Deep Fried and Pickled (Book One - The Rachael O'Brien Chronicles) Read Free Page B

CAMPUS Drive feeling emotionally strung out, unable to remember or care if I’d brushed my hair and locked the dorm door. I couldn’t be bothered. This was all wrong. I was the one who was supposed to go away to find myself, not Mom.
    Somewhere in the kitchen, someone was having a lousy day, and I could relate. The acrid smell of deep-fried-charred-oil wafted in the air. The burnt stink suffocated the entire cafeteria, even the table in the back, where Katie Lee and Macy had saved me a seat. I didn’t know why I’d agreed to meet them. Curled under the covers in my dark room, brooding about Mom was where I wanted to be. Why couldn’t she be normal and just have an affair?
    The numbness that lingered inside my chest overpowered my appetite. I did little more than pick at the edges of the meat and cheese layers in my Italian sub. I wondered if I should go home to be with Dad, but staring at him wouldn’t bring Mom back. Besides, what if she tried to call me at school?
    Rubbing her thumb across her blood red nail polish, Macy randomly clicked the underside of her nails. “There isn’t shit going on. This place sucks.”
    Katie Lee dipped a hush puppy into soft butter. “Y’all, I know where we could go Friday. I hear a decent crowd turns up at the Holiday Inn bar.”
    Macy huffed a throaty guffaw. “You have to be kidding. Partying at the Holiday Inn?”
    “This sounds made up,” I said. “Where did you hear about the Holiday Inn?”
    Katie Lee ripped open three sugar packets and tapped them into her sweet tea. “I overheard two cute guys talking by the elevator.”
    Arranging fries in a puddle of ketchup, I scoffed. “Holiday Inn? As in cheap hotel? With a bathtub-sized swimming pool and vending machines as meal service?”
    Katie Lee’s eyes roamed the cafeteria. “It’s week two,” she reminded us, “and I’m tired of staring at our dorm walls.”
    “We’ve got one problem,” Macy said “The drinking age. It’s twenty-one.”
    Considering consequences, I ranked the humiliation of being arrested and thrown in the clinker for underage drinking at the Holiday Inn a worse offense than flunking out. “We can’t get in,” I told the girls. “They’ll card us.”
    Chewing on her bottom lip roused Katie Lee’s inner magic fairy. She zipped her index finger in the air and sparked extra twinkle from her lagoon eyes. “We can go to the registration office. Tell them we’ve lost our school I.D.’s.”
    I pushed my tray aside. “What good will that do? Unless we get our birth date changed.”
    Katie Lee winked while Macy stopped her annoying nail clicking long enough to ask, “Who’s going first?”
    My mom, it seemed, had pretended to love my dad and me. Raw emotion grappled from inside. “I hate fakes and scams. Besides, what bar would let us in with doctored student I.D.’s?”
    As much as I thought I wanted to party and meet ‘the guy,’ I didn’t want to get busted in the process. I did my best to squash the idea, hoping we’d discover some place less illegal to drink, and some other way to do it.
    Something with apples and cinnamon was baking in the ovens, gradually overpowering the charred smell. “Come on, Rach,” Katie Lee said. “No one will check.”
    I tried to reason with the two. “If we get caught forging an official document, chances are we’ll get kicked out of school.”
    Ignoring my commentary, Katie Lee stood and walked toward the kitchen. Moments later, she returned with three warm apple-strudel tarts. She sank a fork into one. “Y’all, I’ll go first.”
     
     
    NOTE TO SELF
Fake I.D.: the ultimate ticket to a more meaningful university experience? TBD.
     

3
    B lood, D rugs A nd F orgery
     
    The afternoon heat sweltered and everything but the humming cicadas stood still. Like the locked heat index, my mind lingered on Mom. I’d been away at school four days before my parents relationship collapsed. Dad had gone on crisis mode for two days before he called me