Disclaimer: It should be noted that this document is a work of fanfiction and therefore any recognizable characters, events, ect. do not belong to me.
Note: You may recognize some of the writing as a bit of it did come from Sizzling Sixteen but I do not plan on following that story line.
Cheap Thrills, Mostly
My mother's Uncle Pip died and left her his lucky bottle. She got the better end of the deal over my Great Grandma Mazur whom received his false teeth, pink and sticky with a dead man's saliva. Mom passed the bottle over to me; she said she never found any luck in it but perhaps I would. When you're a still teenager you need all the luck you can get. I still haven't found any yet, though. Instead, the lucky bottle sits on the cramped square window ledge in the top corner of my room; it's the size and shape of a beer bottle and looks hand-blown from red glass. One day I picked a flower from the neighbor's garden, petals still clasped in a single embrace until they bloomed in a final moment of repreive, but the stopper wouldn't catch and the flower was left to wilt without a glass of water or the neck of a bottle to support its flaccid stem.
My name is Mackenzie Plum, and my living arrangements consist of my Mother's bare-bones apartment on the outer edge of Trenton, New Jersey, as well as my father's house that he inherited from his late Aunt Rose. I suppose there is a certain trend within the deceased of my family. My parents each live very separate from the other, different homes and different lives. Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only thing holding them together. I wonder that about a lot of things.
It is a Monday morning in mid June, the summer just before my junior year of High school. The air hangs heavy and stagnant, the heat condensing upon my skin, and sweat beading on the backs of my knees. Lula stands in the apartment, hands on hips, her plus size body stuck fast within her size zero bright-spandex outfit. "What's the mini-me doing tonight?"
I strain my neck from my spot of the coach, the rest of my body lying flat as the heat within the summer air, "I'm going to a party." My best friend Cherry had called earlier that afternoon to notify me of our plans, and yes, that is her real name. Cherry is one grade above me but only older by a few months, her sixteen years compared to my lengthening fifteen. She's wild.
Lula oohs. "What are you wearing?"
I shrug.
"Do you need a new outfit? We could go to the mall today." Lula holds her car keys up and they rattle in her hands, it's as if both the action and the sound are a reminder to the fact that she is the only one with a car at the moment; Mom's is dead and I'm without a vehicle of my own. Mom says no to the shopping trip, which is a surprising pass-up on a new pair of shoes—she says that Connie sounded frantic on the telephone—and then I'm left alone.
It's after a lazy length of time within the silence and the heat, me watching through the window for Cherry's car; though, it's really more her fathers, a convertible, leather seats, and painted silver. It is far more sophisticated than anything a high school student would purchase on their own, but we pretend sometimes that our lives bend around things more substantial than what our parents allow.
My cell phone rings, the only steady noise besides my thick breaths and the turn of the hamster, Rex's, wheel behind the walls of his glass aquarium. "I just saw your Mother outside the bakery," Dad says.
My parents seem to have a history revolving around that bakery but I've never been told exactly how. Grown ups like to keep things from kids even long after they may be considered old enough to know. "She better of gotten me a Boston Cream," I say.
"She did but I ate it," he admits casually, like the sugar in his veins has made it too hard to care. "What are you doing tonight?"
I fiddle with my hands but I don't have much to grasp hold to. "Going to the bakery with you for a Boston Cream donut." Given my options between a party and a donut I choose the ladder. The single vice of sugared dough is impervious when compared to that of teenage wiles.
"Can't do, I'm working."
"I'll find better plans."
"Better than your old man?"
"Yeah." Phone conversations are always pulled shorter than the time shared between us, two lives glutted with mania that will later be seen as unimportant, contrary to our current beliefs. But teenagers are never meant to spend so much time with their parents; or at least, that's what they tell me.
Cherry pulls up in the car that belongs to her father but receives more mileage from her foot on the gas pedal. Her arrival either happens in time with or signals the end of my father and I's conversation because that's when I click the end button.
Cherry has hair the same color that her name implies and she can tie fruit stems with her tongue. It's a skill I have attempted but never succeeded at. She looks incredibly like her own father. She seems to get most things from him: pale skin, freckles, fiery hair with a temper to match, a silver car, and a pocket full of hot cash. Her plain brown eyes come from her mother and she tells me the talent with the fruit stems came from her third boyfriend. She always has liked that term: third time's a charm. She has charm herself, Cherry, its seen in the way she gets what she wants, or right now how she peers at me above the rim of her dark sunglasses, a smirk upon her lips. People like Cherry don't smile, not really, not when you have sharp teeth that belong to a predator. I don't open the door to the convertible but rather hop over it, a single movement I hope looks as cool as it makes me feel.
Cherry drives fast; she says if you own a car like this you have to. I ask her about tickets, what she does if she's pulled over. She says she has her ways. I don't ask about those ways.
We're at a stoplight when Cherry has me reach around the back of her seat and grab something. It's all wrapped up in a crinkled brown paper bag and smells stark like the doctor's office but with poorer intentions. "What's this," I ask, my mouth sort of hanging open and slack jawed.
"Hell, Mack, whaddya think it is?"
She rolls down the paper of the bag, which is soft enough not to tear in her hands from summer sweat and warm skin, to reveal the clear glass lip of a bottle. I don't think it's a lucky bottle either.
"You can't drink and drive," I tell her. The light turns green and the car pulls away from the white line like a speedster in a drag race, swerving a bit when Cherry switches hands on the wheel.
"What, are you a cop?" She scoffs, her eyes scrunching closed for a moment, and the car swerves again, the same movement that takes my heart.
"No but my dad is!"
Jersey has stop-and-go traffic and we get caught at another red light, the car jerking forward as Cherry hits the breaks. Another commuter one car over whistles at us over our bickering. "You can't even drive sober," I inform her, crossing my arms over my chest in the same way I do when I'm upset with my parents.
"Shut up or get out," she snaps, taking one large gulp from the bottle just to make her point. I catch a glimpse of liquid like caramel but nowhere near as sweet.
I laugh at her, humorously, like my dad does at my mom when he gets real mad. Cherry retaliates by leaning across me and throwing the door open wide, kicking her foot up over the dash and digging it into my side, using her own door as leverage to shove me out of mine. Both of us are screaming at each other the entire time and I've uncrossed my arms to grip the back of my seat, fingernails leaving crescent shaped dents in the leather.
"You're ruining my daddy's car!" She hollers and then gives one last heave. I go rolling out of the car like humpty dumpty, gravel digging into the backs of my thighs and pavement scorching my palms. I scramble up onto the sidewalk as she goes speeding away.
The rest of traffic stalls and I look up wide eyes at the man in a shiny black SUV that has stopped beside me, replacing the spot that Cherry had once been in. I don't recognize the person in the driver's seat but I can see one of the Rangeman guys in the passenger side.
Ranger is the other man in my mother's life, besides my dad. He's former Special Forces, currently runs and owns the security firm Rangeman, and is drop-dead handsome in a dark Latino kind of way. But I don't pick sides and my mom doesn't seem to either. He drives expensive black cars, wears only black clothes, and has a thing for my mom. Hal, on the other hand, is a real sweetie but he's built like a stegosaurus.
He waves me over and I hop in just as the light turns yellow; the traffic lined up behind the SUV starts honking.
"Hey," I say, and buckle in.
"Hey yourself. We were just going to check on your mom."
My mom has worked as a bounty hunter for her cousin Vinnie ever since she got laid off from the lingerie department in Macy's. Generally this entails her apartment and or car getting blown up on a frequent basis, getting shot at, and crazy mass murders calling our home phone only to breath heavily into the receiver. A lot of people in at my school think it's exciting; though, most of them listen to their parents and agree that the Plum family is one to stay away from. I'm not quite sure whom I agree with yet.
The second Rangman guy, built just as monstrously as Hal but less friendly, parks the car in front of an apartment building that looks like the Tower of Terror only the tower part isn't exactly accurate. It is four stories tall, black with grime, and slightly lopsided. We can hear gun shots go off from the inner quarters, sharp and fast, and I can almost see the light of them behind my eyelids. Hal and the other guy take off running, but not before ordering me to stay put, only, I don't listen to directions very well; at least, that's what all my teachers write on my report cards.
Hal throws the door open and it swings on its hinges, almost knocking right back into me. We're all rushing up the steps just as Lula and my mom come rushing down. They hit the two men with enough force to knock them off balance, tumbling right on top of me.
I make a sharp sound, wheezing, like someone let the air out of a balloon real fast, and then someone is gathering me up on my feet and patting me down like they're placing all my bones back together again. Only the aching reminds me that I have any bones at all.
Lula keeps going on about some moron who ate her jelly donut. I have to agree, that guy is a moron if her thought he was going to get away with thieving one of Lula's snacks. Hal must have the same thought too because he asks: "How bad is he? Do you want us to, you know, get rid of anything?"
Though, there seems to be a consensus that, no, there is no dead body rotting away upstairs, so we all pile into our cars. I hitch a ride with Lula in the Firebird this time.
"Now what?" Lula asks, pulling out of the parking spot as she adjusts her cleavage with one hand.
"Drop me off at Rangeman," Mom says.
