The After Life Of The Party

[GameMaker*]

Suggested listening: Maria! (West Side Story)


It was a typical Friday night, and JJ had been chilling at his house, playing Madden when his friend Trent had called him. He was having a little banger at his house; nothing huge, not like a kegger or anything, but a good like 40-50 people. Trent went to some gay ass private school, JJ knew, but he had met him working during the summer. He was alright, and he knew some sluts from the all girls schools in the area. Hot ones, too, and usually he gave JJ free beer. All in all, it was a pretty sweet deal, even if Trent could be a bit of a bitch sometimes.

Now, JJ was at Trent’s house, waiting with him for other people to come in. He was stretched out on the coach in his white T-shirt and jeans, a smirk on his face and a mischievous look in his eyes. It was look of a predator in the jungle, a look of confidence and hunger as it surveys its domain. He had his hand propped underneath his chin, a slight up turn at each side of his mouth, and a cold beer on the table in front of him.

“There’s gonna be a lot of hot girls here tonight, JJ.” Trent was seated across from him, a beer in his hands too, and he was smiling. There were a few guys there right now, JJ and Trent obviously, but a few of their friends too. “A lot of hot, single girls. You think you’ll be making a move, my dude? Or are you still fucking that girl from Colehurst?”

“Yeah, I’m still fucking her. To be honest though, she’s starting to get on my nerves, and besides-“ JJ paused, taking a sip of his beer “-what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her, right? But we’ll see, man, I’m just trying to have fun tonight.”

Then the doorbell rang, and JJ felt one of the oddest feelings of his life. A terrible feeling in the center of his chest, in his heart, for just a moment. He felt like crying and screaming all at the same time, if only for just a second. He found out later that what he had was called a premonition. It shocked him, and the smirk was off his face. But just for a moment.

“Hey, JJ!” Amy, one of the girls he had met with Trent before, was there with a few of her friends. They were cute and friendly, and dressed in skimpy outfits. JJ gave Amy a hug, complimenting and flattering her, and started talking to her friends when Amy introduced them to each other. He talked to them while other people arrive, and he could feel the connection building between them. He joked and he flirted, and he asked them about themselves while they talked about him, and finally, after getting a little help from Trent’s friends, he was talking only to the one he wanted with, still in the entrance room. He just put his arm around her waist, and walked off with her to the beer pong table.

She smiled at him, and he smiled back at her. He was getting a little drunker then, and he didn’t remember her name at all. But she was hot. There’s nothing wrong with not knowing her name? Do you think she’d be happy to know that? Annoying thoughts, from the back of his head. No, there was nothing wrong, and no, she wouldn’t be happy, but he’d be damned if he’d give a shit about that. She hadn’t asked him to be a fucking gentleman, she had gone with his advances, she had fucking flirted with him, she wanted it the same way he did. Alright, she was drunk, so was he. It was fucking fine. It wasn’t ideal, maybe not the way most girls would imagine it, but that wasn’t his fucking problem.

“Hey, would you want to talk in private for a little bit? I have something I really want to talk to you about, but I don’t want to do it in front of everyone else…” He leaned down to whisper this in her ear, looking around for the quickest way to get Trent’s bedroom. And then he saw her. She was someone he had never seen before, wearing a beautiful red dress and glasses. She had long, flowing black hair, and a heart necklace around her neck. Black eye shadow framed her deep, sensual brown eyes.

“Of course, JJ, I’d love to talk!” She giggled, and pressed a little closer to him. JJ just stared across the room at the girl on the other side, not understanding what he was feeling. He felt weak. He felt vulnerable. He saw her, and he knew immediately he wanted her. He wanted her more than anyone else there at the party, by far. He wanted her more than anyone he’d seen in his life. But it wasn’t just lust. It was, of course, partly that, but there was something else there, something even more prevalent… Love? Was this love at first sight? He didn’t know. He didn’t question it.

“Sorry, I can’t talk right now…” He moved out of her grasp, not even sparing her a look as he walked past her. He wanted to talk to this other girl. Needed to.

“Where are you going?!” She grabbed his shirt as he walked by, and he turned around, a look of distaste and disgust on his face. His hand closed on hers, and he took it off- not too hard, but forcefully enough. He looked at her in the eyes, and he wasn’t smiling.

“Never grab at me like that again. And where I’m going is none of your concern, I’m done speaking to you.” He turned around again, and this time he would not look back at her. Was she crying? Was she fuming? He didn’t know, and he didn’t care. He was there to have fun, and to do what he wanted to do, not to be a fucking therapist. She should have taken the hint, instead of making it all awkward by grabbing him.

It amazed JJ how quickly his personality could change, or at least appear to change. The brooding, frowning contemplative JJ disappeared on his quick walk across the room. The flirtatious, friendly, fun happy JJ reappeared, a smirk on his face and a twinkle in his eye. The face was on, but something felt weird. It was a feeling JJ hadn’t felt for a long, long time. A feeling of weakness and of anxiety, the thought that he might not succeed.

“Hi, nice to meet you, I’m JJ! I don’t think we’ve been introduced, but let me just say you look beautiful.” He stuck his hand out in front of him, a wide grin on his face, waiting for her to shake it back. The girl in the red dress just looked up at him, and did not smile. What the fuck was going on?

“Hi. I’m Maria.” She said it stiffly and abruptly, and did not make eye contact with him. JJ left his hand in the air in front of her for a few moments, and then, when it became painfully clear she wasn’t going to take it, he let it drop. Why was she acting like this? It wasn’t even that she wasn’t just responding to him, she wasn’t even being polite to him. What the fuck was this? There had to be some normal explanation.

“What’s the matter, do I have something on my hand? Or are you one of those germaphobes?” JJ laughed at his own joke, but when he looked back down, Maria was glaring up at him. Her jaw was set in a look of anger, and her eyes were slits.

“No, you have nothing on your hand, and I have no problem with germs, JJ. I have a problem with assholes like you.” Maria spoke these words clearly and loudly, and it turned a few heads as they looked to see the girl who had just talked down to JJ Sturn. JJ was confused, and more than just confused, he was angry. It wasn’t the first time he had had girls say something like that to him. Ugly girls said shit like that all the time, calling him a “prick” or an “asshole” when he’d make fun of them to get some laughs out of his friends. But a girl that he was trying to flirt with… a girl that he really wanted… that didn’t happen. And she didn’t even fucking know him.

She was walking out of the room, and JJ walked after her. He wanted to know why, why she had said that. And he wanted those people to stop staring at him, as he could already hear the whispers behind his back. They’d get back to Colehurst soon enough, the stories of how he’d gotten rejected. How JJ, of all people, had gotten stood up and bitched out by a girl. They couldn’t know he actually liked her. If they didn’t know that, he could play it off as no big deal.

“Hey! Hey, stop, I want to talk to you!” She had walked by him, into the garden in the back of the house. She had a cigarette in her hand, and she turned around, lighting it. She looked at him, a grim little smile on her face, and then she took a long inhale. She breathed the smoke out into the night, and laughed.

“You wanted to know why I rejected you, don’t I?” She kept that little grim smile on her face, the look of someone who doesn’t really want to do something, but has a duty to do it. They smile because they take pleasure in doing their job.

“…Yes.” JJ looked around, looked to see if anyone had followed him outside. They hadn’t… him and Maria were alone outside. They might look to gossip and watch JJ inside, but they knew the risks of annoying him by coming outside. They knew what would happen. “Not why you rejected me, but why you would barely even talk to me. Why you insulted me immediately.”

“It’s funny,” Maria said, taking another inhale of her cigarette. “Julia said that was the one thing that would really piss you off, getting rejected. She said you wouldn’t know what to do.”

“Who the fuck is Julia?” JJ scanned his mind, trying to come up with a face for the name. He knew too many Julias to remember any of them specifically… none of them stood out in his mind.

“You fucking bastard!” Maria shouted this, and her eyes were watering. She was still beautiful though, even with that look of anger on her face. Just as beautiful as she looked at JJ with hate filled eyes. “You don’t even fucking remember her? Dios mio you are a piece of shit!”

“What the fuck did I do to her? Another girl I hooked up with, coming back to talk shit about me? To make up stories about what I did? What fucking lie did she tell you?” JJ was angry. How could she do this? How could she sit here, and insult him like this? And how could he not lose his feelings for her from this?

“Never call her a fucking liar to my face again, JJ.” She spat his name this time, as if it was something bad tasting that she wanted to get out of her throat. She inhaled again, and the music pounded in the house inside, and she shuddered, although it was a warm summer night. “She is my best friend. She’s cute. She was always a sweet girl, always nice, always kind, always naive. I was the wilder one, the one at the parties, the one with the guys, the one who could be a real bitch sometimes.”

“I was the one who dragged her into this party scene. When we talked about sex, you know, she was always one of those girl who wanted their first time to be super special. Candles, music, a warm bath before hand, that kind of thing. She wanted to be sure she had that right guy… and then one day she told me she had met him. One of the parties I had meant to go to with her, but I had missed, I had been sick. She told me she had met the most wonderful guy there, his name was JJ Sturn, and he was nice, and he was funny, and he was so hot, and he was good looking, and he was athletic, and most of all, he liked her. She was sure of that, she kept telling me. She knew how much he liked her.”

“Imagine my surprise when she calls me the next weekend at 1 in the morning, crying. I ask her why. She tells me a certain guy told her he loved her. She tells me a certain guy wanted to go a little bit farther to demonstrate their love. She tells me the same guy who took her virginity wanted nothing to do with her now, that he had just up and left. That he wouldn’t answer her calls.”

“She wasn’t the same after that. She cried a lot, the next few weeks. And she was never as kind, never as trusting… she was always watchful around guys, and even around me and her best friends. She was afraid to show any vulnerability, any weakness. Because the one time she had, a fucking piece of shit had torn her fucking heart out. That’s why I rejected you, capullo.”

“I’m sorry!” JJ shouted this, and he was on his knees all of a sudden. He wasn’t lying either. He hadn’t realized what his actions did, hadn’t realized that he could have had that kind of effect. He didn’t want to be that kind of person. He didn’t want to be a monster. “I’m fucking sorry! What else do you fucking want from me?”

“But you’re not! You did the same fucking thing to the girl you had around your arm before you came over to me!” Maria threw the cigarette to the ground, and now she was yelling too. She was angry, just as angry as JJ, and her words cut into him. “You fucking use people! You treat them like fucking objects, just props for you and your fucking ego! You did it to my best friend, and you did it to that girl before me. I hope you die alone, you piece of shit.”

She turned around, and she walked away without sparing a look back at JJ. JJ was on his knees, and for a moment, he couldn’t get up. He was laughing. He was laughing at the absurdity of it all. He had walked away from that girl to talk to Maria, without even looking back. He hadn’t cared what she had thought. Now Maria walked away from him, without a single look back, and she did not care what he thought. Wasn’t that just fucking great?

He let out a noise, not even something that could be justified as a shout. It was just a vocalization, an expression of rage, pain, and sadness. He got up, and he started walking quickly into the house. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t walk away from him like that.

He walked in, and saw her, talking to her friends again. She was laughing, talking as if nothing had happened. As if it was nothing to just blow him off. It had to be a fucking nightmare, no one treated him like this. How could they? He was fucking JJ Sturn. He put a hand on her shoulder, and turned her around.

“I deserve fucking better than that! I deserve for you to let me show you I’ve changed! I said I was fucking sorry!” Maria looked at him, and the look of hate was on her face again. The music shut off. Everyone in the party was staring at the two of them, at a sweaty, fearful, nervous JJ, his eyes bloodshot and looking wild. Maria grabbed his hand, and pulled it off. Fucking irony again… Shit just repeats itself.

“You don’t deserve shit. You are lower than the lowest, and I’d spit and dance on your fucking grave, you egotistical heartless piece of shit.” And then, she slapped JJ. Hard, in the side of the face.

Too much was going on in JJ’s mind. A voice from his mind, telling him to stop taking this shit from her, to hit her. A dark, dark side of his mind, it was overpowered by the rest of his mind. It was confused, it was angry, it was sad, but it understand a few things, even if it didn’t understand how it knew. It knew that he was royally fucked, that he perhaps had been for awhile. It also knew that to hit her, to listen to his anger and his darkest urges, would be the final nail in the coffin.

“Hey, JJ, listen buddy, you’ve had a bit too much to drink, let’s just” JJ whirled around, and saw Trent standing behind. He reacted without thinking now, his fist coming up and smacking Trent hard in the nose. Trent hit the floor, and blood gushed out of his nose and onto his shirt. Somewhere behind JJ, a girl screamed. Asides from that, it was silence.

“Don’t fucking touch me Trent! Don’t you ever fucking put your hands on me!” JJ was screaming, his voice thick with emotion. He felt tears come down his face, warm salty droplets. He hadn’t cried for years before this… so long he couldn’t remember the last time. He couldn’t understand why he was now; it wasn’t fucking fair. All because of her! Why did he have to feel like that about her? Why did she have to hate him? How the fuck was any of this fair?!
He looked around, and saw her, looking there. She wasn’t angry anymore, she was just scared, looking at him the way a normal person might look at a dog with rabies. They were all looking at him, every single one of them, with that same look. That look of fear and disgust. Like he was just that, a fucking rabid dog.

“Fuck all of you! What fucking right do you have to look at me like that?!” He shouted at them, and one by one, they turned away from him, shaking their heads. Somehow, that was even worse. Some of them went over to Trent, helping him up, helping to wipe the blood off his face. “Stop fucking looking at me like that! Stop fucking judging me!”

He had never felt more alone in his life. He was surrounded by people, and yet he was so lonely. He was crying, and they just stood there, doing nothing. No one cared. No one cared about how he felt.

“JJ..” It was Trent, who had been helped to his feet by a few of his friends. “You’re fucking pathetic.” It was said with a cold, disgusted look. He was shaken, but he had no problems saying this to JJ. Words that before, no one would have even dared to say. “Get the fuck out of my house.”

“And what if I don’t want to, huh? What if I want to fucking stay?” He was laughing now, laughing and crying. He was laughing because what a fucking spectacle this was. JJ Sturn, he was the *fucking* man in highschool. He was the guy you talked about at parties, the one you loved to act like was your friend. And now here he was, crying, and hated by everyone there.

“Well, you’re a pretty tough guy, but it’s twenty to one. Or, let me put this way for you, you fucking dumbass piece of shit: you either walk out of here now, or we throw you out.” They stood there, his former ‘friends’, their arms crossed looking at him. He was still crying, he couldn’t help it. …What… what the fuck could he do?

He didn’t have a choice. He walked by them, out towards the front, trying to walk as if he didn’t care, as if getting kicked out of the party was just what he had in mind. His face, stained with tears, and his childish response before had kind of dispelled the illusion, but JJ had no idea what else to do. He had putting on that front his whole life. He didn’t know anything else to do. He opened the door, taking one last look behind him, and saw Trent and Maria behind him, with a few of Trent’s friends. He slammed the door, and walked out.

He walked down the driveway, one of his hands wiping away the tears from his face while the other fumbled in his pockets for cigarettes. When he was growing up, even he, the womanizer, the one who didn’t give a shit about any woman, had dreamt about love. Had imagined what it would be like to be with someone who you considered beyond beautiful, who would understand you, who would love you back. The one girl that made you feel different than any other girl ever has.

He lit a cigarette, taking the first few steps of his long trek back home. He had finally found love, hadn’t he? Maria had made him feel different than any other girl had.

And she hated him.