Crooked by Louisa Luna

Author:Louisa Luna
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MTV Books
Published: 2003-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

We walked around until we found a bar where Chick didn’t owe money. We held hands and smoked, and my stomach and thighs were still sweaty, my privates sore, but not too much. The bartender in the place we found wore a tie and said, “What can I get you folks?” when we came in. My mother said you can tell what kind of a place you’re in from how the bartender takes an order. He had thick round glasses and smiled nicely, like we were on our way to the prom.

Chick and I hadn’t looked at each other since we left the house, and I glanced over at him now, and he yawned and tugged at his cocktail napkin.

“You okay?” I said.

He kept yawning and nodded, made a little squeak.

“Yeah, I’m good,” he said. “What about you?”

“I’m fine,” I said, and I looked across at the whiskey bottles.

We didn’t say anything then, and I sipped my beer and didn’t know why we were being so weird, acting like a couple of virgins. I watched the bartender make a margarita, put the glass facedown on a circle of sea salt.

“You want to do shots?” I said to Chick.

He laughed and said, “Yeah, okay.”

I ordered two Cuervos, and the bartender brought us a salt-shaker and two lime wedges on a napkin. The shots tasted like hot lemonade going down, and my eyes started to water. Chick shook his head quick as we sucked on our limes, and he took a tiny black film canister out of his jacket.

“Hold out your hand and close your eyes,” he said.

I did.

“Open.”

There were two white pucks smearing chalk on my sweaty palm, and I laughed.

“Wow. Just what I always wanted.”

Chick smiled and shook two out on his hand and flipped them into his mouth.

“Good and good for you,” he said.

“Right.”

I held one between my fingers and then dropped it on my tongue. It tasted like aspirin. I drank it down with beer and handed the other one back to Chick.

“One’s okay,” I told him.

He rolled his eyes and said, “Lightweight.”

I started watching a woman sitting a couple of seats down. She had long dyed-red hair, roots coming in black, and she had on pale jeans and some kind of cowgirl top with studs. She waved a twenty at the bartender, trying to be flirty, I thought. She had heavy mascara and dark base, which would’ve made her look a lot tanner than she really was except I could make out the clean line where it stopped on her neck.

The bartender smiled politely at her.

“Lite, please,” she said.

He gave her the beer, and she took a dainty little sip. She was really squeezed into her jeans, too, like my mother, except my mother pulled it off better because hers didn’t ride up her ass so much.

She was talking about how she wanted to move to the city but it was too expensive, how she lived in Richmond now and had to take a bus or BART and then walk six blocks to get home.

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