The Basement Vault

My head was spinning. The last time I looked at the clock it said 2:00 AM and Becka was giving me a goodbye kiss. Now, 10:45 AM blazed from the clock. I desperately wanted to sleep the day away, but there were two things that were driving me out of the bed:

  1. I had to pee, excruciatingly bad.

  2. I needed the largest and coldest glass of water that was possible.

  Nick’s room was on the way to the bathroom, and his door was wide open. The bright sun shone through the American flag that he used as a curtain along with the dozen or so blue glass bottles that lined his windowsill, casting the room in varying shades of red and blue. Those colors in the morning had a strange effect on me that I wasn’t sure if I liked. They were somehow both agitating and soothing.

  After my morning pee that seemed to never end, I stuck my head fully into Nick’s room, expecting to see him passed out on top of his blankets, probably still in his cutoff shorts.

  But he wasn’t there.

  As I walked into the kitchen the back door flew open, and in came Nick bouncing on his toes, holding a tall glass of something red with a green sprout sticking out.

  “Hey, Powers, you’re up!”

  He was wide wake, apparently.

  I rubbed my eyes. “When’d you get up?”

  He shrugged. “About an hour ago.”

  The kitchen smelled of coffee, which was most welcoming. I poured myself a tall glass of water and a mug full of hot, black coffee and sat at the table.

  “This is what you need, man, if you want to fly right.” Nick opened the refrigerator.

  “A bloody Mary?” I was going to dismiss the idea of drinking anything alcoholic, but I had to admit, it sounded appealing.

  Nick made a drink and put it on the table before me. He then went to the cabinet to remove two aspirin from the container, along with either a Ritalin or Adderall left over from a party, placing them all next to my drink. Then he went to the stove to scramble some eggs.

  “You’re in a good mood,” I said, looking down at my variety of drinks and pills.

  “Damn straight.” He cracked eggs into a bowl.

  Suddenly, a flashback from last night passed through my memory: I saw Nick get in one of his dreaded drunken moods, nearly crying while crawling across the grass in inebriated delirium. It must have been around the time everyone left and my memory was becoming fuzzy. He was shouting the same fragmented statements, things he only ever brought up at the tail end of a serious bender. But he always cut himself short of fully explaining what he was talking about. He spoke as if battling some demon inside him, so all I would get is “It’s—they ... they’s took me, man—it was them. I only, didn’t want to do it, man,” and he would be crying. “I-I was a just a k-kid, man, those fucking-fucks, they-they took me, man!” Whatever he was talking about, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to know. Occasionally, he would shout the same jumbled utterances while sleeping. I was warned a long time ago to never wake him up if I heard screaming in the middle of the night. So I never did. Darin had known Nick way longer than I had, so he was able to wake him out of those episodes without getting himself killed.

  Nick put a plate of eggs before me along with a bottle of hot sauce.

  “Eat up,” he said. “Then go take a shower. We’re leaving in half an hour.”

  I nodded. I knew I had made an agreement, but I’d been half expecting Nick to be just as hung over as myself. Unfortunately, he wasn’t.