day ninety three.

INSTALMENT FOUR - HETERO + EXTRA

The only place in the small town of Newcastle that one could buy alcohol, closed at 6:00 every night except on Sundays (when it wasn’t open). This almost posed a major problem for a group of girls just ‘legal enough’, who arrived at the store at 5:55. It was a Friday night and really, what other choice did they have but to drink, after their long, one hour tutorial on Friday afternoons.

The girls knew exactly what they wanted, or rather, followed their friend who assumed the leader position to pick up exactly what she wanted (it was her turn to supply the real drinks, another to supply the mix and the last one to supply the dark and dingy basement which only got sufficient use on Friday nights, as it was completely too haunted to visit on the remaining days of the week). One mickey of vodka was all she could afford and it was all they would need – they didn’t plan to drink this slowly. The leader brought the bottle up to the counter with her troops right behind her and paid.

“Do you have airmiles?”

“What’s that?”

“That’ll be $13.95”.

They rushed out of the store with their bagged bottle of delight right before they got kicked out; the transaction had taken 3 minutes exactly. When they closed the door to the liquor store, the manager put up the closed sign with a sigh, hoping she wouldn’t have to deal with the awkwardness of accepting another fake I.D. that night.

The girls skipped home arm in arm, oblivious to how foolish they looked and eventually arrived at the musty basement in which they had already set up their cups and mix. Out came the bottle, and with a quick twist by the leader it was open, and poured into three glasses. The bottle itself was placed out of the way on a shelf, hidden in case a mother or father appeared downstairs.

All of the excitement of their I.D. working and talk of how it was ‘fair anyways because they were all 18 which is almost 19 anyways’, caused them to make their drinks disappear within the hour. Now red faced and hiccupping they had acquired that heavy, loathful thirst for more to drink. They decided to go back to the liquor store in hopes that the manager was still closing it down. Laughing at their new plan, they grabbed the bottle from the shelf and left, arm in arm, a little more unsteady this time.

They reached the store a convenient ten minutes later, though they almost became distracted by a dog in the catwalk they took, and collapsed against the glass door to look inside. The manager was nowhere to be seen, nor was anyone else, or any light for that matter. They tried the door; it was locked. Angry now at that ‘stuck up, snooty, stooopid fuckin’ airmile manager’ the leader raised their emptied bottle in the air and let it crash down in front of the store.

Satisfied with their destruction, and feeling drunk again, they left to go to try and find some pot to smoke from one of the stoners at the park.

The bottle lay smashed in twenty different pieces next to a squished cigarette butt.