The Same Place (The Lamb and the Lion #2) - Gregory Ashe Page 0,28

to feel anything at all. He closed his eyes. After a moment, he was fine.

“Hey, buddy.”

“Yep,” Jem said, touching the wad of cash in his pocket, making sure it was still there. “I’m perfect.”

He made it to Chaquille’s without any more problems.

“Shit,” Chaquille said when he answered the door. Tall, skinny, his hair in cornrows with a tight fade, Chaquille didn’t look like what most people probably expected a grad student in aerospace engineering to look like. He was on fellowship and, from what Jem had pieced together, had turned down offers from Boeing and JPL before starting the program. He was wearing a tank printed with a huge marijuana leaf and the numbers 4/20 and boxer shorts with cartoon space shuttles. Behind him, strobe lights flashed inside the apartment, and a steady beat reverberated through the air. In his usual croaky voice, he asked, “What happened to you?”

Jem flashed the roll of cash.

“Fuck yeah,” Chaquille said, pushing the door open wider.

After that, the night blurred for Jem. He smoked a couple of joints, tossed back shots of something that burned like hell and had an aftertaste like pineapple, and ended up making out with a guy wearing eyeliner and a skinny black tie. He didn’t recognize a lot of the music—he thought they were EDM remixes of songs he’d never heard originally—but the thumping bass and the frenetic pace blended with the weed and the booze and the guy grinding on him. Eventually, the guy in the skinny black tie left to get a drink and didn’t come back, and Jem found himself sprawled on a patched sofa next to Chaquille.

“What’s so funny?” Chaquille shouted over the music.

That was when Jem realized he was laughing. He tried to rein it in, but it kept exploding out of him in huge, hysterical guffaws. Chaquille’s eyes were flat and dull and unruffled, partly from his own blaze, partly from his natural personality. It was what made coming to Chaquille’s easy.

“He’s just such a selfish, self-absorbed bag of dicks,” Jem managed to say between fits of laughter.

“Who?” Chaquille said.

“Both of them,” Jem said, and then he was laughing too hard to stop.

Chaquille said something to a girl who was wearing nothing but an MIT t-shirt and a pair of black panties. She rolled her eyes, sauntered over to the kitchen, and came back with four shot glasses. Rolling her eyes again, in case Chaquille had missed it, she lined up the shots in front of Jem.

“Fuck ‘em,” Chaquille said too loudly into Jem’s ear.

“Yeah,” Jem said, grabbing the shot. “Fuck him.”

These tasted like cinnamon, roaring to life at the back of Jem’s throat. He finished all four and felt like he was breathing fire. His head sagged back on the couch. Just like Puff. Breathing fire just like Puff the Magic Dragon. What would Tean say about that? Probably something about how Puff was contributing to the irreversible effects of climate change by releasing more greenhouse gasses. Jem laughed so hard that he fell off the couch. Then he was gone.

When he woke, the apartment was painfully quiet, and his mouth tasted like dog shit. A needle of light came in through curtains that hadn’t been closed properly, and Jem blinked, moaned, and squeezed his eyes shut. The headache that had been waiting at the back of his skull lunged forward, and he moaned again. He was pretty sure his two options were: a) die right there, right then, immediately; b) crawl into a hole and die there, maybe fifteen minutes from now. Option A sounded pretty good, but Option B wasn’t bad either.

When a few minutes passed and he hadn’t died, Jem got to his feet, wiping his eyes, wincing as the room rocked around him. The thunder in his head redoubled. The kitchen and living area of Chaquille’s apartment were a continuum of the same space, and Jem spotted the girl in the MIT t-shirt curled up in an armchair, and the guy with the skinny black tie passed out on the floor. The guy had a Truman Capote-style hat covering his face, and Jem made the mistake of rolling his eyes. He paid for it with another groan.

Picking a path over sleeping bodies, Jem made his way to the door. He patted his pocket, found a single ten-dollar bill left from his score, and thanked God for McGriddles. When he slipped out of the apartment, Chaquille was in a webbed lawn chair on the stoop, poring over a page