“Me too.”
Brett and I were sitting on the floor looking into her mirrored closet doors. We were coming down the peak of an acid trip on a random school day in the fall of 1993. Our faces looked blotchy and felt like they were made of dry clay. Pushing and pulling noses, lips, and cheeks, it took a little too long to get back to where it was, and it never looked quite right once it settled.
“Maybe it’s the lighting,” I said.
“God, I hope so. If we really look like this, we’d be the most unattractive people in the world.”
“There has to be someone more unattractive than us.”
“Like who?”
“Tracy’s mom.”
Brett and Tracy were best friends a month before and had some kind of falling out that resulted in them being mortal enemies. It reminded me of the Highlander. The movie one, not the TV one.
While Tracy and her mom were not ugly, they had masculine features softened only by the excess weight that gave the illusion of rounding out angular body parts that strongly jutted out from already oversized frames.
Amazonian is too strong a word.
Brett laughed and added that Tracy and her mom were the most unattractive people in the world and we were second. It was funny and we started laughing. Brett grabbed a marker, climbed onto her bed and wrote on the wall:
We are the SECOND most unattractive people in the world. Tracy and her mom are the first.
I grabbed a marker and starting writing on her wall as well. In under an hour, every reachable space around the bed was covered in multi-colored memos about anything that happened to race across our acid-saturated minds.
We decided that as the second most unattractive people in the world, we should be celebrated. There should be thrones. Ugly thrones!
Brett tore the sheets off the bed as I grabbed two old Ikea chairs and put them on the bare mattresses. We climbed onto our makeshift thrones and made capes out of the bedding.
Just as I was preparing to make on official declaration of our new positions, Brett’s mom walked in and surveyed the room.
Brett and I were wrapped in blankets sitting in chairs on top of bare mattresses. The wall behind us was covered in ramblings and drawings. The floor covered with markers and the clock read one forty five in the morning.
“Hi Mom!”
“What the hell are you two doing?!”
“Nothing,” Brett said.
“We’re royalty!” I blurted out.
“Are you on drugs?” Brett’s mom always asked this question, mostly because she thought she should, so we always played along. Our eyes were as big as saucers and we were sitting on chairs on a bed covered in blankets at one forty five in the morning, but Brett gave the answer that would move us past this part of the conversation.
“No, Mom,”
“Brandon, why are you wearing a blanket?”
“It’s a cape. We’re the second most unattractive people in the world!”
“Tracy and her mom are the first.”
Brett’s mom laughed and said, “Oh, you kids,” as she rolled her eyes.
“Mom, do you have any cigarettes?”
“What happened to the pack I just bought you?”
“We finished them.”
“My God, you two are like little chimneys. There in my room, come get them.”
I interjected, “Brett! You can’t go. If you leave the throne, you might not be one of the second most unattractive people in the world, and then it’s just me, Tracy, and her Mom.”
“You’re right,” she said, “we should go together.”
So Brett and I whispered down the hall into her mom’s room wrapped in blankets to get a pack of Capri 120’s from her mom.
“You two go to bed,” she stage whispered at us as we were walking away.
We got back into Brett’s room and put the chairs on the floor and remade the bed. We were still too high to go to sleep, so we grabbed our capes and went out on her balcony to smoke.
“Brett, I think it’s your lamps that make us ugly.”
“I think so too. What do you think makes Tracy and her Mom ugly?”
I thought for a minute.
“Genetics.”
B
Posted by Peanut Butter And Jealous 
