Part 7 - Working up the Crowd.

So with that, I knew what I was drinking – a Half of Stolichnaya, mixers Blue Curacao and Lemonade. I still had half Generic Blue from a while back, when we were doing shots of it with lime juice. Pretty intense, but we were running about like pre-schoolers on straight red cordial. Hah, good times. Stoli was the brand of preference, seeing as I earned enough working at Maccas to justify something more expensive than Karloff, but hardly enough to warrant the extravagance of Absolut. Besides, it matched the Lemon Stolis some of the girls drank.

But anyways, we were sitting on the spoils of war while a few of our group were playing Hackey, those who had a bit more coordination than those who were sitting down. ‘So Pete, you comin’ to Nikki’s?’ I said.
‘Huh?’ apparently I’d just snapped him out of the Twilight Zone.
‘Nikki’s. on Friday. Everyone’s invited. Even you. Are you comin’?’ Jase said.
‘Uh, I dunno. Maybe.’
Pete’s ‘situation’ was a strange one, and a warning to the rest of us not to invest too deeply into women. He was ‘good friends’ with Lauren, whatever that meant. I mean, like a lot of us were friends with Amanda, Nikki, even Bec, although all the guys seemed to go red when she was around. But we had no idea what was going on in Pete’s world with Lauren, and we weren’t likely to get much out of him. Unless we got him drunk.
‘Sure you are dude. I’ll drive ya.’ Jase said, as he caught an errant hackey ball, and threw it back to the crew.
‘Yeah man.' I said, then whispered, ‘dude, go anyway, it won’t matter if she’s not there or not.’
I could understand the difficulty he would be going through. We’d all had unfulfilled crushes. To us though, it looked like he was being led on. But hey, what would we know, it’s not like we knew what was going on. Sure me and Jase would have liked to pick up, but Pete, well, he needed to pick up. Break free from the oppressive shackles of friendship.

That’s how we saw it, anyway.

‘She wouldn’t show anyway, not to Nikki’s.’ He said.
‘See, it’s cool dude, nothing to stress about. All exams are over, and there’s three weeks of holidays, plenty of time to do, well, whatever it you do with her. Come on, Friday’ll rock.’ I said.
‘Fine, I’ll go, only cos I know you two’ll keep bitching at me all week if I don’t.’
‘Damn straight, bitch.’ said Jase. By some fluke, a Hackey flew in at this moment, which I slapped away rather than catching it, and it went straight for Pete’s head.
‘God dude, don’t have to get violent on me.’

Then the Bell rang. People started moving, except for me and Jase. ‘later bitches.’ Gotta love free periods. Especially when there were so many of them. The crowds withdrew, and how few remain… Me, Jase, and walking on over from Nikki’s group was Amanda, the only girl from Woy Woy like the rest of us. Only one worth counting, anyway.