Dancing with Molly - Lena Horowitz Page 0,35

stopped kissing and turned around just as Carson lunged onto Brandon and hauled back his fist to hit him again. I heard someone yell NO! and realized that it was me. Suddenly Pete materialized out of thin air and tried to pull Brandon to his feet as Reid jumped in and held back Carson’s arm, which was ready to fly toward Brandon’s head again.

Damn speedy ecstasy. I guess this is what those kids on that forum were talking about. They mentioned that every once in a while the balance of the MDMA to the caffeine or speed, or whatever they cut it with, is seriously off. I still can’t imagine anybody throwing a punch while rolling on molly, but maybe ecstasy just affects people differently. Or maybe Carson would have hit Brandon for trying to kiss me stone-cold sober. Whichever, it happened, and all the guys were yelling at each other, while Ashley stood there, wide-eyed, her jaw clenched, her arm wrapped around her stomach like she was going to throw up.

I went over to her and hugged her and told her it was going to be okay, and Jess came over to us and said, Let’s go get some air. She and Kelly were leading the way toward the door when we saw the big metal door of the warehouse fly up and red-and-blue flashing lights. These weren’t part of the light show. They were coming from a cop car and an ambulance. Jess and Kelly stopped dead in their tracks as two paramedics and a cop started shoving their way through the crowd toward us. I was so confused. Ashley yelled over the noise, Did you call the COPS? And I was about to say NO when they pushed past us, and we turned to see them move past Carson, Reid, Pete, and Brandon, who was standing there with his head back, holding his T-shirt up to his nose.

It was only then that I saw a circle had cleared on the other side of the block where Ashley and Reid had been dancing. There was a girl with dark hair lying on the concrete floor. As the lights swept across her, I could see that she was twitching, violently, her mouth covered with a weird white liquid that seemed to bubble up from inside her. Soon, the paramedics and the cop surrounded her, and Jess appeared in front of all of us and shouted, LET’S GO! NOW!

Jess grabbed Kelly by the hand and cleared a path through the crowd, pushing and shoving people out of her way. We muscled our way past the DJ booth, where Kyle was still spinning, headphones on, lost in his own music. Finally we hit the cool air of the outside, and we started running.

We didn’t stop until we were back at our cars.

Everybody except for Pete and Brandon went back to Kelly’s house after we left the club. Kelly and Carson drove everybody, and I didn’t really grasp until yesterday morning when we all woke up sprawled across the couches and carpet what a truly terrible idea it was for ANYONE to be driving.

I thought Ashley would be totally freaked out, but after we got back to Kelly’s we all tried to relax in the hot tub and Kelly passed around a little bong she had packed with some really good weed. It helped everybody chill out and come down from the speedy ecstasy nice and easy. Eventually, everybody crashed. We were waking up when Kyle got home, and Kelly came around with waters and the biggest bottle of Advil I’d ever seen. Kyle told us that the girl who had passed out was a regular at that warehouse party every month. He knows some of her friends and is going to see if he can find out some details about what happened to her.

When we got home, Mom wanted to know all the details. We’d told her we were spending the night at Kelly’s house after we went to an eighteen-and-under club with Reid, Carson, and Jess. Sometimes I think my mom just wants to believe what we’re telling her so that she can live vicariously through our teenage lives. She didn’t really get to do that much fun stuff when she was a kid. Her dad was sort of a mean drunk, and he ran off when she was in eighth grade, so the whole time she was in high school she had to work at a department store to