This bonus chapter is for Ross. Thank you for all your support, and thank you for letting me keep working on something I love.
Mallory's was a youth club that styled itself like an Irish pub. The people in there were mostly between fifteen and nineteen, people hanging out with their friends, and the majority of the staff were someone's parents. I'd heard that a few years before there had been some controversy about kids being encouraged to spend time in a place that served alcohol, but the city had decided they would rather have people my age having one or two beers under the supervision of a friend's parents than drinking illicitly-obtained bottles in the park. By the time I'd been old enough, it was just the way things were.
Marcie was already eighteen, and started the night with a glass of wine. Elspeth wasn't quite old enough to buy one herself, but could have just one so long as a responsible adult was paying. For some reason Elspeth had brought a friend along; a tall, skinny blonde called Serena who we barely knew from school. I wanted to ask more, but there were way too many other things to talk about tonight, and the presence of a rich, popular girl at our table wasn't enough of a big deal to break up other conversations. Nikki had brought Lance along, and he shrank back quietly into the corner, the only guy at the table and the only one older than me. Jodie was the youngest, and started the night by sipping mocktails with Nikki. Sooner or later one of them would get one with alcohol in, which was why they were sending Lance to the bar, and they would try to recognise that it tasted different. They never could.
Marcie was venting about her Mum again; that was nothing new. Thankfully she hadn't done anything to stop her coming out tonight, but she had prevented Marcie from doing her electronics homework, which would certainly earn her a brutal spanking in a day or two. Elspeth and Jodie were trying to think of some way they could help, but it was the practical part of the exercise that would have been a big problem.
At some point, amid a dozen other conversations, Marcie jokingly suggested that I might end up lisping like her, and that I could get some practice in. It didn't take long for the whole group to get started, and somehow we could laugh about it now. Marcie's impediment was already starting to go back to normal, so she could make fun of it herself by imitating how it had sounded before. I joined in, hoping that I wouldn't end up stuck like this tomorrow, and found that I was even harder to understand. Serena seemed to be fascinated by the lisp, asking Marcie how it felt; whether the words sounded right in her head; whether she could feel it in a particular part of her mouth, and more questions any of us had even thought of.
That was the important thing. Even when we were all next to incomprehensible, we were laughing together. Nobody was laughing at anybody else, and that reassured me that no matter what happened, my friends would be with me.
Marcie and Elspeth went back to Lance's house after Mallory's closed. They hoped there might still be some way to get her homework done and then get her home without her Mum noticing the late hour. The others split up, and I turned towards home.
"You were drinking soda all night?" Serena asked, as she came striding up beside me. "You the designated driver for this lot?"
"Heh, no. I just tried beer and don't really enjoy it. Sometimes I'll have one, but if this is my last night of dignity I'd rather be sober to enjoy it." That was true enough. I didn't need to mention one particularly stupid episode when I'd been a bit younger, which had put me off a whole range of other booze for life.
"Same," she offered a smile. "I mean... Dad always gives me a glass of champagne for my birthday. He buys a bottle for us all to share at my party, and a couple more for them and the chaperones. It tasted so bitter, I never enjoyed it, and like the last five years I've never touched mine. Lemonade's my choice."
"Yeah. I mean, it's not like I hate it. I'll drink when everyone else is, but I don't know why everybody gets so excited about being old enough. It must be worse with those mad parties, right?" I knew she was a cheerleader; at school she hung around with the football team and the volleyball teams, the cool kids who thought everybody else worshipped them and acted like they were a whole separate society.
"There's pressure, but I've never been good at doing what I'm told. Even by the cool kids." She shrugged as if that was nothing special. I still had no idea what her life was like, but the designer clothes, lack of compliance with the uniform, and general don't-care attitude made me think that she had both more money and more freedom than I could dream of.
We changed the subject then, and spent the rest of the walk home talking about what might happen to me in the morning. My parents had even called in to book time off school for me, so there was no chance I could change my mind now. Serena apparently knew a lot of the different options they could give me; the original fifteen possibilities had been displayed on the website, until they realised that it could be more effective for some rebels to be punished with a surprise. She asked me how I would feel about having my hand-eye coordination impaired so I would have to look at my fingers in order to type anything; about bad breath and flatulence; about weight gain and lethargy; about lack of coordination; and about acne and rashes. There were others as well, and all of them felt pretty bad. But in every case, I guessed that my friends would try to stand by me, and that made everything feel a little better.
"How about oral fixation?" she came up with next. "Like, it's supposed to give you a little compulsion to put things in your mouth and chew on them without thinking. Not as embarrassing as some of the others. I mean one of Daddy's accountants always has his pen in his mouth, and he gets a new one every other week. How would that make you feel?"
"I don't know," I shrugged. "Not such a big deal, I guess. Might be embarrassing, and might end up wrecking stuff I actually care about if I'm not careful. But... ohh, I think I could keep laughing through that one." I thought about the number of manky, disgusting chewed-up pens sitting in a rack on Becker's desk. That was a problem he knew personally, so if he saddled me with it he would just be dragging me down to his own level; and that would too funny for me to really feel embarrassed.
"I guess that's the lucky spin for you. You're going for random, right?"
"Yeah, my folks might have been able to afford some of the upgrades, but they don't want to. Like they're trying to put me through a nightmare, but so long as they don't choose it they can pretend it's not their fault."
"I guess I can understand that. Like telling a maid to clean up something nasty, so you don't have to touch it yourself. So... what did you do to get this anyway? Don't they need to have proof of something beyond normal rebellion?"
"Broke a shop window," I grunted, kicking a stone across the road idly as I walked. "Well, took responsibility anyway. It was an accident, but... would have caused other problems if I gave the mall cops time to investigate properly. And with an unlawful act, there's no vague questions about intent, or if it's going to happen again, or anything like that. They can automatically give me the pill. Or, well, the shot."
"That sucks. Sorry I can't help more."
She nodded again, and I could still see there was something going on in her mind. Well, for a popular girl to come and hang out with our group I knew there had to be. At first I'd thought she might have a crush on Marcie, from the number of times she said that the lisp was endearing, cute, or charming. But then it seemed extremely unlikely Elspeth would have brought her along. Maybe she was just trying to see how the other half lives; and trying too hard to make friends. She was good at reassuring Marcie, anyhow. And now that the group had broken up, she was being extra friendly to me as we walked in the direction of our homes. It felt good to have someone unconditionally accepting my fears about the weeks ahead. It was like there was no judgement there at all, and I could say whatever I thought.
This new friend was so supportive that it was hard to believe, by the time I turned up the path to my own front door, that we hadn't been friends for years. And then there was only my Mum to deal with, stepping out of the lounge to talk to me as soon as I arrived.
"Your brother's already in bed," she said. "It's quite late."
"It's not fully dark yet. Still safe to walk home." I could have apologised, but I didn't feel like it today. They had chosen to do this, and after that it was harder to have any respect for them or their rules.
"Right. Well you better be up early tomorrow. We have your appointment booked. And we've thought about what you asked for. But Mr Becker was kind enough to tell us that you had legal trouble when you attempted to hide it from us, and that is a clear sign of integrity. He even offered your father a discount because he knows our situation. We are not in a position to pay those fees again at this point in your treatment."
It was just about what I had expected. I tried offering to pay for the difference myself, just to get out from under Becker's hands, but she laughed and said there was no way I could afford it. All I could do was go to bed, and try not to have nightmares about when I woke up.