The Party by Christopher Pike

croaked.
    The figure croaked back. No, it was more of a belch. She reached down, picked up the car that had struck her on the head, smelled the beer. Her fear disappeared as quickly as it had come. Somebody was just getting drunk in private. Laughing, she walked toward the tree trunk.
    “Hey, if I was you, I wouldn’t be drinking up there. You could slip and hurt—”
    A flash of metal and wood whipped by, inches from her face. Polly leapt back a step. Embedded in the ground in the grass at her feet was a huge axe.
    Polly screamed bloody murder.
    The guy fell out of the tree. Polly kept screaming. He rolled over and looked up at her. “What time is it?” he mumbled.
    Polly bit her lip. “Past ninethirty.”
    The guy sat up, rubbed his head. “Where are the birds?”
    “What birds?”
    “I heard birds.” He burped again, deep and loud, and reached for his axe.
    “That was me. Excuse me, what are you doing with that?”
    He was using it, Polly realized a moment later, to climb to his feet. She relaxed a notch. There were empty beer cans littering the ground. This guy wouldn’t be chasing her anywhere.
    “Do you need some help?” she asked tentatively. He briefly gained an upright position, clinging to the axe handle, before swaying forward and smacking his skull directly into the tree trunk. “Oh, no!” she cried, jumping to his side. “You’ll kill yourself.”
    “What time is it?” he breathed in her face. With the lack of light, she couldn’t see what he looked like. She could, however, smell him. He must have poured half the beer over his shirt.
    “I told you, past nine-thirty. Why do you keep asking me that?”
    He tried to get up again. “Got to chop this down before morning, before the birds get here.”
    “You can’t do that.” She tried to pull the axe from his hands. “No.”
    He wouldn’t let go of the handle. “Why not?”
    “Because it’s a pretty tree. Leave it alone.”
    The guy turned, stared at the trunk, and then spat on it. “Those faggot foots—footballs. They all stand here.” He leaned into the axe, pushed himself up. “It’s got to go.”
    Polly moved back a step. He’d raised the axe over his head. It looked capable of flying in a dozen different directions. “Stop!” she pleaded.
    He let go with a wild swing. The tip of the axe sliced into the bark. Leaning back, he tried to pull it free. His hands ended up slipping from the handle, and he was back on his ass. Before he could get up, Polly knelt by his side, putting both her palms on his chest. Even through his soggy shirt, she could feel the curves of his welldeveloped pectoral muscles. “Look, you’ve got to stop. If you kill this tree, you’ll be killing all the birds who live in it.”
    “I can’t hurt the birds,” he said, trying repeatedly to get up, not realizing it was she that was holding him down.
    “That’s right. So why don’t we take your nice axe and put it in my car and I’ll drive you home.” She wasn’t exactly sure why she had made the offer. It could have been because of some distant streetlight. A sliver of white had fallen across his face, revealing a rugged—rough would probably have been closer to the truth—handsomeness. He belched again, his jaw dropping open.
    “Is it you?” he asked, amazed.
    “Who? What?”
    “You! I stopped the race for you. The foots—Coach made them kick me off the team. All because of you.”
    “No, it wasn’t me.”
    He wiped the back of his arm across his nose. “You’re pretty, Sara.”
    “Thank you. Let me take you home.”
    “Your place or mine?” he slurred as she helped him up.
    “Your place. What’s your name?”
    “Rusty—Russ.”
    “I’m Polly.”
    “Sara Polly?”
    “I’m whoever you want me to be.”
    It took time getting the axe out of the tree. It took longer getting Russ and the axe into her car. Fortunately, he remembered where he lived. She assumed it was the right house. She deposited him in the front yard without