Hellhole (20 page)

Burg chugged the rest of the second can and moved on to a third. “Lesson two: once you start, you can't stop until it's gone. Oooh. OOOH. We can play a drinking game along with the show!” He started counting on his fingers. “One drink for every ‘Make it work,' two drinks whenever someone bursts into tears at a sewing machine, three drinks every time someone is thrown under a bus, four drinks every time someone claims they would
never
throw someone under a bus, ‘I will
not
stand here and be insulted by the likes of
you'
—”

“But—”

“Five drinks every time someone says ‘fashion-forward'—”

Max continued to protest, but the inevitability of it all stopped him. Burg wasn't skilled at the art of self-restraint. Burg would never ‘pace himself,' as Max had hoped. If Max left him alone with all of this alcohol, it was a near certainty that it would be gone within minutes, dumped directly into Burg's bloodstream, giving him all sorts of malicious new ideas . . .

“You know what?” Max said, deciding to take one for the team. The team, of course, being Team Not Getting My Mom Disemboweled by a Devil. “I think I'll join you after all.”

“Splendid!” Burg put the beer down on the table in front of Max, then, spontaneously developing a taste for manners, daintily placed a coaster beneath it. “Go ahead. Taste the rainbow.”

Max picked up the can and nervously squeezed it.

“This is very exciting,” Burg said in a quiet, watchful voice, as if providing commentary for a golf tournament. “What kind of drunk will the lad be? A mean one? A boisterous one?”

“Maybe I'll just slink off into the corner and sob.”

“Hahaha! Quit stalling.”

Max put the can to his lips and took a swig. Half a second later the swig reemerged, spraying across the room and coating the television screen.

“Ugh!” Max choked. “
That's
what beer tastes like?”

“Like the feet of a thousand angels dancing the Baltimore waltz on your tongue?” Burg said. “Yessir.”

“But it's disgusting!” Max had never imagined an instance when washing his mouth out with soap would be the preferable option, but here he was, casting about for a bar of Irish Spring. “People drink this voluntarily? And repeatedly?”

“Well, see, therein lies the magic,” Burg said, bringing the can back up to Max's mouth. “Each sip tastes better than the last.”

Max recoiled, but remembering that the alternative was the painting of the basement walls in his mother's blood, he forced himself to take another glug. It went down just as repulsively as the previous one, with twice as much gagging.

Good thing I'm never going to be able to afford college,
Max thought, steeling himself for the next swig.
I wouldn't last through a single party.

 

“She's using
chiffon?
”

“She's out of her damn mind!”

“What happened to the organza swatches? At least those weren't a ghastly shade of chartreuse.”

“Seriously. This pencil skirt's going to be a hot pot of
disaster!
”

Three hours, a case of beer, and countless outfits later, Max and Burg's bender had taken a strange, fabulous turn.

“Call me crazy,” Burg said, clutching no less than a dozen Funyuns in his fist and gesturing wildly at the screen, “but I liked it better with the pleats.”

“Are you kidding me?
Are you kidding me?
” Max, it turned out, was a loud drunk. Especially when it came to opinions about fashion, which were bold and impassioned, if not exactly educated. “Pleats are never a good choice. Never.”

“They're better than embroidery.”

“Nothing is better than embroidery!”

“Shhh!” Burg waved a hand in Max's face. “Tim Gunn is about to be concerned.”

Max clammed up and stared at the screen, where the dapper mentor was tenting his fingers in front of his mouth, brow furrowed. The room went silent.

“I'm concerned,” said Tim Gunn.

“DRINK!” Max and Burg yelled, downing the last of their beers and then smacking their empty cans together, crushing them flat into disks between their high-fived hands.

“Of course he's concerned,” Max said. “She's attaching the zipper with
glue.
”

“Oh girl, you can't swing a dead cat in that studio without hitting a dress that's been glued together.” Burg's eyes widened in a sudden panic. “JUST KIDDING ABOUT THE DEAD CAT!” he shouted toward the staircase.

When no offended meowing sounded from upstairs, Burg relaxed again. “You know what I think?” he drawled as the show went to commercial. “It's all gonna come down to styling. You gotta use that accessories wall wisely, bro. Too over-the-top, your look's gonna be costumey. Too cheap, and it's gonna be commercial. Then it's the Sears catalog for you, and that is the
kiss of death,
my friend.”

Max looked up, bleary-eyed. “Youdon'tthinkmakeup'llmatter?” he asked, his words slurring. How much time had he wasted in his life up until now, bothering to put spaces between words?

“Well of course it will, but a smoky eye and a full lip can't save a bad design.” Burg stuck a languid hand into the paper bag. “Where's the rest of the beer?”

“But Paisley's doing it all in honor of her dead brother,” Max insisted, nearly moved to tears. “That asymmetrical hemline was a
tribute.
”

“Are we all out of beer?”

“He's watching down from
heaven
and giving her the
strength
to feather stitch
—”

“Hey!” Burg looked downright panicked. “We're all out!”

Max looked at him blearily. “Huh?”

“There's nomore. Is allgone.” Now that the flow of alcohol had ceased, the full force of inebriation seemed to catch up with Burg at once. “Is allgone,” he repeated sadly.

“So?” Max gestured to the television. “We can still keep watching. The runway's coming up.”

Burg was already slumping over, his lids half closed. “Beer bye-bye. Sleepytime now.”

“But it's not over!” Max insisted. “Plenty of sideboob still to come!”

Burg emitted a snore-burp.

Max looked at his watch. The T. rex skeleton informed him that it was after two in the morning. “It's late. I should probably go to bed.” Self-narrating was yet another one of Drunk Max's finer qualities. “I have a history quiz tomorrow. I should go study for that.”

This must have struck him as hilarious, because laughter bubbled up as he stood and tottered to the stairs. “Night,” he called out, grabbing the banister for support. “See you tomorrow.”

“Yeah, buddy, tomorrow,” Burg answered. “Unless, of course, you slipped a Mickey into my drink.”

It took a full minute, but Burg's words eventually slogged their way through to Max's brain. “Huh?” he said, stumbling back to the couch. “Whadyu say?”

Burg opened one eye and looked at Max, his gaze steady and strong. “If you attempt to drug me,” he said evenly, his words no longer slurred, “if you engage in any deceit or fraudulence or injurious advances whatsoever, I will not hesitate to do something very unfortunate to you.”

Max had always heard that drunk people sobered up immediately in the face of trauma, but that wasn't happening for him. He was finding it even harder to concentrate; in fact, he couldn't even be sure he wasn't currently passed out on the floor, drooling and dreaming that his drinking buddy had improbably gone from hammered to evil in five seconds flat.

But he wasn't imagining it. Burg was still staring at him with that one cold, lifeless eye. A chill pounded through Max's body.
He knows.

He knew that Max and Lore had talked about drugging him. But how?

A numbness came over Max as he staggered up the stairs, accidentally banging his elbow into his mom's bedroom door as he tried to sneak down the hallway.

“Max!” she called out in a harsh whisper.

He gave the door a shove. It opened a couple of inches, creaking quietly.

“Yeah?” he said into the darkness.

“What time is it? What are you doing up?”

A burp escaped his throat—he tried to let it out quietly, but it insisted on making its presence loudly known. “I wasjus—I hadta pee.”

She didn't answer.

“Max,” she said after a moment, “come here.”

“Nah, I'm turnin' in. Go back to sleep.”

“Max.” Her voice had a sharpness to it. “Come in here. Right now.”

He didn't know how or why it happened, but the stupor he'd felt moments earlier swiftly turned to rage. It consumed him, took hold of his muscles and his voice, which rose to a deafening volume. “No!” he bellowed. “Every damn day it's something else with you!
My toothbrush fell! The heat's too hot!
Can't you just leave me alone?
For five friggin' minutes?
”

When she spoke again, her voice was quivering. “Max?”

“Just shut the hell up and go to bed!”

With that, he slammed her door shut and stalked down the hallway to his room. He fell into bed, and if any thoughts of regret flickered through his inebriated mind before unconsciousness took him, they weren't strong enough to make him get up and apologize.

MAX AWOKE TO FIND
that someone had replaced his organs with water balloons, his mouth with a sandbox, and his head with a train track mid-construction, repeatedly being punctured by railroad spikes.

“Guuuggghhhhhh,” he moaned.

“Get up,” someone said.

Max unsealed his eyes—producing, unsettlingly, a wet, smacking noise—then slammed them shut again. Whoever had done all of these terrible things to his body had also placed him in the center of a sun or a star or some other gaseous body capable of producing an unfathomable amount of light.

He fumbled with his pillow until it covered most of his head. It didn't stop the railroad spikes pounding through his brain—those workers were highly industrious—but at least the light was dimmed.

He felt a tap on his elbow. It hurt.

“Owwww,” he said to verify this.

“Max, get up.”

Max's stomach roiled. His skin broke out in goosebumps as a chill coursed through his body. The pungent smell of vomit wafted up from his sheets, providing Max with the strong desire to produce another batch.

He permitted a single eyelid to flutter open, seared retinas be damned. A puffy smudge of darkness sat to his left.

“Ew,” said the smudge. “You smell even worse than you look.”

“Audie? What are you doing here?” he asked, though it came out more like “Whayudunear?”

She was sitting on the edge of his bed and staring at him as if he were an endangered tiger, rare and dangerous. “I'm going to assume you don't remember opening your window last night around three a.m. and yelling ‘That neckline is a fashion disaster!' in a German accent, but that is what happened. Since you left your window wide open, I took it upon myself to sneak in this morning to find out what's going on.” She sniffed again and made a disgusted face. “And since my nose is in working order, I think I've figured it out.”

“It was an accident,” Max mumbled into his sheets. “I didn't mean to.”

“Didn't mean to drink
an entire case of beer?
” Audie countered. “You could have gotten alcohol poisoning and died in your sleep! What were you thinking?”

Max felt as if he were processing this conversation on a thirty-second delay. “Wait, did you say I yelled out the window? Did I wake your parents up?”

“Uh, yeah, Max. You woke the whole neighborhood up.”

He groaned. He tried to sift through his memories of the previous evening, but none of them included being a public nuisance. They were all so jumbled together, with lots of holes . . . Burg was there, but so was Heidi Klum, somehow, and beer cans . . . and sequins . . .

And Mom,
he realized with a lurch. Yelling at his mom. Being quite, quite rude to his mom.

He groaned again.

Audie poked him harder. “Max. What happened?”

The urgency in her voice brought him back to his senses. He sat up in bed, every atom of his body screaming in pain. “I, um—” He pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, which seemed to help both with the pain and with avoiding Audie's eyes as he lied to her. “That fugue state—it was really stressful and humiliating, and I just thought I could—”

“Ease the pain with alcohol? How'd that work out for you?”

An extra-long railroad spike gleefully clobbered Max's cerebellum. “Not well.”

“And I see you're still sticking with the fugue state thing. Great.” She retrieved a tray from the floor; it held two mugs and a plate of steaming pastries. “Coffee, water, or Pop-Tarts?”