Groomed by Casey Watson

Author:Casey Watson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2017-08-18T04:00:00+00:00

‘Oh God,’ Tyler groaned, at the kitchen table the following morning. ‘Nan and Granddad must think I am such a prize prat. I should ring them to say sorry, shouldn’t I, Mum? And, cross my heart and hope to die,’ he said, with feeling, ‘I am never, ever drinking again.’

I say ‘next’ morning. It was the same morning – still. Not quite noon yet. Thank God it was Saturday.

‘I’m never drinking again either,’ said Denver. ‘Well, not till I’m eighteen, anyway, obviously,’ he added sagely. ‘God, I’m so sorry, Casey.’

I was tempted to say ‘yeah, right’, re the ‘not till I’m eighteen’ bit, because there was a slim to zero chance of that happening, I reckoned, even if I didn’t officially know about it. But I decided to let it go. They’d learn. They were learning.

As was I, as it turned out. Because it had come to light that it hadn’t just been beer they’d been drinking. A recce of the conservatory by Mike, before he stomped off to football in high dudgeon, had established that Keeley’s ‘friends’ hadn’t just brought wine with them. They’d been necking something called Jägermeister, and one sniff at the almost empty bottle he’d unearthed from beneath the sofa was enough to make me think I’d probably be saying that in Ty and Denver’s shoes too. Quite apart from anything else – it smelled like the devil’s own cough syrup – it was about 35 per cent proof. And there’d been just five of them drinking it, at most. So the maths wasn’t hard.

But we’d done the post-mortem now, and as far as I was concerned that was the end of it, even if Denver still had to run the gauntlet of his mother. (As did I, to an extent, because I felt very guilty. Thank goodness she was the non-judgemental pragmatic type. ‘Denver’s big enough and ugly enough to know what he’s doing,’ had been her generous response when I kept on – and on and on – apologising.)

‘Look, the pair of you messed up,’ I said. ‘But there’s no harm done – except to your heads – so let’s move on now. You can do your penance by making the breakfast. If you can stomach any, that is.’

Apparently they could. Cast-iron stomachs, teenage boys.

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