"Are you sure your parents don't care that you haven't been home all day?" I asked Derik skeptically, picking up my ripped Blondie shirt off the floor and pulling it on. I heard him zip up his pants from where ever we had thrown them and him fixing his belt.

"Yeah, they don't care," he said. He sounded kind of spacey. I had come to decide that he was a strange guy with strange ways; I'd never met anyone who could be so spaced out one minute then aware the next. He was just like that.

I walked over to my vanity and wiped my face clean of the make-up from earlier. Most of it was mascara caked onto my face, which took some fierce scrubbing with lotion to get off. I put on the full routine: Foundation, blush, eye shadow, eye liner, mascara and bright red lipstick. I saw Derik fiddling with his suit jacket in the mirror. He was standing by my bed, checking something in one of the pockets inside the coat. Mints? An address book? A fucking Bible? He could have had his pet goldfish in his pocket for all I knew.

"Hey, let's go get the girls," I said once I'd finished up with the make-up. "It's starting to get dark." We'd spent most of the day either having sex, talking or watching some random movie that I had stuffed in my VCR. It wasn't even in color-- hell, it didn't even have sound --but it was somewhat entertaining after watching it two or three times. I couldn't tell you what it was about, but the acting was so bad.

We walked out of my room and into the kitchen. Mike was just walking in. He saw us and walked over to me, planting a kiss on my cheek.

"Hey, Girl!"

"Hi, Mike," I said, smiling at him and draping an arm over his shoulders. "This is Derik, my boyfriend." Mike pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head and smiled at Derik. My boyfriend awkwardly smiled back.

"Hi, Derik!"

"I'm going to go say bye to Mom real quick; me 'n Derik are gonna go pick up the girls to go clubbing." Mike nodded at me. I took my arm off his shoulders and said, "You two get along. You're the only two guys in my life!" I laughed. Mike laughed. Derik didn't even attempt one, instead looking down at his shoes. Weirdo.

I walked out of the kitchen, though the living room and into Mom's room. Cuddles was curled up at Mom's feet. Mom sat in bed, staring as people walked across her tube's screen in almost-full color. Most of the stuff on there looked yellow to me.

"How're you, Mom?" I asked, sitting on the edge of her bed. The wooden frame of the water bed dug painfully into my ass.

"Dakota," my mom said beside me, her voice sounding pained. "Dakota, you've gotta stop this. Dun fuck anymer guys. I've... been selfish for too long." She paused, clenching her jaw. She didn't even look at me. I stared at her in complete confusion. My heart beat faster in my chest. I couldn't stop.

"Yer not gonna whore yerself off for crack an' I'm not either," she continued, still staring at the television with dead eyes. "I'm gonna get a job. We're gonna make this right. S'gonna be da way it was before."

I started to get up, but my mom grabbed my hand. I turned to face her once more, disappointment rising in my chest. Her blue eyes had been so dead before, but now they were filled with some kind of determination.

"Dakota." Her voice rose a tad. I could tell it was paining her. "You. Have. To. Stop."

I carefully took her hand from mine and walked calmly out of the room. Disappointment turned to nausea. Bile burnt in my throat. Why? One bad time and she was off her rockers. Did she have a concussion? She knew I wasn't just going to stop. I just.

"Derik, we're going," I said. I crossed the living room, grabbed my purse off the counter and put on my shoes. Derik came to my side like a well-trained dog. I completely ignored him and Mike, walking out of the apartment and out to the car without so much as a glance at Derik. I climbed into the driver's seat and pulled a bag of coke out of my purse.

Derik only got into the car after I finished the lines I had scraped on Canary's dashboard. Immediately better. The bad feelings melted away. I smiled and turned the car on. Derik didn't say a word. He was in another one of his daydreams.

I cranked up the radio and we drove off to Jasmyn's house. She crawled into the back, too busy working on some kind of up-do to say much to us. We stopped by Diva and Mary's building. Mary came out first and climbed in, yammering on about how excited she was. The conversation dragged out forever before Diva finally came out of the building.

She was clad in the darkest clothes I had ever seen her in. Derik pushed the seat up for her and she sat down in silence beside Mary. We all stared at her.

"Did you suddenly decide to like Depeche Mode or something?"

She threw a tape at me. Okay, then, Bitch. It was a green tape and had some gothed out guy on it as the album art. I squinted to see that the tape was titled Disintegration and was by The Cure. No wonder why she looked like she had just walked out of a Depeche Mode concert.

"I like The Cure now," she said simply. "Play 'Fascination Street,' it's the seventh track on side one."

"Whatever, Bitch," I said. "Tell me when to stop." I popped the tape into the player and wound it forward until Diva said to stop. Canary rolled back into traffic as the tape player played through the song. It was genuinely awful. I wasn't into the whole cult scene unless I was stoned. Really stoned. Poison and Alice Cooper were more my thing.

"Uh, Diva," Mary said after the song was over, her voice an octave higher than normal. She must have been nervous. "You're not on heroin are you?"

There was no answer. That was enough of an answer for me.

Luckily we didn't have to suffer through another Cure song because we pulled into The Haze only seconds after the next song came through the speakers. I popped the tape out and put it back into its case before climbing out of the car and holding the seat forward for Jasmyn and Mary to climb out.

We walked as a group into the line to the club. There wasn't much to talk about that was for other people's ears, so for the most part, we waited in silence. I paced as much as I could in the space I had. I was so jittery. I would have talked and talked and talked, but that wouldn't have been good. Derik eventually put his arms around my waist so I would stop pacing. I walked in place then.

Luckily, the wait didn't take long. We flashed our fake IDs and slipped into The Haze. Immediately, the outside air was replaced with the stench of sweat and cigarette smoke. Devo screamed through the speakers inside the club, hundreds of people writhing under the blacklight with their red Dixie cups held high in the air. Alcohol rained from the practically-glowing cups into the crowd.

Jasmyn ushered us over to the bar and reached into her purse. She drew out small pieces of what looked like wrapping paper and distributed them to all of us except Derik. He was sitting at the bar a few steps away, already on his first round of vodka shots.

I watched what the other girls did and put the blue paper in my mouth, but didn't swallow it. It just stuck to my tongue and wasn't too thick, so I could talk if I wanted to.

"So when does it kick in?" I asked them. Diva shot me her best Depeche Mode glare and Jasmyn scoffed at me. As usual, Mary was the only helpful one out of the group.

"It'll be a little while. Wanna go dance, Dakota?"

"Yeah, just let me check on Derik," I said with a huge smile. What sort of wonderful things would I see on my trip? I walked over to Derik and rubbed his back.

"Hey, are you gonna be cool?"

"Yeah, I'll be fine, Honey," he said, turning to look at me over his shoulder. "Have fun with your friends. I'll come find you later." He smiled at me before taking another shot of vodka and waving the bartender over. I kissed him on the cheek and walked back over to Mary. Diva and Jasmyn were already gone, lost to the crazy crowd of people in the club.

"Let's go, Girl!" I grabbed Mary's hand and drug her into the mass of people. Alcohol rained down on us and people's white shirts glowed under the blacklight. The whole club shook from the sheer force of the bass and people all around us yelled and screamed, thrusting their arms into the sky and dancing up on whoever was around them. Mary and I danced on each other to try not to lose the other in the crowd.

I don't know how long it was before I started to see the music in the air. It couldn't have been very long before the hazy atmosphere was colored like a rainbow. People around me glowed different colors and I started to feel like I was full of helium. I danced my way through the crowd, raising my hands up to touch the music in the air. People around me bumped into me until my body vanished and I was just floating. My body laid down on the floor and I watched people dance above me. They flashed between people and naked trees with a sky painted with LSD.

"Thank you, Jasmyn," I think I said. I saw the words float in the air above me before popping out of existence. Someone pulled me to my feet. I was neck-deep in an ocean. A bouy sat in the middle, a pelican perched on top of it. Only it wasn't an ocean. I could see fingers and arms making up the water. The sky writhed colors above me.

I turned away from the ocean and started walking in the opposite direction. Now I was climbing a tree. Then I was at the top and reality happened again. I was standing at the bar. Derik had me roughly by the arm, smacking the side of my face. I don't know how hard he was hitting me. Probably not hard. He was saying something, but no words came out of his mouth. I was going to say something, but I fell into his eyes. A freshly-plowed field. Someone was planting glowing plants inside the rows. I was being pushed along by a mule in front of me. My heels dragged in the soil, making more rows for the plants.

Derik turned me around to face forward and I was in reality again, walking out the door of The Haze. Why? Question marks floated around in the air around me. I reached out to touch them, but Derik was pushing me away from them.

"Derik!" I said sternly, turning to try to look him in the face. I got distracted by the letters floating in the night sky. I still heard and saw music even though it was inside. Inside the club. I fell into the passenger side of Canary. The world spun into the night sky.

I floated with the stars for awhile, then they started to get closer. And closer.

Soon, I was staring into the sun. Then the blinding light turned into a field. A pretty field full of horses. A thousand suns whirred by above our heads. I walked through the golden field, trying to reach the horses, but they only kept getting farther away.

I slammed into Canary's dashboard. I saw a blue diagram of my ribs in my vision. The place where I was hit radiated blue throughout my body. I groaned. The sound was pink.

Derik opened the door and picked me up. I struggled at first, but then stopped. I wanted to see the city under our feet. Hundreds of little creatures living in tiny buildings. How could Derik just walk over them? And onto their floating cocaine farms?

The city disappeared as we entered somewhere else. Derik threw me down somewhere and I stared at him. We were at my house. He had a devil's tail and horns sticking out of his head.

"I'm sorry, Dakota," was written in the air in blue letters. I scrunched my face in confusion. Then people started into my house. No, they were cockroaches with guns. They were going straight for my mom's room. Their auras were all wrong.

One turned to me and its face morphed into a man's. A dead man's face. Every cockroach had one now, a face of a dead man. Dead bodies laid everywhere.

I started to shriek and cry, turning the air an angry red. The ceiling turned into points. Hundreds of cockroaches marched past, an endless line in front of a castle sitting on an island above lava. My tears floated up to greet me, trying to make things better.

But things weren't better.

They were taking us away. The cockroaches were taking us away. One picked me up and ate me in one bite. I sat inside his dark stomach, too afraid to move. I heard things crawling around me. I didn't want to see.

I didn't want to see.

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i hope you kinda got what happened in this chapter? i'm really sorry that the end was so confusing, but. acid, guys. stick with me here, the next chapter will explain it if you were totally lost as to why dakota was a plow and cockroaches were swarming her apartment lol. i tried my damndest to make it at least SOMEWHAT CLEAR IDK GUYS I'M SORRY FOR THE WEIRD CHAPTER

also i've never tripped on acid (surprise?) so uh. any help on that regard would be wonderful. i think i did ok but idk i literally have so little to go off of. "it makes you see colors and the walls breathe and you see shit" is literally all i got from the internet. XD

dedicated to my awesome friend michelle for making that cover on the side, being a great friend and also encouraging me to post this chapter and not rewrite it <3

sorry for the long note omg i feel like an ass ;-;

stay groovy~!