Chapter 17 Snippet - Shon's Downhill Tumble

     There are only a couple people who really know what happened at that party that night – God and the parent of the girl who threw the party. That mother wasn’t very happy when she came in the next morning to find several teenagers and college students passed out across her living room furniture. I didn’t even know what happened when I woke to her screaming and kicking beer bottles across the floor to get to her daughter’s bedroom. I just knew I had a matter of time to find my pants and Damon and get the hell out of there. I really wasn’t sure why I was having to search for my pants, but I seriously hoped no one called my phone in nine months to tell me when to show up for child support court.

     Damon came running from the bedroom, hands holding up his unzipped pants, threw my pants at me, and screamed at me to hurry. I saw her mom come running out next with a lamp in her hand, followed by the daughter, draped in a towel, pleading her mother to “leave him alone.” Damon laughed as he ducked out the door, dodging other passed out people and a yapping dog. I jumped up and followed as quickly as I could, pants in one hand and a half empty bottle of whiskey in the other. Damon already had the car in reverse by the time I jumped in, and somehow, I managed to get both legs in and the door shut before we sped off.

     We laughed the whole way back to Damon’s house that morning. Damon bragged about how he nailed the girl who had the party. He said it looked as if I had gotten lucky too, and I just went with it. I didn’t see any other way around why I wasn’t wearing my pants. I at least knew there was no other excuse that wouldn’t get me laughed at. So, I nodded and sucked down the rest of the whiskey in an attempt at ridding myself of the horrible hangover I felt.

     “I think I left my underwear in ole girl’s bedroom,” he laughed as we pulled into his apartment complex. “Oh well. It’s not like I’ll ever see her again to get it back.” He laughed again, and we got out to go inside and crash in his mom’s living room.

     It was around one in the afternoon when we woke up again. This time, I awoke to Damon kicked my leg that was hanging off the couch. He was standing over me, shouting at me to get up so we could head back out to his uncle’s farm. I jumped up off the couch, slid my shoes on without untying them first, and we headed out the door.

     When we got to his uncle’s farm, he decided he was going to wait in the car while I walked up to the abandoned house on the other side of the barn. I walked straight into the back door of the house like I owned the place and slid down the wall in what looked to be the living room of the house. The house was empty minus a few empty bottles scattered on the floor and some cigarette butts on the floor of the kitchen. The window to the front door was broken. I assumed it was so someone could unlock the door and come inside. The front window was boarded up and the two windows in the back of the room had blankets hung from them. Someone had tried to repair the broken window on the door with duct tape. There were a couple holes in the wall of the room I sat in. It looked like someone had put their fist through the wall.

     I got up to give myself a tour of the rest of the house. I went through the kitchen first. There was one window in there that had a blanket over it as well. A couple of the cabinet doors were swung open. Spiders had built webs all across the kitchen. I went past the kitchen through the hallway where there were two bedrooms. In one, I saw a mattress in the middle of the floor with a boarded up window above it. There were no sheets or blankets on the mattress, and it had a huge stain in the middle of it. I walked into the other room that was completely empty. The closet door sat open. The window in that room had been boarded up too. There were some markings on the door of the room – typical initials and who loved who.

I went to the other end of the house where I originally came from. There was another bedroom off that end of the house, attached to the living room. It had a mattress in it too. It looked like one of those blow up mattresses you use on camping trips. This one had a single pillow at one end of it. There was a sheet lying in the floor beside the mattress. The carpet in this room, like everywhere else in the house, was filthy. There were black spots in various locations on the carpet. This room had two windows. One was boarded up, and the other had a blanket over it. In the blanket was what looked to be a peep hole so someone could see outside. There were spider webs in the corners of this room as well. In one corner of the room was a crumpled up chip bag and an empty pack of cigarettes.

I went over to the peep hole in the blanket to look outside. It was then that I saw Tyrone pull up not far from the house in the wooded area. He jumped out and looked around before he grabbed a backpack and crossed the open space over to the house. I made my way back into the living room to wait on him to come in. He opened the front door and walked in. He turned to look back outside before shutting and locking the door behind him. He crossed the room to the back door and made sure it was locked before he said anything. “Hey man, it’s been a minute, huh?”