Head in the Cloud

Head in the Cloud By J.M. Snyder When Jake Mallory woke on Sunday morning, his head throbbed like a rotted tooth. The pain seemed situated right behind his left eye, and no matter how he moved, it didn’t seem to get any better. Then he rolled over and caught a face full of bright sunshine streaming through the crack in his curtains, and the pain flared to searing intensity. Pulling the covers up over his head, he burrowed down into the dark quiet of his bed. But his sheets stank of stale cigarette smoke and spilled beer, and no matter how thinly he tried to breathe, the smell didn’t get any better. In a huff, he rolled away from the window and gulped in fresh air…or as fresh as it got in his bedroom, with the piles of dirty clothing strewn across the floor, and a pair of damp sneakers moldering near the door. But it smelled worlds better than the musky funk of his bed sheets. God, what did I get up to last night? Blurred images filled his mind, but his head hurt too much to concentrate on any one of them for too long. He went clubbing, he knew that much, a back-to-school jaunt that was supposed to celebrate making it through the first week of his last year of college. The binge had started Friday night—he could remember that much pretty clearly, a few friends getting together at one of the student apartments on campus, pizza and beer all around. Then someone had suggested they hit the clubs, and since there were a handful of gay dives scattered across D.C., no one could settle on which to visit. So Jake had said hey, let’s hit them all. His roommate Holly was there—she was always their designated driver, and she liked gay clubs because no one hit on her there. Plus she shared a house off campus with Jake, which meant she could drive everyone back to their place to crash. Holly was a bit of a fruit fly—she liked to brag that she only knew gay guys, and the ones she knew who said they weren’t gay were still in the closet—and Jake liked having her around. Not only were they friends, but she had the uncanny ability to chat up anyone, and that always worked to Jake’s advantage in a club. Whenever Holly started talking to some hot little piece of ass, Jake would drop in to check on them and, nine times out of ten, ended up flirting his way into the guy’s pants. That might have happened Friday night. Jake couldn’t quite grasp the details, but he seemed to recall a pretty face hovering around the edges of his memory. Someone he knew, maybe? There had been something familiar about the guy, and Holly had grinned when she introduced them, as if she knew Jake knew him and was waiting for the connection to be made. Only by that time, Jake had been pretty drunk. He only knew which one was Holly because of her hips. With her short-cropped hair, she’d looked like every other guy at the bar from behind. But he zeroed in on those birthing hips and called for another beer as he leaned between her and the other guy. “Hey,” he had breathed, in a voice as thick as gasoline. In the quiet of his bed, Jake covered his mouth with his hand and blew into his palm. The air was rank, and suggested he had been hitting something a bit heavier than plain beer. If he’d been in the club on Friday, though, and today was Sunday, then what had happened to the day in between? Wait, was it Sunday? Why did he think it was Sunday? Blindly Jake slapped at the top of his bedside table, searching for his phone. He found a half-squeezed tube of KY Jelly, a tube of Chapstick, a bottle of pills that rattled when he knocked it to the floor, but no phone. Jake sat up fast. My iPhone. s**t. Then the pain stabbed into his eye and he pulled up his knees to hang his head between them. Both hands cradled his throbbing temples. “Oh God,” he moaned. Then he raised his voice. “Holly?” Silence. Of course. If it were Sunday, then she was at church, and Jake had probably heard the car pull out of their driveway just before he woke up, which was why he knew it wasn’t Saturday. But if he had his phone, he could check… “Don’t tell me I lost it,” he mumbled to no one in particular. Carefully he maneuvered himself to the edge of the bed and stretched out across his mattress. He gritted his teeth against the pain in his skull as he looked down at the floor. A pair of dingy jeans lay discarded at the side of his bed, a T-shirt and boxers balled up on top of the denim. Jake moved like an old man, trying not to do anything to worsen his hangover, as he reached down and pushed the jeans aside. No phone. f**k. Had he lost it somewhere between the dorm Friday night and his bedroom now? Left it in someone’s car, or given it to Holly to hold onto, or dropped it in the bathroom at the club? And it was an iPhone, too, the latest model, not some cheap-ass dumb phone he could do without. All his stuff was on that phone—banking apps that saved his passwords so he wouldn’t have to type them in all the time, email accounts that checked for messages automatically, even his class schedules. Everything. Gone. Suddenly it was too much to think about; it made his head hurt worse. So he turned back around, placed his head on the pillows, and pulled the covers up under his chin. He’d deal with it when he felt better. Right this moment he was going back to sleep. Two seconds later, he rolled over again, this time to put his back to the window. If he couldn’t be bothered about his iPhone, he sure as hell wasn’t climbing out of bed to fix the damn curtain.