The Best Friend Scandal - Lucia Jordan Page 0,28

on, Hensley, you need some more fun.”

I hesitated, but everyone at the table was popping them like candy.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll just take one.”

I pulled one of the little silver balls out of the bag and put it in my mouth. It was so small that I had swallowed it before I even realized I had. For a few minutes, I didn’t feel anything. We had a round of drinks brought to the table, and everyone talked about the runway show and then about what gigs and shows they were moving to next. Then we all got up to go dance. Cai popped another pill into his mouth and shoved the rest of the bag into his tight jeans pocket. They must be pretty mild if he can take that many of them.

When we started to dance, I began to feel the effects of the pill. Everything in the nightclub seemed saturated, and all of my senses began to feel overstimulated in a good way. Cai grabbed my waist and pushed his pelvis against mine as we danced, and the feel of other bodies swirling around us was intoxicating. I danced and felt my hair brush across my face and felt Cai’s hands hold me as we swayed against each other. I was dreamy and hazy, and almost as if I weren’t all the way inside my body. I looked up to see Cai, and when I did, he pushed his mouth against mine to kiss me.

For a moment, I was startled and didn’t move, but then when I felt his tongue swirl around mine, I pushed him away and stepped back. When I swallowed, I felt like I had swallowed a handful of tiny stones.

“There you go,” he said with a wide grin. “Now, you’ll start to feel something.”

“What did you do?” I asked him as I started to feel a little terrified.

He reached forward and grabbed me in his arms again and held me upright against his body for support as I started to feel the room spin around me. I let him hold me because his arms were the only things keeping me from falling to the floor.

“I shared a bit more with you,” he whispered in my ear as he kissed the side of my neck. “You’re welcome.”

I was going to say something to him in return, but all of my thoughts suddenly seemed to blur together, and my voice disappeared as if I had never had one. I felt like a marionette whose strings were the only thing holding her up, and I wasn’t in control of pulling them. All of the faces and bodies churned around me, and I watched them with eyes that felt like they weren’t blinking anymore. It looked like the crowd had merged into one collective body with one communal face. The face looked back at me with dozens of eyes that seemed to stare at me in all different directions. I tried to ask Cai what was happening, but all that I heard come out of my mouth was a garbled noise that sounded like I was trying to talk through a mouthful of Jell-O.

Cai laughed and twirled me around and then pulled me close against him so that my head flopped against his chest and my teeth knocked together.

“You’re hallucinating now, aren’t you?” he asked. “That’s the best part.”

I felt his breath on the side of my neck, and then I felt my own warm breath in front of my face. I could see it as if it were a puff of smoke swirling out of my mouth and into the air around me. I looked down my nose at it, and then I saw that the angle of my nose changing. It felt different, too. It looked like the snout of a dragon, and my whole jaw looked like the muzzle of the leathery skin of a dark-green dragon. I was turning into a dragon, and I was blowing smoke from my nostrils. I was too enthralled in the experience of what I was seeing, and feeling, and becoming, to notice what happened next.

All of a sudden, I was being wrenched away from Cai. His arms came off from being around me, and something else was holding me instead. I watched my dragon smoke coming from my nostrils dissipate in the space between us, and my nose started to look like it had before. I looked at Cai, who was laughing while also looking a little bit