After draining several glasses of the crispest, most refreshing water Sarah had ever tasted, the young Miss Williams settled back into an uneasy slumber while she waited for Sir Didymus to rouse himself. As she slept, she dreamed strange things. But were they dreams, or just long forgotten memories, recalled like a faded photograph? Perhaps they were something like a daguerreotype, or an image on tin, or a camera obscura, which reflected back the truth of the matter inverted.
In a house filled with the boisterous laughter of newly freed children finally able to play at adulthood, Sarah Williams felt utterly alone. The photojournalist students always threw the best parties, 'PJ Parties' they were called, and the more desperate or free of the young coeds often arrived in matching sleepwear sets that left little to the imagination.
For Easter, Sarah had shown up in footie pajamas with white rabbit ears on the hood and a little bunny tail, thinking she'd found a workaround to both fit the occasion and avoid unwanted attention. Instead, all night, boys had grabbed at her tail. When one troll of a man finally ripped it off in frustration at her rejection, she had stormed out of the party. On her way out, she'd grabbed a handle of cheap vodka from the kitchen, still mostly full. It was obvious that no one at that party needed to be any more intoxicated than they already were. This was highly unlike Sarah, especially because she wasn't much of a drinker to begin with. Besides, she had no idea who's bottle that had truly been, anyway.
After leaving the party with her newly liberated jug of spirits (and sans some of her dignity), she risked driving back to her dorm. This was another thing she had always sworn she would never do, not only to herself but also to her dad and Karen since she first got her license. She felt crummy about it, but she wasn't willing to let anyone else see her bright pink underwear. Thankfully, her new car had excellent cruise control, and she was furious enough to be on high alert. She still nearly had a collision, but she didn't.
One more broken promise for Sarah Williams.
The jug had sat on the top shelf of her tiny closet for several months while she focused rigorously on schoolwork. Ironically, her grades actually took a dip during this time, as she kept second guessing her answers on exams. Finally, just as the end of her third semester of college approached, she cracked.
"Party!" she found herself shouting in a rage as she slammed a biology book shut. "Party party party party party!" she added with a pound of her fist on the table, standing up and stomping her feet childishly. "Party… party… where's a party?" she wondered aloud, grateful that her roommate was away studying with her sorority sisters for this mental breakdown. Frankly, the parties were done until finals week ended. Everyone was busy cramming 9 weeks of education into two weeks of effort, and here she was averaging a C in a class she always used to think was a piece of cake.
She knew enough to know that she had no idea, and briefly considered inviting her friends though the mirror bolted to her door. Only the knowledge that she could never anticipate when her roommate Debbie would return held her back. Sarah's sex life was non-existent, even when solo. She had the strongest suspicion that all of the sorority girls tittered at her when she walked by, and she correctly attributed this to the time Debbie had walked in on her in a private moment.
"Can't even… fucking masturbate!" she complained in a shout to no one, only realizing afterward that her voice had a habit from the stage of carrying. Well, that surely cemented her reputation on campus as a sex-crazed lunatic. Great.
As she paced her small dorm, rifling through her internal file system for anywhere that would let a 19-year-old without a fake ID have a good time, the harsh florescent light of her room caught the cheap plastic of the vodka bottle she'd stolen from a party several months ago.
"Bingo!" she cried, so spent from months of distraction that her mind wasn't even reaching for loftier words like eureka. She grabbed a Dixie cup from Debbie's side of the room (fuck her and her stupid little Dixie cups every day to brush her teeth) and climbed atop the serviceable chair that usually slid neatly under her small desk. In a few moments, she had retrieved the handle of vodka and was pouring herself her first drink.
She sat there, trying to sip the wretched beverage, and found herself reading the label. 'Heaven Hill', it said.
Heaven? That was not the first thought one had upon tasting it. In fact, she didn't know why she was sipping it at all. Shouldn't she be shooting it? It was wine that people sipped, or cocktails. Maybe… aperitifs?
She nodded to herself to firm her resolve, and downed the rest of the Dixie cup in one go. Immediately she made a face like she'd just taken a bite out of a lemon—actually, that would be an improvement—and poured herself the next round.
Three Dixie cups later, she couldn't take the sight of her dorm any longer, because if she spent one more minute in that room, she'd pour the rest of the handle over everything on Debbie's side of the room and set it ablaze. The idea appealed to her on a visceral level that reminded her more of the Goblin King than she cared to admit.
"I am the party!" she declared to herself drunkenly in the mirror, raising her paper cup to toast herself. "Where I go, the party follows! I am the party!" She nodded at herself to confirm this new belief system, and stood abruptly, unprepared for the headrush that followed but intrigued enough to let her feet carry her.
If she could defeat an ageless Sidhe and his perilous Labyrinth to rescue her baby brother when she was 15, she could damn well find a party on a college campus at age 19. Even during finals week.
Though she had initially set off looking for other college students to commiserate with over their impending doom, her feet led her away from campus immediately, in a direction she wasn't familiar with because it was referred to in hushed tones by Debbie as 'that part of town'. Well fuck Debbie right in her stupid fucking Pekingese face: if it was where she and the other Debbie Drones dared not to tread, it was good enough for Sarah.
She had wisely, albeit somewhat sloppily, decanted the awful vodka into a Sprite bottle. This was also stolen from Debbie's side of the room, though it was just in her trash bin. Still, she knew Debbie—if that bottle wasn't back where it came from when she got back from her study date, she'd be telling everyone that Sarah liked to dig through her trash looking for her tampons or something equally vulgar.
Sarah checked her watch, as though it might reveal the expected return time of her noxious roommate, and found she didn't much care. Let Debbie say whatever Debbie wanted. Why didn't Debbie just get a fucking life?!
An overgrown park caught her eye in the periphery of her double vision, and she made an abrupt right hand turn to enter. If she hadn't noticed it just then, she would have never seen it. The sky was growing darker, and normally Sarah was wary about being in parks after twilight, but she found that she didn't care. A single yellow streetlamp illuminated the rusty merry-go-round, and she chose this spot to collapse in a slump, resting her head between her knees. She felt so angry that she wanted to cry, but the tears wouldn't come. This only made her angrier at her stupid eyes for failing to produce the correct response to her emotions.
"AUUUUGGGHHH!" she bellowed at top volume, not thinking of the neighbors and if they particularly cared to listen in on her temper tantrum. Someone shot back with a 'stop fucking yelling, crazy bitch!' from a nearby window, and she decided to keep her mouth shut after that. Yes, much better to drink vodka than shout wordlessly into the void.
She was thirsty now, and forgot for a moment that it was vodka she was drinking and not water. Alarmed, she check the Sprite bottle and realized she'd downed about 10 ounces of 40% alcohol in seconds.
"… uh. Okay," she decided after a moment, having considered if she should attempt to outrun her intoxication and make it back to the dormitory before she was really hammered. Logically, the answer to 'should a sheltered young wasp drunk in a dimly lit park on the poor side of town head home before she passes out drunk?' would be a resounding YES, but she wasn't operating on logic anymore. Logic stated that party time was over, and study time was now. But she was the party! So it was said, so it be done.
Get out, logic, you have no place here! she thought to her paranoia, laughing and lifting her plastic bottle in cheers to herself for having such excellent taste in company. She took a small sip, realizing too late that it's bad luck to toast without drinking. Oh well, she supposed she would simply need to toast fewer things, considering how toasty she was already feeling.
She sat alone on the merry-go-round for several more long minutes, holding imaginary conversations in her head with everyone who'd ever looked at her funny, and putting them all in their place with what seemed to her at the time to be perfectly devastating cutting wit. Soon, though, she found herself tapping her feet and her hands, and fidgeting. Well, she was sitting on a piece of playground equipment, why not play?
Stashing the bottle under a nearby bush in case someone showed up, she gave the wheel a good tug, and met iron resistance. Undeterred, she took another deep breath and gathered her strength for a second try. This caused the wheel the utter a single, weak sounding creak, as though it were bothered by being pulled back into service as an object of merriment. She growled low in her throat at the thing, letting it know just who it was messing with: the Champion of the motherfucking Labyrinth!
This time, when she pulled hard with all of her might (admittedly not as much as she might have liked to imagine) the mechanism broke free from its encasement of rust and began squeaking along. She gave it several more spins, loosening the joint of the fixed center, until it no longer whined in complaint. Once it was rotating so quickly that the handlebars were a blur, she leapt aboard, clinging to the rails unsteadily before finding her footing.
"Aahahaha!" laughed the dark-haired woman with giddy abandon, another obstacle tamed and made pleasurable. "I am the party!"
She nearly leapt out of her skin when she heard a cheery male voice shout a response from the treeline along the dark edges of the park. "Party!" he cried, and every dead girl horror story she'd ever been warned about suddenly flooded back to her in a rush of anxiety and panic. She grabbed the handles again, willing the ride to stop so she could jump off and run back to the safety her campus. As the male figure appeared, ducking nonchalantly through the trees, her face was a mask of terror and destruction. She was the Champion of the fucking Labyrinth, and woe betide any foolish human male who tried to hurt her!
As if he could read her thoughts, the man who now in the yellow light appeared to be roughly her own age and possibly one of the least threatening looking people she'd ever encountered—though there was something wild about him she couldn't place—raised a placating hand. "It's okay, okay, I just heard yelling and someone trying to use the roundabout." He paused his explanation to pull a pack of cigarettes from his front pocket, lighting one before continuing.
"I actually walked over to tell you that it's rusted in place and can't be moved, but looks like you are stronger than me. So don't worry, you have nothing to fear tonight, party girl." Sarah thought she placed some vague accent, but it was faint. The carousel had slowed enough that she could make out his appearance properly, and she discovered that her fellow park goer was a scrawny boy with messy auburn hair, glasses of a style not popular in several years, and hazel eyes. Irish, she thought to herself without realizing she'd been assessing him.
The boy jerked his head at her. "So, you're new in town then? Not many college girls wander into this park, you know." Sarah narrowed her eyes at him and jumped off the wheel, brushing rust from filthy mitts onto her jeans before sticking out her hand.
"I'm not many college girls, and you?" she asked him teasingly, somehow unwilling to share her name with him. Too many strange things had happened in the space of too short a period of time for her to not to follow the rules of the Underground. It was a habit she'd gotten into since her journey, half superstition and half blind faith.
He stared at her in shock for a few moments, one brow raised slightly as though he wasn't used to good luck and couldn't believe he'd suddenly encountered some. "I'm…" he hesitated for a second that felt excruciating to him. How could he top an introduction like that? "… honored to make your acquaintance, not-many-college-girls." At this, he bowed clumsily and kissed the back of her hand. Suddenly Sarah realized that he was probably even drunker than she was, and this concept seemed very intriguing to her. He had rough hands, but his lips were soft and warm, and there was something about his eyes she found more exhilarating than the rush of ethanol in her blood.
Alarmed that her thoughts had turned so feral so quickly, Sarah quickly stuffed her libido back in the same box in which she kept theories about the Goblin King's choice of wardrobe. "I… uhm," she began, trying to change the subject to distract herself. "Do you want some shitty vodka?"
The auburn-haired boy laughed, his glasses reflecting the street-light for a moment. "Is there any other kind?" he mused good-humoredly before turning serious and holding her gaze intently.
"Yes, thank you party girl. I would be delighted to share a drink with you."
Disclaimer: I do not own the Labyrinth or any of its associated characters, nor do I own any Heaven Hill vodka (thank god). The auburn-haired boy owns himself.I just enjoy writing about some of his madcap nights with Sarah.