This morning found our haggard faces struggilng to awaken in my mangled excuse for a bedroom. Cider bottles dotted the floor, just like hungover bodies dotted my mattress. The first words of the day rasped out between cracked lips like a rattlesnake slipping between two stones.
"What a night.."
Not that any of us recalled it in its entirety. The walk back to my place was forever lost in a realm of drunken forgetfulness. One of the first things that presented itself to me was an odd, musty, and somehow malevolent smell. I poked my head out of my sleeping bag and instantly discovered the cause: Feather. The smell that arose from the dank depths of his armpits permeated the room like a toxic cloud, threating to asphyxiate me and my friends. We slowly rose from the bed like zombies working their way up from the Earth's epidermis.
When I left the room, I was confronted by one of my roommates.
"We need to talk."
We sidled outside and I was subjkected to a cynical speech about how foul Feather stank and how his stench had suffocated the home's entire atmosphere, making it smell worse than it already had (a feat I'd thought impossible.)
I apologized profusely and hurriedly rushed Feather andthe others out of the house. Once the hobo stink had subsided, the first thing that caught the group's eye was Julie.
Standing slack jawed, the sun's rays reflected off her lifeless eyes. We realized that she hadn't even come close to coming down off the acid.
"Hey, you ok?"
Her gaze bore straight through each of us as the question passed through her left ear, neglected to negotiate with her brain, and slipped out her right ear. The look of amazement that was faceted across her face was incredible; it seemed she had just heard spoken words for the first time.
Satisfied that she wasn't going to answer, we began our trek to Wendy's for breakfast. Ten minutes down the road, Julie finally answered our question.
"Yeah, I'm fine!"
It took us all a moment to realize she was answering an inquiry that had faded into our memories a dozen minutes ago. Had she been thinking about it the whole time? Had she struggled so hard to find an answer? Or had the acid simply rewired her neurological pathways in such a way that it took ten minutes for a question to pass through her skull?
Who knew? It took too much effort to contemplate her lack of contemplation. We decided to accept the fact that our friend had developed a (hopefully) temporary retardation. The journey went on, though the intelligence was quartered.
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