Crashing

What's it like to be poor and seventeen and know you've got nowhere to go in life.

In the corner of the room four people sprawled out on a mattress on the floor. Two boys, two girls. The moans coming from there gave the room that crack-addict type of feel that really makes you feel at home. I sat on one of the three beanbags that made up the only other furniture in the room. Beside me a tall, seventeen year old boy with a dark grey Hollister shirt inhaled from an oversized bong, while another one flipped through the TV channels. 

“You wanna hit?” The boy next to me asked.

I nodded, and pressed my mouth to the opening of the bong. “Can you light it? I can’t figure this s**t out,” I said. He nodded and leaned over. 

“Okay, inhale when I say when.” He lit it.“When.” 

The smoke sank into my lungs and burned on its way down, until I let it out with a cough. 

He laughed. “You good, Jane?”

I coughed more and tried to nod. The room was large, but it had been a couple hours, and everything in the room was cloaked in a thin layer of smoke.

Some girl stood up from the bed and walked into the bathroom. She was wearing only a bra and a thong, and one of the boys yelled after her, “Where are you going, babe?” She grunted in response, and then I heard the sound of pee hitting toilet water. 

“I love this show,” I said to no one in particular. I wasn’t sure what show it was, but they had switched on one of those cartoon shows you used to watch when you were a kid, and never really let go of. The characters flashed on the screen, speaking in high-pitched noises much too high for humans. Probably why they were all animals. The room fell out of focus, and I laid my head back against the chair. The ceiling began to spin just slow enough so I didn’t get too sick. I didn’t know if this was a good use of my short life, but I didn’t really know what else to do. 

A short boy weighed down by an oversized necklace that had Jesus bleeding on the cross nodded from the third beanbag. “Same,” he said.

A guy got up from the bed to take a hit from the bong. He was wearing blue boxers with little crabs on them. It was funny because he actually had crabs.

A phone rang in the corner of the room. “Ugh, it’s my dad,” the same girl who just went to the bathroom said.

“F**k him. Don’t answer it,” said the guy.

“Obviously.” The phone stopped ringing.

The guy on the third beanbag pulled out a blowtorch. “Jack, what the f**k are you doing?” said the boy next to me. 

“I’m lighting up, but with a f*****g blowtorch. How cool is that?” A light flashed in the corner of my eye, and went out as Jack exhaled. 

“Why don’t we ever go on a road trip?” said the boy next to me. I nodded. That was the best idea I’d ever heard. “Kyle, that’s the best idea I’ve ever heard,” I said. 

“Can we get food first?” Jack said. His eyes were red. “Your eyes are really red,” I said.

“Haha, yea that’s what happens, Jane,” he said. 

Someone in the corner of the room turned up the speakers so the music filled up my head and bounced around my skull. Jack shouted, "I can't hear myself think it's so f*****g loud." Another boy yelled back, "That's the point."

It was sunday, and we all knew tomorrow we'd have to go back to school. Live up to expectations or, rather, down to them. I took another hit from the bong and thought about the reasons we were all here. The s****y parents that didn't care, the s****y teachers that didn't have time, and the s****y system that didn't have room for us. We were seventeen and our entire lives were etched in stone in front of us. It might as well have been our gravestones. The minimum wage job, the multiple spouses. We were s**t out of luck, and yet entirely conscious of the state we were stuck in. It was like watching a car crash in slow motion, and you're in the driver seat, but for some reason you've lost all control of the wheel. There was no reason to believe we could avoid the crash, and yet there was still a small part of us that thought we could. You see, we weren't raised better, but we knew better. Even with alcoholic parents or fucked up friends, we knew we shouldn't be doing this stuff. But what are you supposed to do when your car is crashing and everyone is telling you there's nothing you can do to stop it?