Glitter & Mayhem by John Klima Lynne M. Thomas Michael Damian Thomas

Author:John Klima, Lynne M. Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Apex Publications
Published: 2013-08-16T04:00:00+00:00

Bess, the Landlord’s Daughter, Goes for Drinks with the Green Girl

Sofia Samatar

1. Pink Ice

BESS AND THE GREEN GIRL ARE out for drinks. They’re at a club called Pink Ice, where everybody gets a lollipop at the door. Rumor has it the lollipops are poisoned, or at least drugged. Their white ink messages — JUICY, KISS ME — glow in the dark.

Bess and the Green Girl sit at the bar and twirl lollipops on their tongues. They look fabulous. They’re both wearing high–heeled shoes with pointy toes. Bess’s are yellow. Her image gleams in the mirror behind the bar: round red mouth and high–piled hair. She wears a white blouse with a lot of ruffles over the breast.

The Green Girl is wearing an oversized t–shirt that says LIVELIVELIVE. She has long, flat hair and terrible posture. A jumble of plastic bead necklaces covers her throat. She crunches lustily on the nub of her lollipop, gnawing it off the stick. The Green Girl has surprisingly large, strong teeth, and so does Bess. They’ve talked about whether your teeth keep growing afterward. Bess doesn’t think they keep growing, but maybe you get a new set, the way children do. She dips her lollipop into her vodka and cranberry.

“This place is the best,” the Green Girl yells.

“Love it,” shouts Bess. The music is physical, invasive. She can feel every note in her bones.

“It’s even better than that place with the smoke.”

“Mm,” Bess agrees around her lollipop.

“It’s like, I feel like I’m getting an injection.”

Pink Ice is an injection of noise and movement and beauty and youth. Boys and girls crowd in, waving lollipops in the air. They wear black boots and sparkly hair–bands, black lipstick and sparkly eye shadow, black lace stockings, everything black and everything sparkly.

The Green Girl seizes Bess’s arm. “Look! I want that!”

There’s a girl in a feather stole.

“You want that? That?”

“What?”

“It’s feathers!”

“So?”

“Chicken feathers! It’s horrible!”

The Green Girl rolls her eyes. “Can you open your mind, please? Even a tiny bit? There is an entire world beyond cardigans.”

“Just because I have taste,” says Bess. She does have taste, she gets it from magazines. She gives the Green Girl a playful kick with the tip of her shoe. The shoe leaves a dent in the Green Girl’s spray–tanned leg.

“Ugh,” says the Green Girl, bending down to rub out the dent. “Would you stop?”

“Sorry,” says Bess.

“ ‘Sokay,” says the Green Girl. She shakes back her hair and brightens. “I love this song!” She jumps down off her stool and shimmies into the crowd. Her t–shirt’s so huge her skirt doesn’t show. She looks like the other girls at Pink Ice: fabulous and starving and sparkly and lost.

§

2. T–Shirts

A thin boy in thin jeans asks Bess to dance.

Bess dances.

Bess and the Green Girl love to dance.

Bess and the Green Girl love to dance and drink and take little white pills and little colored pills and they love to go home with boys.

They love shopping and shoplifting and the movies.

Also, the Green Girl loves making her own t–shirts.

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