“I guess there’s so much heavy breathing going on that there’s enough CO2 for you all,” Karen says, flicking a piece of ice at the frog. She misses, and the ice skitters away over the bar. The alien turns its long-suffering eyes on her again. She sips her rum and coke and stares back until she starts to feel distinctly uncomfortable. She leans left, and the frog’s eyes follow her. Then she leeeaaans left, and the frog is still staring. She leans so far that she loses balance and falls against Trisha.
Trisha laughs and pushes her back upright on her barstool. “Hoo boy, Karen’s smashed already.”
“No, I’m not,” Karen says, hoping that the bartender didn’t see her fall. Luckily, he’s busy, slinging limp white napkins and pouring cheap beer.
It’s easier to hear now, and it takes a moment for Karen to step outside of her drink-tunneled attention and realize that the opener has stopped playing. In the silence between sets, the bar gets so busy that she can feel the press of people against her back as they crowd forward to order drinks over her head. A guy stumbles against her, grabbing her boob for balance, and then he slides away down the bar before she can respond. Trisha and Moira either didn’t see or don’t care. Karen bites her lip, hunches her shoulders, and wishes she’d stayed home. She doesn’t even like the headliner much, it’s Moira’s favorite. She wishes she’d responded faster and punched the guy in the kidney, or something.
The glitter frog is gone. Karen wonders if they can walk on the floor in this crush of people, and then she imagines the floor coated with the remains of glitter frogs like stomped grapes.
The benefit of going to a show in another city is that it means the chances of running into someone you know, or worse, someone who knows your parents, are much slimmer. Still, Karen thinks she recognizes one of the young men on the other side of the bar. She squints in the dim light and can make out his features.
It’s the missing boy from her high school, she realizes. He has glitter frogs on both his shoulders and he’s buying a drink for the boy next to him. People thought he was dead. He’s been gone for months.
She’s about to go over to him and tell him that he should call his parents and at least tell them that he’s alive when Trisha says, “Oh my god, can we dance already?”
Karen realizes that she hadn’t noticed the headliner beginning to play.
Moira throws back the rest of her drink, and then she grabs Trisha by the arm, pulling her off the stool. “Come on,” she says, “I love this song!”
Karen chugs the rum and coke, which is a mistake because she realizes that she isn’t quite sure how many drinks she’s had so far.
She follows her friends out into the mass of people, shoving her way past sweaty arms and glowsticks, past people dancing so close that she wants to scream “Get a room!” but doesn’t because she figures they wouldn’t hear her anyway. Moira is extremely good at working the crowd, and it doesn’t take long before they’re only a few people from the front. And then they are in the crush of humanity, everything smelling hot and damp-slick with sweat.
Karen feels like she should be repulsed by the warm sweat of strangers, but instead she lifts her arms over her head, lets the stage lights strobe between her fingers and the thrumming bass fill her head.
For the first two songs, she hopes that the night lasts forever, that the set will go on and on until she dies of old age here in this dark room. There are no frogs on the floor, but there are some on the stage. One is even clinging to the microphone stand.
But then the first few songs turn into a few more, and a few more, and suddenly Karen realizes four things:
a) She isn’t sure where her friends even are anymore.
b) She would rather the show be over sooner rather than later because she’s not sure she can keep up with this pace much longer.
c) Most of the guys on the floor seem to have the same balance problems as that one man did by the bar.
d) She’s going to need to puke soon.
Her feeling of malaise turns into an even stronger need to puke as the slower song she’d been swaying to segues into something faster, hotter, and with more thumping in it. And then she’s dodging elbows on her way to the edge of the crowd. The world consists of nothing anymore but the sour smell of other humans, the bruising force of their bodies against hers every single time she misjudges the tempo of their terrible fucking dancing.
Karen thinks she’s going to start screaming, crying, or maybe just pass out, but then she’s miraculously outside the crowd, stumbling toward the can. There’s a man near the door checking her out, and she barely manages to flip him off before stumbling through the bathroom door.
The women’s restroom is full of glitter frogs. They’re everywhere—on the floor, clinging to the stalls, on the sinks, in the sinks, by the sinks. On the paper towel dispenser.
She stumbles into one of the stalls—of course none of them have doors—and hovers over the painted-black toilet with the cracked seat, trying to puke so that the bathroom will stop spinning. She tries to stick her finger down her throat as if that might help. It should have, since her finger tasted grosser than anything, but it didn’t.
After a few minutes of fighting to give in to the nausea, she gives up, sits on the toilet with her pants still up, breathing heavily and trying not to cry. The sickness encompasses everything. She is in a building with several hundred people, here with friends, and she’s alone.
The glitter frogs are watching her.
Air, she thinks, and even though the room is still spinning, she climbs to her feet and stumbles out of the bathroom, following the wall to the front door, and then she’s out on the street.
It’s raining, cold fat drops are landing on her hair, soaking through her shirt. The door guys watch her like the glitter frogs as she stumbles around the corner and leans back against the jagged bricks of the wall. The street keeps tilting clockwise.
“Are you okay?”
Karen blinks. Standing at the corner is the boy she recognized earlier. He is covered in frogs. He doesn’t seem to mind the rain.
“Are you Aaron?” she asks. Missing Aaron.
He smiles. “Kind of.”
She squeezes her eyes shut to make the spinning stop. This makes her more dizzy, so she opens them again.
He asks, “Do you need help getting back inside?”
“Not yet.” Karen can hear the music. She can feel it against her back, the vibrations working their way through the wall.
“I’ll wait with you,” he says. He doesn’t add, “Because you’re way too drunk.”
Minutes pass. Karen asks, “Why’d you run away?”
Aaron’s voice is so soft that she almost can’t hear him over the music and the sound of rain. “The frogs,” he says. “I want to go away with them. Me and Tristan are going away with them.”
Karen laughs. “Oh my god,” she says. “Are you serious?”
He lifts a glitter frog off his left shoulder. This one is dark blue, and it glistens in the streetlight. She can’t tell if that’s from the metallic flecks in its skin, or from rainwater. Aaron holds it out to her. “Haven’t you ever felt like you didn’t belong here?”
Karen takes the glitter frog, holds it in the palm of her hand.
Aaron says, “Neither do they.”
For Sale Listing: GLITTER FROG CLOTHING—COTTON—SHIRTS, PANTS, SUITS, SUN DRESSES—$20-$75
All glitter frog clothing hand sewn by ME! Are there alien frogs in your life that you’re starting to get attached to? Are you having trouble telling them apart? Price varies depending on the amount of fabric needed! When you order, send a photo of the frog next to a ruler or something so I can figure out the measurements.