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Jennifer Joseph – Balloons [from Drugs]

They wandered down Ninth Avenue looking for the number on a door.

"l think this is it." she said. "Look at the balloons on the door here. Ho-ho, pretty funny."

"No kidding."

Opening the door, they heard the unmistakable sound of a nitrous party. The sound of the gas coming out of a tank was loud going into the balloons. The laughter and voices were almost as loud as the tank. These parties are great, she thought, even if the burn-out level is enormous. She walked into the room with the tank. The floor was littered with bodies. Enormous balloons replaced people's faces. Everyone looked vaguely familiar. Someone announced,

"The tank's empty!" and a big moan went up as people clamoured for more.

More, more, there's never enough. The only enough is too much. It was only how much you could get without getting too much, that was the key to the whole process. A voice said,

"No man, it’s only frozen on the bottom. Here, check it out. If you tilt it sideways, y'see, like this . . . right, you got it, it helps the gas move around, right, there ya go, y'see there's plenty left."

Great. She kind of fell in line. Even though it wasn’t really a line there was a definite order to how long people had been waiting to fill their balloons, and the people who had been waiting the longest made that very clear. She filled her balloon, and pushed her way through the crowd toward the hallway past a guy who spilled vodka on her sleeve. She spotted the friends she had come to the party with and asked if they wanted any nitrous.

"Nah, I did that stuff a lot in high school, and now it just gives me headaches."

“Oh. That's too bad."

She wrapped her lips around the mouth of the balloon and breathed in slowly. She inhaled as slowly as she could and held the gas in her lungs. Her ears rang with wave patterns, ordered yet unattached to anything. She saw people's mouths moving as they spoke to her, but all she could do was laugh. Her mind was perfectly clear.

"I'm glad I'm driving home from this party," her square friend said.

All the girl could do was laugh harder.

It's always the same, she thought, it's always the same.