'High on Mushrooms in the Barnstable High School Production of Peter Pan', by Brian Stephen Ellis

My buddy Armstrong was dealing weed at the high school, so we’d go to the parking lot there in the afternoon, I was just two years out of high school myself, well I had dropped out when I was a junior, so it’s kinda like I was just getting out now. Every time we went to the parking lot right as class got out there was always this girl there named George who everybody said liked me. I didn’t really see it but it would be nice if it were true. 
George had big poofy hair that was part afro and part dreds and she had dark skin and big dark eyes behind cat’s eye glasses and wore a denim jacket with a big Clash flag on the back and she was like this hippie-punk-intellectual who made zines and partially took classes at the community college while still at high school because none of the teachers at Barnstable were smart enough to teach her anymore and she was so freaking hot I couldn’t even look at her. 
So I was looking down at the mix of sand and gravel strewn across the faded asphalt under my chucks when she asked if I would come to this thing at the school on Friday, I worked overnights at the gas station and didn’t sleep the rest of the time so I was always free.
No way Armstrong was actually going to go inside the building so on the Friday of I asked my buddy Kansas if he’d meet me outside the school, I felt weird about being like an adult person just walking around inside a high school and he said yeah, and Kansas met me at the chain link fence near the street and as we walked up the concrete steps he told me he had an eighth of mushrooms on him and maybe we could take them after and I said better to take them now because you don’t want to have those things in your possession inside a school, which is a government building, and Kansas said yeah you’re right that’s smart and we split the bag before going in. 
Kansas gagged chewing the dry psylocibin, but I didn’t mind the taste. He stopped at the first bubbler in the entrance of the high school. George and her whole crew were waiting for us a couple halls over. I was glad Kansas was with me because Barnstable was much bigger than where I went, Dennis-Yarmouth. George stood at the fore of the group, and she looked up into my face when I walked over, a smile on her small mouth. Charlotte asked if Armstrong was with us because she had a crush on him, and Kansas and I just hissed in response.
We were late and George hustled the group along, the play was about to start. This was the first I had heard the word play, I didn’t know what I thought this was, some bands playing maybe, but it turned out to be the Drama Club putting on Peter Pan. This was opening night. George squeezed my dangling hand, her heat and strength a pinch that I could feel all the way at the top of my neck where it met my skull. 
“You can sit with me,” she whispered. 
The high school auditorium was huge, and the room was packed. It was a really big, nice room, big stage with a wide arch over the red curtain, filigree and sconces and the whole thing. Maybe a thousand people in the three sections of seats. The tax base of this school system was perhaps higher than I knew. 
One of George’s little friends was saving a row for us halfway down on the far-right side, and it was a good thing, otherwise we’dn’t been able to snag seats. I sat on the very inside, next to a stranger, some large woman with big dark hair, George on my other side, Kansas on the other side of her. After we sat down, the house lights flickered, and the play was about to start. I started to wonder about my hands. Where I should put them. Put them out on the armrest where George can grab them, like she did when we came in, or do I keep them close? Should I be forward or conservative? Which was which? I put my hands in my lap and the curtain went up.
The production quality of the play was next level. I loved Peter Pan, I had seen it on stage a couple times when I was a kid, my older brothers in their high school productions, and I loved the Disney movie and the live-action Hook. And these kids were good actors, I was pulled right in and became completely absorbed in the narrative and kinda forgot about swallowing mushrooms and even my crush next to me. I started tripping when Tinkerbell appeared. She was represented as usual by the lights crew with a tight white spot, but the sudden jump of the play from the static field of the stage into the auditorium with us knocked me back into the fabric auditorium seat. 
I was experiencing the play with child-mind, everything was as potent and magical as when you’re a kid, and Tinkerbell was a real faerie, as far as I was concerned in that moment, and I thought this was what fairies are, the beings that usher us into the impossible when we open our hearts, my heart was as open as the first time I ever saw Peter Pan, and maybe that’s what I was seeing now, my memory of the thing overlaid with the thing, the first time I ever experienced this story planting a seed in me and that moment reverberating still.
George’s small hand reached out and squeezed the top of my thigh. I thought for a second that maybe my knee had been jiggling and George found it annoying and wanted me to stop, but I thought about it and went into the past slightly and realized that my knee had not been jiggling but George was just touching me because she wanted to touch me, I remembered the hand holding from about a year before this all started, and a warm gold ooze filled my body, like a kind of sex lava, the live wire of George’s body in contact with my body. 
Very slowly, one stiff inch at a time, I turned my face and neck to look at George, her round cute face, sexy eyes behind sexy glasses, her big cheeks, small mouth. My eyes were wide and her face was like a wave of information, streaming in at me, a great gush of knowledge blasting straight in my mug. It was so much information that I couldn’t parse out any of it, it was the babel-language of heaven. 
I turned back to the play, which was only slightly less intense than looking into George’s face. I heard George and Kansas whispering, I was sure Kansas was snitching on me to George, telling her what we had done, maybe the whole crew knew, I heard whispers all over, little shushes like wind in the trees, tress are full of rumors. My mind was stretching into the past and the future, my brain was a golden bell and the ring was reaching out in every direction, I was still that child seeing Peter Pan for the first time and what was happening now was the future, I was still a kid and I was inside of a vision, Island of Lost Boys, I would never grow up.
And then that fucking Crocodile came. Barnstable High School had constructed a huge prop for the Crocodile that chases Hook, the thing was the size of a golf cart. It looked like it was made of out paper mache, and we didn’t see the whole thing, just its huge head and its neck extending from off-stage, and there was the ticking sound of a clock everywhere in the room and the crocodile had these bright white glowing eyes and it took every ounce of strength and courage for me not to run out of that freaking auditorium screaming. 
It was fucking huge and coming right for me, those huge glowing eyes.
I was ready to burst, some kind of chromatic rainbow mania was going to explode from my skull. We were in a government building, and there were definitely a few cops in the audience, the room was full of people, and I could feel waves of time ripping out of my body, ripping me apart, and I had to keep it all in, I had to plug the well of the underworld which was my body, so I stuffed my fist in my mouth.
I’m a skinny guy, but I have big hands. I have these huge swollen knobby knuckles, bone pushing through thin pasty anemic skin. 
I dunno how I got my whole fist in my mouth, my jaw disjoined, something. 
I stayed that way, fist in mouth, breathing through my nose, my elbow way out in front of me, my crush next to me somehow not noticing, in the dark of the audience, dazzled by the light of the stage, keeping all that strangeness inside, holding the storm of my personality at bay, lost boy, trapped in time and space.     

Brian Stephen Ellis is a poet and prose author living in Portland, Ore. Their most recent collection of poems is Against Common Sense from Limit Zero Press (2023). You can find them at brianellis.info

         

Photography by Remi Berin