┏━━━━ •❃°•°❀°•°❃• ━━━━┓
chapter eight
" You are the sunshine of my life
That's why I'll always be around
You are the apple of my eye
Forever, you'll stay in my heart. "
┗━━━━ •❃°•°❀°•°❃• ━━━━┛

NOW PLAYING: "YOU ARE THE SUNSHINE OF MY LIFE" by STEVIE WONDER (1973)

________

THANKS TO TEDDY Price not being bitter over the pears incident, The Six is now on its way to getting a record deal. But that doesn't mean that there aren't pros and cons to this.

The pros: They aren't limited to McNasty's anymore. Now, the band is playing at more well-known, popular rock clubs and bars on The Strip with Teddy present most nights to lend advice. They actually have a bit more money from tips and Eddie no longer worries about eating pocket toast. They're still pinching pennies, but not as much as they were before.

The major con: Everyone is exhausted and close to burning out. Playing so many shows and being pushed to perform better and better has put a strain on The Six, while, having recently turned eighteen, Rory is putting more hours in at the grocery store than she ever has. She has started developing migraines from being under dull, flickering, fluorescent lights for so long. Her throbbing muscles ache after every shift.

So, as to not lose their sanity, everyone decides to take a day off and make the forty-minute drive to Santa Monica in 1973. Does the station wagon break down on the side of the road halfway there? Maybe. But it only takes fifteen minutes for the guys to fix it (for the time being) and they're back on their way.

The mid-spring weather leaves the day dry and mostly sunny, peppering the azure sky with fluffy clouds. Rory inhales the scent of saltwater as soon as she steps out of the van. Eddie, Warren, and Graham immediately take off sprinting toward the water, kicking up sand in their wake, leaving the girls and Billy to pick a spot to put all of their stuff.

They decide on an area far enough from the tide where they don't have to worry about their belongings getting wet, but not too far from the ocean. Billy immediately cracks open a bottle of beer and sits cross-legged on his towel, the sunlight glinting off his aviators. Camila takes out a book, her camera, and her video camera, placing them strategically around her so she can quickly reach one at any given moment. Karen runs off to join the boys in the water. And Rory?

She sits.

After taking off the sundress she'd worn as a cover-up and remaining only in her green checkered two-piece (with high-rise bottoms to hide her bony hips), she wraps her arms around her knees and digs her toes into the sand until she finds a cool spot a few inches below the surface. Then she closes her eyes. If she tries hard enough, she can imagine that she's back home. Not Hazelwood, but home in Colombia.

The sound of waves crashing into the shore is familiar to her. The arid Californian climate sharply contrasts the tropical humidity she'd experienced in her youth, but she can almost hear Abuela's laugh being carried in by the wind. Her grandparents used to take her and Mateo to the beach often, and they would return home at dusk encrusted in sand and with salt clinging to their bodies like a second layer of skin, their cheeks aching from a day full of smiles. Those memories with their grandparents are some of the few where Rory can remember her and her brother getting along.

She exhales slowly and tries to shove down the feeling of homesickness brewing in her gut. That was a much happier time— before Mateo became full of himself and they could go a day without arguing. When they used to build sand castles together and he'd helped her learn to read the waves.

"I LOST MY SWIM TRUNKS!"

And the mirage breaks. Rory cracks open one eye to see Eddie stomach-deep in the ocean, frantically looking around while the others around him break out into laughter.

"The sea hath undone thine loins!" Warren exclaims.

Eddie reaches out to swat him, almost falling over in the process, trying desperately to make sure the water continues to cover him from the waist down.

Rory shakes her head and closes her eye again, unconcerned about the location of Eddie's clothing. How he'd even lost them is a mystery to her that she does not want to be solved.

Moments later, Camila's voice asks, "Can someone tell me why Eddie's swim trunks just washed up on the shore?" followed by Eddie's sigh of relief that they hadn't vanished out to sea. But the peace doesn't return so easily— judging by the sounds that come next, Graham and Warren are now playing a game of Keep-Away in a more shallow part while Eddie curses at them, unable to follow lest he is exposed.

She's content to remain in that spot, allowing the sun to beat down on her and the breeze to rifle her hair, but the serenity is once again interrupted. This time, it's by water droplets that come raining down on her from above, causing her to squeal and fall back, catching herself with her hands behind her. Her eyes fly open to reveal Warren standing above her with a shit-eating grin on his face.

"Hey, Ro-Ro," he greets her, bending his head down and shaking his hair again to cascade cold water droplets upon her.

"Warren!" she cries, ducking away from the spray. "¡Basta!"

"Just messin' with ya." He nudges her leg with his foot. Plopping down on the empty towel beside her, he copies her former position with his legs bent toward his chest. When she sits up straight, his elbow touches her arm. His wet skin is freezing in comparison to her sun-warmed self. "You should join us instead of staying with these old geezers."

Camila raises her chancla in a silent threat, causing Warren to apologize immediately lest she throws it at him.

"I'm waiting for my inhaler to settle in," Rory reminds him. She'd taken it as they had parked the van, but it takes a good twenty minutes to actually have any effect that will make her able to endure moderate physical activity for three hours.

"Oh, yeah," Warren says. "So, you're just... sittin' here until then?"

"Yeah." Rory starts tracing a sun shape in the sand, first a circle and then the rays extending out from it.

She can feel him examining the faraway expression on her face. It makes her cheeks warm.

He asks, "You thinkin' of home?"

She's surprised that he'd been able to guess that. She nods, blowing out a sigh. "Pennsylvania was so different that I stopped getting homesick after a while, but here, with the palm trees and the ocean, the Spanish influence... it is dredging up old memories. Old feelings."

Rory pauses, watching as Warren adds a pair of sunglasses to her drawing. It makes her chuckle and smile in spite of herself.

"But... that was another time," she continues. "Another life. That was with my other family. And now... I have a new one. I have you guys."

She glances up to see Warren smiling at her again. He wraps an arm around her shoulders and pulls her to his side, causing her cheek to smack into his bare chest.

"Yeah, you're stuck with us forever," he says, rubbing his fist into her hair while she laughs and weakly bangs her fists on his arms and legs to bat him away. "But just remember that you signed up for this."

"You're freezing!" she exclaims. The cold water droplets all over his body make her shiver while he holds her captive, and even though he'd taken a dip in the ocean, he still smells like the marijuana joint he'd been smoking on the back porch prior to their departure. "Let me go! I want to go by the water now and you are holding me hostage. Camila!"

"I don't see anything," she says dismissively.

Rory cannot believe that Camila won't help her. "Traidora."

∴━━━ ✿ ━━━∴

CAMILA: I never got the chance to show Rory this photo— I just found it recently when I was looking through my old albums. It's from the day we spent in Santa Monica. I was sitting with Billy when Warren came and bothered Rory, as usual, then sat next to her. She wasn't looking; she had no idea I was watching.

I was able to sneak the photo. I couldn't help myself. Rory was talking, tracing something in the sand, and Warren was just... well. I'll show you.

[She holds up a photograph from Santa Monica in May of 1973. Rory's back is to the camera. Warren sits to her right, his eyes on her, his expression soft.]

Everyone always says they were surprised about Warren and Rory ending up together. But I wasn't.

∴━━━ ✿ ━━━∴

Warren continues tormenting her — this time by tickling her — and it makes her shriek and kick and almost send a cloud of sand cascading over Camila and Billy from her uncontrollable floundering. Then he flips her over and stands so he's carrying her toward the water.

"Warren Rojas," Rory cautions, "don't you dare."

"I dare, Ro-Ro."

"Graham!" she shouts, desperate for help as they reach the ocean, sea foam sloshing over Warren's ankles. "Karen!"

"Nice of you to join us, Rory," Graham says while fighting a grin. He makes absolutely no move to rescue her.

"I hate you."

Graham blows her a kiss in response.

Rory decides that if Warren is going to toss her in, she will take him down with her.

She uses her small stature to her advantage by twisting around in his grip and wrapping both arms around his neck. They've waded waist-deep now, and, thankfully, Warren has considered their height difference, making sure she'll still be able to touch the bottom. And Rory's plan works. When he tries to throw her into the water, her grip causes him to basically do a front-flip in right after her.

The freezing ocean envelopes Rory like an electric shock to her senses. She breaks her hold on Warren upon impact, but she still gets whacked by one of his arms or legs or maybe that was his skull banging into hers. But when she finally gets her feet on the sandy ocean floor and resurfaces, she's laughing.

"It's so cold!" she exclaims, hopping up and down on her toes in the soft sand. Warren pops up beside her and shakes his drenched hair out like a dog.

"That's because you just got in," Eddie tells her. He splashes her, making Rory glower and begin to lunge forward in the water. Then she stops.

"I hope you aren't still naked."

"I'm not."

"Good." Rory releases a battle cry before launching herself onto Eddie's back and clinging to him like a monkey while he tries to fight her off.

"Help!" he cries, twisting around to force her to fall backward. "Tiny demon attacking me!"

Warren and Graham splash her in an attempt to make her release him. Luckily, Karen comes to her defense, clobbering the boys on their heads with the foam pool noodle she had been using to float around.

"Violence!" Warren yells, holding up his hands to defend himself against the Pool Noodle Attack. "Assault! Battery!"

Eddie's wet skin makes him difficult to grip. Rory really doesn't want to accidentally push down his swim trunks with the way her legs are wrapped around his abdomen, so she releases him and tumbles backward into the water before she can slip any further.

After wearing themselves out from the impromptu battle, the group heads back to shore so they can bother Billy and Camila. Or, at least, most of them do.

Rory decides to search along the tide to find seashells. It's an activity she used to love doing with Abuela. They would return home with a bag full, then sit at the kitchen table and sort through which ones they wanted to keep. Rory used to have jars full of beautiful shells of all sizes and colors. Unfortunately, they'd had to leave them behind when they moved.

She wonders if her relatives had still kept them in the house. Had Tía Paola tossed them out? Or are they still on a shelf, waiting for her to come back to a place she might never be able to return to?

The day dips into dusk, the sky painting itself shades of pink, purple, and orange as the sun sinks below the horizon. Billy brings them sandwiches he'd bought on the pier for dinner. They sit, talking and laughing, when Eddie casually takes out a plastic bag with acid squares and starts passing them around. Rory watches Graham put one on his tongue before she asks, "Can I try?"

Eddie freezes, staring at her like she's grown five heads. He blinks. "You want... to try acid?"

"Yeah." She shrugs. "I can't smoke and alcohol is mediocre at best, so why not?"

"Fair enough." Eddie tears off a square and places it in her outstretched palm. "Just — you know —"

"I know what to do with it," Rory says. She puts the blotter on her tongue, expecting a strong taste, only to be met with a slightly bitter one as the paper begins to dissolve. The ingestion process is the most uneventful part.

Warren and Karen throw their hands up and cheer. Camila, though grinning, maintains a careful eye on her.

"It takes a while to settle in," Graham informs her. "But once it does..." he smiles, "you'll know it."

∴━━━ ✿ ━━━∴

EDDIE: Some articles about us have called Rory a stiff because she was always sober around the cameras, while the rest of us... were not. That's definitely not true. She didn't take acid often, but when she did, it was almost always funny. Sometimes we would skip out on the trip and just watch her.

I shit you not, one time, Warren and Rory were both high and just sat cross-legged in the living room with their knees touching, staring at each other, and laughing. For an hour. Graham, Karen, Camila, and I were on the sofa with popcorn. We had bets on when they would stop.

RORY: He had the mustache at the time and it was doing a little dance on his face.

WARREN: Her laugh is contagious.

∴━━━ ✿ ━━━∴

The sky is bleeding color. Rory is on her back in the sand, her pupils blown into two black abysses, staring at the vibrant hues all melting together like watercolor paint on an artist's canvas. Karen lies next to her, her golden hair a glowing fire as night continues to fall. Their hands are laced together. When Rory tries to detangle her fingers from Karen's, they can't find their way out, and both girls break out into a fit of deranged giggles.

Every movement leaves streaks of the objects behind like a camera set in motion blur. Her grin is wide when she returns her gaze back to the heavens above, the stars twinkling and huge. She can't believe that she had once accepted her parents' wishes to confine her to Hazelwood for the rest of her life. How could she have ever been okay with that when there is an entire planet to discover? The stars above are remnants of ones that have already died thousands of years ago and she is a speck in the universe. She is going to make sure her tiny blip of existence counts.

"Have I told you that I love you guys?" she asks.

"What?" Eddie inquires.

"Rory, you're speaking in Spanish," Camila tells her.

"Oh." Her brain can't figure out how to flip the switch so only English words come out of her mouth. It all sounds the same in her mind, translations becoming muddled in the fog. She scrunches her eyebrows, focusing hard on the words she is forming. "I love you guys."

Graham replies, "We love you too, Ror," and she's so happy she could start crying.

A few seconds or minutes or years later — what is time in the grand expanse of the universe? — Billy says, "It's getting late. We should get going."

Rory tries to push herself up onto her elbows but finds that the ground won't let her go. "The beach is stuck to me."

"That's all the sand in your hair," Camila tells her.

Rory shakes her head to let the grains fall back where they belong, laughing at the way it makes her head bobble. Karen looks funny when she does the same. Her hair is still glowing in the dark.

"Okay." Billy heaves Rory onto her feet and then crouches down in front of her. Rory may not have the best motor functions, but she's still able to climb onto his back, watching the beach and sky coalesce into one as he lifts her up by slipping his arms under her knees. "Off we go. The van's waiting for us."

"I wonder if it missed us while we were gone," Rory mumbles, her cheek pressed to his shoulder.

"I'm sure it did."

Billy carries her, among several towels he has slung over his other shoulder, while everyone else that's high is left to struggle on their own. Warren bursts out laughing when Eddie almost face-plants into the sand. Karen leans half of her weight on Camila, who's herding them all in the right direction like a mother duck keeping her ducklings in line.

She is placed in the back of the station wagon and snuggles into the fuzzy towel that appears around her. The five acid-takers all pile in with her, basically flopping inside like dead fish.

Soon her head becomes too heavy to hold and she's leaning it against Warren's shoulder— she knows it's him because he smells like weed and salt just as he did before. His cheek plops on top of her. Rory's eyes flutter shut, feeling completely at peace with the people surrounding her, as she snuggles deeper into the crook of Warren's neck and dismisses the fluttering of her heart as a side-effect of the drug.

_______

a/n:

me literally listening to a podcast episode about LSD to help me write this chapter: 🎧🧐📝

it's the way that rory is my first OC to (intentionally) do drugs. which is, like, weird on the surface since she seems like she'd be the least likely to do them. but then you remember it's the seventies

i love writing scenes and chapters like this where the main focus is the bond between the characters !!! i hope that, by now, it's obvious how close all of them are, and how they're a family. also i have weirdly come to appreciate rory and eddie's dynamic so much ??? they've come a long way from an awkward first kiss in chuck's garage.

which of rory's dynamics do you find the most interesting or entertaining? i honestly can't choose because i love them all. part of me wants to say roquez because duh, but then there's graham, and then eddie, and then camila, and then karen, and even billy truly cares about her deep down, and the scene with him carrying her on his back at the end of this chapter really made my heart go WOOSH.

also HOW DID THIS BOOK GAIN ALMOST 3K READS SINCE I PUBLISHED THE LAST CHAPTER OMG Y'ALL ARE CRAZY ILY😭🩷

— kristyn

TRANSLATIONS:

¡Basta!: Stop it!

Traidora: Traitor

( word count: 3.2k )