice house, Mrs…” I stuttered messily before turning to Alex and frowning. “I don’t know your what-cha-ma-call-it. You know, the thing we often call teachers by? The 'Bond' in 'James Bond'!”

“Gaskarth,” he whispered underneath his breath.

“Well, Mrs. Gaskarth, you have a very nice house. I’ve been here once before, but I didn’t really have time to look around. To be honest, I can’t exactly look around now either because my vision is fucked up.”

“Alex…” Mrs. Gaskarth repeated, still not understanding what a random drunk girl was doing in her house.

“She goes to my school, she just moved here. I also don’t know why she came here-- wait, how did you even get here, did you drive?” Alex explained before realization hit him and he completely ignored the fact that his mom was in the room and had asked him something.

I snorted, resisting the temptation to laugh in his face, “I may be failing school, but I’m not that fucking dumb, Alex. Have a little fucking faith in me!”

“Alex!” His mother scolded yet another time. She probably thought I would be a terrible influence on her son, which was probably true, but something told me she didn’t know just how bad he already was.

“Mom!” He replied in a similar tone and pointed at me. “We can’t just force her to leave and fend for herself in a state like this. Would you want somebody to take care of me if I was this drunk?”

“Ok, alright,” she shook her head in a disapproving manner and walked up closer to me before crouching down, “do you want us to call your parents? I know you might not want to face them right now, but it will be better in the long run.”

“No,” I groaned and clutched my head, hoping it would stop the world from spinning, “they’re not in town, there’s no point in contacting them.”

“Is there anybody else I can contact? Are you staying with somebody else?”

“There’s always somebody you can contact, but the question is if they’re the right person to contact,” I tapped my temple and pointed at her as if I had just said the smartest thing ever, but drunk me could turn anything into something deep, which with further thinking sounded like the biggest bullshit ever, “but I’m staying with my deadbeat biological father.”

I wasn’t sure if it was the alcohol playing with my mind even more than it already was, but Alex looked like he had just found the key to a great mystery. He seemed shocked and worried, but that could also have been because I was struggling even more with holding myself up in the chair than before and not because of whatever words had left my mouth.

Mrs. Gaskarth kept questioning me to help find a solution to the uncomfortable problem we were having. “Ok, and where is he? Why would he let you go out like--”

“Don’t even bother,” I scoffed loudly before my disgust turned into loud laughter. This subject wasn’t anything to laugh about, but it was a very drunk defense mechanism. “He’s possibly at a bar, drinking until he passes out in the bathroom or on the street; maybe he’s at a strip club spending all his rent money; it wouldn’t surprise me if he somehow found a hooker and parked his car underneath a bridge; I don’t know whether he’s done any drugs lately, but that’s also a possibility. Just look out for all the sketchy places in town and you’ll probably find him in no time.”

“We can’t let her go back to him,” Alex stated and gave his mother a stern glare. “Whatever you do, you can't do that.”

“I lived with him the first thirteen years of my life, I can survive a couple more nights,” I shrugged off, trying to stand up to prove my point. Of course, I secretly hoped they wouldn’t let me go back out like this, but maybe Alex thought I would be too stubborn to give in like that and would just let me go on my way.

“Thirteen years?” Alex gasped as I fell back down on the chair. I could see Mrs. Gaskarth looking at her son weirdly. Honestly, I felt the same way. Why did it even matter to him?

But drunk me didn’t have a filter. “That asshole made the judge believe that my mom was the drug addict and so he got full custody of me. My mom swooped in when I was thirteen, though, and brought him to court again. And now I’m here. I’ve been all over the country because no school wants me.”

Mrs. Gaskarth decided to interrupt before I poured more of my heart out; I was going to have to thank her for that later, because Alex did not need to know about everything that had happened. “Ok, she can stay in the guest room, but I will not allow your drunk friends to come over all the time.”

“I’m not his friend,” I grumbled.

“Yeah, well, you came here for a reason.” Alex struggled to pick me up, but wouldn’t let his mom help him.

When he finally was holding me with one arm under my legs and the other behind my back, I stared up at him, my vision going really blurry. “You know, I wasn’t always like this. I used to get straight A’s and swore to never touch alcohol. Look at me now.” I froze up and gasped, “I’m not like my father, am I?”

And that’s when I blacked out completely.

Notes

Decided to finish this off while I still had the time. Now, back to the idea board!