Rum Bottle Decor

She was doing very little to grab my attention intentionally, but impact often outweighs intent. Her hair was straight and still a little wet from her shower shortly before and an oversized t-shirt seemed to be the perfect sort of outfit to join a neighborly fall bonfire, but I was hooked, nonetheless. She continued to talk to me, but I had a difficult time focusing on her words as I stared across the flames at her face. Her name was Alicia and she lives with Cassie, that much I gathered.

I passed her the Pringles. “What’s your major?” I asked loudly.

She smiled and I figured she just then realized I probably missed the majority of what she had said previously. “Sociology. Same as Cassie.”

“Right on,” I said. I didn’t have a plan for the conversation moving forward. In all the times I had visited campus, to include seeing Cassie, I had somehow never met this Alicia.

I watched her eyes wander away from my direction as we sat in silence. “And what’s your major?” She ventured back to my generic topic, then added, “Where do you go to school?”

“Sports Management at Saint Patrick’s,” I said. I chose not to clarify my on again, off again path towards a degree I had no plan on actually using, figuring it wouldn’t be very impressive.

“So you go to school all the way over there and come here to hang out with your high school friends on the weekends?”

“Yeah, usually once or twice a month. We are pretty tight. Bryan, Colby, me. There’s a bunch of others from our town here, too.”

“That’s cute,” she mocked. Her skin glowed behind the flames of the bonfire.

“I get told I’m cute often, actually.”

“I believe it,” she said, nonchalantly. She leaned forward in her folding lawn chair. “It’s good though, that you stayed tight with Colby and Bryan. So many of you guys stayed close. I don’t hear from any of my high school friends anymore.”

“Yeah,” I said. I remembered specifically that nineteen people from my graduating class ended up going to Copper River University and several more joined in the following years. “We are almost like brothers, as cheesy as that sounds. I’m just glad they have a nicer place than they used to. The old apartment was a dump.”

I remembered vividly, going there with Jillian and sleeping on the filthy carpet, because her brother’s air mattress she borrowed had a hole in it. I partied there often, and most certainly packed in more people than the fire marshal would have liked.

For Bryan, their new house was conveniently next door to Cassie, and it was much nicer than most rentals for college students. They squeezed into the five-bedroom, two story with three other buddies and set up the detached garage specifically for weekend parties with two separate beer pong tables to host tournaments. The custom paint jobs and smooth lacquered finish took the kind of effort that often went underappreciated.

“Come on, Seth,” Colby yelled. “Let’s play some beer pong.”

“Want to play?” I asked Alicia. As I asked, Cassie stumbled past us and towards the sidewalk. “What’s with her?”

“This keeps happening. I wish they would just break up for good.”

“I didn’t realize Cassie and Bryan were on the rocks,” I said. “Bryan hasn’t said anything to me.”

“It’s been like this the last two years. They fight and break up. Then one crawls back to the other and they do it all over again. Rinse, lather, repeat.”

In high school, they were the two everyone assumed would get married by nineteen and have three kids by twenty-five. They were an old-timey couple and acted as such. I remembered seeing their prom pictures posted on each of their parents’ TV stands and I figured their parents assumed they’d be married soon, too.

“Bring Alicia,” Colby yelled from the garage. “Bryan and I need new opponents.”

She shook her head no, looked down to her phone and began to text furiously. “Cassie’s drunk and being stupid.”

This was relatively obvious, I thought, even without the text.

“She said she’s walking to the river,” she said. “That’s at least two miles from here.”

“Why would she do that?”

“She likes the attention when she’s drunk, to be completely honest.”

“That tracks,” I said. “She led the school announcements every morning. She certainly likes attention.”

She smirked and looked back at her phone. “Now she said she doesn’t know where she is and wants help. I need to find her. Sorry, I need to go.”

“I can help you,” I said.

“You actually want to come with? That’s great,” Alicia said. “I just need a hoodie. It’s cold away from the fire.”

“Sure, no problem,” I said. I’d be happy to help save the day.

“Come with me, I’ll just need a second.” We walked next door to her front porch. The design seemed at least fifty years older than Colby’s new house, next door. The front porch felt nostalgic and welcoming.

She headed inside while I waited in the entryway. I looked around and was hit with instant deja vu. I knew everything about this house.

To the left were stairs leading to the second floor’s small hallway, with a bedroom on either side and a bathroom and hall closet at the end. To the right through the small living area was a kitchen and through there, was a dining room in the back. The carpet was quite old, but rather well vacuumed for a college rental house. Cassie, Alicia and the other two girls living in it must have had high standards.

I remembered the kitchen vividly. Oak cabinets all around, an old ivory fridge on the left and just past it was a bathroom, interestingly enough. Just past the bathroom was another doorway, but with stairs leading to an unfinished basement. The kitchen was painted an ugly blue and on top of the cabinets were empty rum bottles as decoration. Then it hit me, I remembered holding Jillian’s hair as she vomited in the toilet and then looking back through the open doorway at the rum bottles in the kitchen.

The stairs went down halfway, then had a small platform and turned ninety degrees to the right. At the foot of the stairs was a weird bedroom in two parts; you had to walk through one bedroom to get to the next. Next to the Willy Wonka style bedroom was a small, dingy bathroom.

Like any old house, there were weight bearing posts, in all the inconvenient places in the center of the open area. There was some storage past the bedroom and bathroom and then their very own beer pong setup, albeit unlacquered and if my memory serves me correctly, it was a bedroom door they used as the table. I remembered Jillian staggering around while others played beer pong and then pretending to pole dance before spilling her drink.

The most interesting part of all the thoughts racing through my head was the dugout portion in the brick wall, fully around the corner. The area contained beer cans, and a creepy doll resided in the very far back, discoverable with a flashlight. Jillian sobered up for just a moment when I had gone down to get her and told me to look at the creepy doll she found, shining the light on her phone deep into the dirt abyss.

I regathered my spiraling brain as I saw Alicia rush down the stairs. “I’ve been here before,” I said.

“Oh?”

“Yes,” I said, then explained to her without taking many breaths between my words that I knew the entire layout of her house. I described her blue kitchen decorated with rum bottles on the tops of the cabinets and the stairs to the basement, just past their kitchen bathroom.

Her jaw dropped as I talked about the stairs to the basement and which way they turn and the weird bedroom with its entrance inside a different bedroom.

“You’ve been in my bedroom?”

I shrugged and continued on about the rest of the basement, the beer pong table and the weird hole in the block foundation. Then I mentioned the doll in the back corner of said weird hole.

“Who are you?” She asked, then her eyebrows raised. “You stay here. I’ll be right back up.”

She hurried back down the stairs; I could hear her footsteps on the creaky stairs shortly before shouting, “What the fuck is that? That is the creepiest fucking doll I’ve ever seen!”

Her eyes peered at me as she rounded the corner again, in her weird blue, rum bottle filled kitchen.

“Let me back up. I have this photographic memory thing,” I said. “A girl I was dating, sort of, was at a house party here like a year ago. I came here, for like twenty minutes, to get her. I don’t remember meeting you that night, though.”

Her suspicion slowly eased. “So, you aren’t a stalker?”

“Nope.”

“A private investigator?”

I laughed. “No.”

“An alien? A time traveler? A vampire?”

“None of those,” I said. We could hear loud vomiting outside, dropped our conversation and quickly went to check on whoever was losing their dinner.

“We were just headed out to find you,” Alicia said. She reached delicately to hold back Cassie’s hair as she didn’t want to touch any vomit. “You need to lose Bryan’s number. Next time you see him outside, look the other way. I wish they didn’t live next door. This shit is getting old.”

The vomiting continued. “Whatever,” Cassie groaned.

“Can I get you guys anything?” I asked. “What can I do to help?”

“No, I think I’m going to bring her in and get her to bed,” Alicia said. “Thanks for your help.”

“It’s still early,” I said, stating the obvious. “Come back out once she’s all tucked in. I could use a partner for some beer pong.”

“Sounds good,” Alicia said. “Maybe I’ll see you later.”

“Good night, Cassie,” I said.

She groaned as Alicia guided her inside.

I knew I probably wouldn’t see her again that night but hoped for the best.