The bartender was someone Courtney had seen on a few occasions at the swimming pool. She was a pretty girl that was roughly Courtney’s age and also shared the same height, figure, and happy-go-lucky attitude—but whether hers was faked or not, Courtney didn’t know. She had long, shiny blonde hair with the last few inches dyed red and black. Though longer, it was styled straight and flat like Courtney’s. She dressed similarly as well.
Another child of pop culture.
She was probably someone Courtney could have been a friend with had events happened differently—and she didn’t mean just at Eastpointe. The bartender reminded Courtney of the kind of person she used to have as part of her social circle—the pretty yet not overly interesting type. If the world as a whole had not changed, maybe this was someone she would be finishing college with. That sounded about right to her. At her current age, she would have just been finishing up college, provided she had only signed on for four years. She would never know now.
It was weird for her to think about things like that.
The bartender was busy washing glasses in the sink, but looked up as Courtney entered the room.
“Hi there,” she said in a laid-back Pennsylvanian voice. “Courtney, right?”
A bit surprised, Courtney asked, “You know my name?”
“I’m a bartender,” she replied with a smile. “I know everybody, and—whether I want to or not—everybody’s business.”
Courtney looked around. The place was dark, with booths only dimly lit with soft, candle-like lights overhead. The stools around the bar itself were polished and shiny and the large mirror in the back was smudge and fingerprint free. Cocktail glasses hung from wire racks and long, perfectly situated rows of bottles stretched out along the wall. Despite its upper-class atmosphere, there was country music playing quietly on the jukebox. Courtney and the bartender were the only ones there.
She pulled out a stool and climbed on.
So this is a bar, she thought. Whoop-tee-do.
From behind the counter, the other girl strolled over and stood in front of her. She leaned close and very politely whispered, “You know you need work credits in order to drink here, right?”
Courtney sighed, then reached into her front pocket and pulled out a handful of silver tokens. She placed them neatly in a stack on the bar and asked, “Is this enough?”
The bartender’s eyes grew wide. The tokens still had their glossy finish, which meant they probably hadn’t been circulated throughout Eastpointe. She replied, “That’s plenty. Don’t you ever spend any?”
“Mostly just in the cafeteria and swimming pool,” Courtney replied. Then, wondering if the girl might think her a prostitute or something for having all those credits, she quickly added, “I earned them legitimately.”
“Yeah, I know,” the girl said. “You were one of those going out the gate a couple years ago.”
Courtney nodded. The bartender hadn’t been lying about knowing everybody’s business. Then again, she knew everyone at Eastpointe had a tendency of keeping an ear to the ground.
“You don’t have to work, do you? You’ve got like a free pass now.”
Courtney nodded once more.
The girl cutely rolled her eyes and said, “Must be nice.” She extended her hand and introduced herself. “Alexis Turner.”
Courtney shook it and replied, “Courtney Colvin.”
“I know. So, what can I give you?”
Courtney looked away to investigate the rows of bottles behind the bar. She had to squint to read their labels. She saw Amaretto, Schnapps,
Alexis raised her upper lip and replied, “All the beer went bad a long time ago. Unless you want to try the home-brewed kind. But it’s kind of nasty.”
Courtney shrugged. “I don’t know what I want.”
Alexis turned her head to examine the bottles for herself, then turned back and said, “You’d probably like a
Courtney didn’t know what it was, but assumed it involved mixing alcohol from different bottles. It sounded fine with her.
Alexis grabbed several bottles off the shelf and set about making the drink. She started with sweet vermouth and whiskey, then added a dash of bitters and topped it off with a cherry. When it was finished it was kind of pretty.
Courtney spun around on the stool, checking out the room’s layout again. After a moment she turned to face the bar once more. She asked, “Doesn’t anyone else come in here?”
“Of course,” Alexis replied. “But not for another hour or so. Most of them have jobs.”
“Oh.”
Alexis slid a wide-rimmed glass of red liquid to her. Courtney checked it out, then stirred it a bit with a straw before taking a sip. It wasn’t bad.
So this is alcohol.
Alexis pulled up a stool on the other side of the bar and sat down.
Courtney wondered if she had been one those laughing at her in the cafeteria during the vinegar incident. She couldn’t remember. She further wondered if Alexis was still laughing and just trying her hardest not to show it.
—But it didn’t matter. She was just a bartender and as long as Courtney had credits to spend, nobody would be teasing her.
The Manhattans kept coming. After a while Courtney started to notice how the drink was losing its flavor and it took bigger and bigger gulps just to taste it. By then she was slouching forward, resting her elbow on the bar and her head on her palm and using her free hand to lazily lift the glass to her mouth and back down again.
It was sort of relaxing.
Time passed—slowly at first—but every once in a while she would glance at the clock on the wall and notice the second hand had moved quite a bit. Other people were filtering in from wherever they had came from and sitting down on the stools or in the booths. A couple of them eyed her curiously, probably wondering what force of nature had brought her out of hiding, but none of them sat close to her.
She liked it that way.
Alexis continued to chat with her between drinks, but Courtney didn’t really mind. It seemed like she might actually be able to get along with her newfound peer, though she wasn’t ready to socialize with more than one person a day.
However, no sooner had she considered this when someone sat down on the stool right beside her.
“Hi Courtney.”
She turned her head to match the voice to the face, then turned forward again. She mumbled, “And so my day is now complete.”
“Hi
“Hi Lexy,” he replied.
They exchanged a mutual smile. Courtney immediately realized that they had been intimate at some point or maybe still were. It made her sick to remember that she had willingly made herself just another notch on his bedpost.
“What can I give you?” Alexis asked.
Alexis laughed. “I keep telling you we don’t have champagne.”
“You do keep telling me that, don’t you?” he replied. “Fine. How about just Sex on the Beach?”
At this point Courtney mumbled, “Gee you’re so suave.”
They didn’t hear her.
“I don’t have another bottle of Grenadine yet,” Alexis told him. “They’re looking through the boxes in the basement again. They’ll find one eventually.”
Alexis took it and started mixing his drink.
He turned to her and said, “I come here in the evenings sometimes.”
She shrugged her shoulders and replied, “So?”
“So, I didn’t want you to think I came in here just to see your pretty face.”
She sighed and turned to face him, showing a sneer. “Why can’t you just talk normally? Your voice is so annoying.”
“Oh, the witty barbs continue. We have a long night of drinking ahead. If you keep being this insightful we’ll have nothing left to talk about.”
She rolled her eyes and took another drink of her
Alexis slid a glass of black stuff to
“You two get along so well,” Alexis teased. “I’m beginning to think there’s something going on.”
“It’s supposed to be one of those love-hate relationships,”
“Just shut up,” Courtney snapped. She finished her drink and slid another token to Alexis. “More red stuff please.”
Alexis took the token, but didn’t drop it in the bucket on the other side of the bar. Instead she rolled it across her knuckles in a practiced way as she watched Courtney.
Courtney watched her too, wondering why she was getting stared at.
After a moment Alexis returned the token to her and leaned over the bar to whisper, “I know the Manhattans are good, but you should just drink water for a while.”
“What?” Courtney snapped. “Why?”
“Your eyes are getting cloudy. Your face is pale. You’ve been slurring your speech for the last half hour. Shall I go on?”
Courtney, in no mood for this, slid the remainder of her stack of tokens over to Alexis and said, “You can have all of them. Just treat me nice. Another
Alexis turned her gaze to
“Are you drunk, Courtney?”
“No,” she replied, her voice becoming louder. She glared at Alexis. “A few minutes ago you were being really nice to me and now you won’t even give me another drink? What the fuck is your problem?”
Other heads in the bar—ten or eleven of them—started turning toward the ruckus.
“Courtney, I’m not being mean to you,” Alexis told her, keeping a soft tone. “But if I give you another drink you’re going to be sick.”
Courtney swiped all the tokens off the bar and sent them flying. They clattered to the carpet below. She climbed off the stool. “I don’t need this,” she declared. “Why’d I bother? Hell with you guys. I’m going swimming.”
She promptly fell to her butt.
She then sat there, looking at the floor, wondering what had caused her to be so close to it and why her hair was hanging so messily across her face. After a moment she mumbled, “This sucks.”
She could hear someone laughing across the room. She quickly turned her head and saw a woman in one of the booths watching her and giggling.
“Keep it up,” Courtney growled. “And I’ll come over there and smack the grin right off your face.”
“Okay, that’s enough,”
She looked up at him and whispered, “You know I could kick her ass, right?”
“I believe you could, doll,” he replied. “So there’s nothing to prove.”
He put his hands in her armpits and pulled her to her feet. She wobbled there for a moment, trying to find her coordination. It was worse than morning dizziness.
When the hell did this happen?
Alexis pointed to the glass of Jim Beam and asked, “Are you coming back,
“Yeah,” he told her. “Can you put it in the fridge for me?”
She nodded.
With that,
They exited the bar and crossed the parking lot. The sun was completely behind the hotel now. She wasn’t sure exactly how long she had been in the bar, but she knew twilight was at about
She further concluded that three and a half hours and twice as many Manhattans was not a good mix. She should have learned how to drink before just jumping right into it. Being led outside like a mental patient was kind of embarrassing.
Then she noticed
Courtney pulled her arm away and said, “That’s my cart over there.”
She found she couldn’t do much on her own.
He hopped in the driver’s seat, started the ignition, then went forward out of the yellow lines. He exited the parking lot and took the road headed for the main gate.
He was a slow driver.
Courtney didn’t like it.
As they passed the gate, she could see that the business-suited zombie was still on the other side of the fence in the same position he was before. He still had his icky fingers around the links in the fence, still keeping quiet, still being ignored by the two guards and the rottweiler. However, this time Courtney went by the zombie opened his mouth and snarled at her, spilling chunky saliva all over its shoes.
She, in turn, flipped him off.
She turned her head and angrily told him, “Don’t even joke about that.”
“Sorry.”
They took the road Courtney usually traveled—the one furthest from the farms, much to her relief. She didn’t think she could handle the smell of cow manure just then. She’d rather smell the aroma of dead people emanating from the other side of the wall. She wasn’t feeling good at all, especially riding in the passenger seat without any control of how the cart would move.
They entered the main housing area.
As they passed,
Finally he stopped the golf cart in the small patch of gravel in Courtney’s front lawn and shut off the ignition. Courtney didn’t do anything just yet. She just sat there, staring at the iron bars in the windows of her home. They seemed new to her somehow.
“Nuh-uh,” she slurred. “You don’t get to go there again.”
He shied away and climbed off the cart. He muttered, “Please. Get over yourself.”
She fumbled with the buckle until it unfastened, then slid her butt off the seat and put her feet on the ground. Her front door seemed a long way away. She studied the ground between her and the porch, noticing a lot more hills than what used to be there before.
Being drunk sucked. Courtney wondered how anyone could enjoy this.
“I’ve gotta walk back to the hotel,”
She looked at him, then studied the miles of yard between her and the front door again, then returned her focus. She said, “Yeah, a little help might be nice.”
He nodded, then walked around the cart and put his hand under her arm. He guided her across the lawn, helped her negotiate the two porch steps, then opened the screen door.
He couldn’t get the front door open.
“Push in and turn left,” Courtney whispered.
He did and the heavy wooden door swung open. He guided Courtney inside.
“Which direction do you want to go?” he asked. “Couch or bed?”
“I think...,” Courtney began, concentrating, “Bed.”
He escorted her down the hallway.
“You cleaned the place up,” he commented. “Looks nice.”
“Thanks.”
“Was it on my account?”
“Get real.”
He took her into the bedroom and let her plop down on the edge of the bed. She looked up at him for a moment. He had an odd expression on his face—maybe a look of guilt, maybe a look of pity. She couldn’t tell. All she knew was that the skin on
It sucked that he was cute.
She was tempted to do something then, like kiss him or something, but she didn’t know why. She didn’t even like him. If only he were more mature—like Gordon—maybe things wouldn’t be so complicated.
“I’m gonna go now,” he said. “Take care of yourself.”
She nodded, then put her head down and started unlacing her shoestrings. Before he left the room, she whispered, “You’re not even that much taller than me and you’re certainly no James Spader.”
She hadn’t meant for him to hear, but he did.
He countered, “And you’re no Michelle Pfeiffer. So what’s your point?”
She shrugged.
She heard the front door being pulled closed and the screen door swing shut. She kicked off her shoes and fell back on the mattress. She watched the ceiling twist for a while before closing her eyes.
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