You don’t get to leave the country club early. Brooke is your only ride out of there, and spends a quarter-hour trying to make friends with an increasingly quiet J.M. Elsewhere, Kelsey is busy zipping between conversations, while you manage to just about avoid Abigail by making a break for the toilets and sitting there for a good ten minutes, staring at your phone. This is a world you don’t belong in, and the moment Brooke discreetly gets your attention that she wants to leave, you’re at her side and ready to head off.
It’s late, virtually sunset, by the time you find the address you’ve been given. It’s just north of Potsdam park, on the banks of the Mohegan river, and you have to park up a side road and head down a short path, overgrown with weeds and littered with cans, cigarette butts and rusty objects, before you hit the river. There, a mud track swings along the bank until you come to the back of a row of garages, and a small clearing. The smell of greasy food overtakes you as you approach, and you can see the remains of a one-use BBQ, plus a trash bag with a pile of tattered paper plates and a few empty bottles shoved inside. Once, the spot might have been meant as a beauty point, and there are two long wooden benches with names carved into the wood. As it is, you doubt anyone’s been here from Parks and Rec to keep the area tidy for more than a decade.
For all the remains of a party, there are only three people still there when you turn up. The first, animatedly spray-painting the garage wall, a respirator shoved on her face like she’s planning a bank heist, is an elfin girl with large doe eyes and short-cropped hair, which is dyed black and hanging over the right side of her face. She’s wearing a grey hoodie with the sleeves hacked off, and pays you no attention as she continues working on her masterpiece, selecting her cans from a bag at her feet.
The next, a Latina girl you’d guess the youngest of the three, has her shoulder-length hair parted down the centre, half dyed purple, the other half dyed jet. Large, bee-stung lips push up in front of an impudent nose with a large ring piercing, while a black chain covered with pin badges hangs loose around her neck.
Nearest to you, sucking on the remnants of an iced coffee, is a thin girl, dressed head to toe in black. It’s a direct contrast to her pasty white skin, and her hair pushed is back and dyed bleach blonde save for the dark roots where the locks part. Through her left nostril is another ring piercing, identical to the Latina’s.
“Ha! Did you just come from the country club or something?” coffee girl asks.
“Actually, yeah.” you say, coming to a halt near the trio.
“Oh.” There’s an awkward silence.
The two girls not actively spraying the wall look at you expectantly, wondering what it is you want. While the path continues beyond the little scenic spot, you can see where it runs to the edge of the Borman Bridge, so you’re hardly out for a walk. Then, deciding they probably don’t care what brings a stranger among them, they turn back to their friend, grinning as the work continues.
“C’mon, Alex. Hurry up before someone shows or we lose the light.”
“Relax, Rae, Jeez. Had to wait until Nadine and the others bailed before I could make my finishing touches or they’d have freaked out. Just… one… more… there.” The short kid in the respirator pulls off her mask, backing up to see the design in the rapidly fading October sun and revealing that she, too, has the same, identical piercing as the other girls. The orange illumination of the streetlights gives the still wet spraypaint a glossy sheen, but you can still admire the talent it took to create the large mural of ―
“Uh,” you say, “is that an eagle shitting on a dragon?”
The artist turns, grins, and nods rapidly. “An Eastman eagle shitting on a Westside dragon.” She gestures wildly into the night, up at a shadow looming across the river, and you realize the mural’s going to be in plain view from the Borman Bridge – and clearly seen by anyone travelling into town past Westside. “It’s… y’know.” She whistles through her teeth. Ffffffffttttt.
“Communication,” the purple hair says, having whipped out her cell and begun to take a few snaps of her friend’s handiwork.
“Retribution,” the final girl with the iced coffee clarifies, taking a slurp.
“One of the Westsiders made a ‘friendship banner’ that was even worse,” the artist says, gathering a backpack covered in badges and clinking with spray cans. “Unveiled it in some goofy cross-school club.” She gives a wide grin again. “I just wanted to let ‘em know over at Westside we’re thinking of ‘em.”
“I go to Westside,” you say. “Some of the dickwads there’ll kick your ass if they see this,” you say. The artist makes a pffft sound.
“Like to see ‘em try. Besides, a perk of having tits – nobody hits a girl. I get to hit back, though.” She folds the respirator and shoves it into a spare pocket of her rucksack. “You want something? You’re beyond fashionably late for the cookout. Everyone’s gone home already.”
Shit. You stand awkwardly for a moment, not knowing the magic word to break the ice. “Uh, I don’t suppose any of you are a guru, are you?”
“Oh! Good point!” The artist dives into her rucksack, grabs a can and rushes back up to the mural. With a flourish, she signs the corner in big, yellow letters: ‘GURU’. She turns, winks, and walks back. “Alex Day,” she says, before pointing to the others, first the half-purple dye job, then the girl with the coffee. “Izzy Santos, and Rae Caldwell. And you are?”
“Will Prescott. I was told to come here by someone called Roxanne?” Alex raises an eyebrow.
“Roxanne Hurley?” Rae interrupts. “Really? The fuck’d she tell you to come here?” Well, at least I know Roxanne’s surname now.
“The party, dumbass,” Izzy says to her friend. Rae bounces on the balls of her feet and gives her a light shove with her elbow, before Izzy turns to you. “It was just a little Eastman thing, y’know? Few burgers and stuff. But you'd have been welcome.”
“Roxanne said it was a better invite than the country club,” you say. “Sorry I missed it.”
“Must’ve been why Nadine Martin was hanging late,” Izzy replies. “She went with Roxanne a few months back, think they still sometimes have a little fun. You missed her by, like, ten minutes. As you can see from the debris, party’s wound down. Just us, now.”
“Too bad,” you say. “I wasn’t going to come, but then, at the country club, a girl called J.M.―”
“Joss-Moss!” At least this name seems to hit the right button with Alex. “Yeah! We used to roll together. Before my little…” she flicks her fingers, and whistles, whit-woo.
“Transfer,” Izzy says.
“Expulsion,” Rae clarifies.
Alex’s carefree grin remains in place. “I wasn’t Xavier’s material, so now I go to Eastman, with my peeps.” She walks over between Izzy and Rae and gives them both a warm, squeezing hug, still clutching the final spray can in her right hand. “Izzy’s brother still goes there, though. But you said you were looking for Guru – who, as you might have guessed, is me. So, wanderer, tell me what mystic knowledge you seek.”
“Uh,” you say, “apparently I suck at everything?”
“Ah. A work in progress.” She chews her lip. “You’re, what, a junior?”
“Senior.”
The three girls look at each other and burst out laughing. “Oh boy, this is next level,” Rae says.
Alex holds up her hand. “’Kay, ‘kay. I can work with this. Let’s start at the beginning. What do you do?”
You furrow your brow. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” Alex says, hoisting her rucksack on her back, “what’s your clique? High school’s defined by stereotypes. So, are you in the drama club? Play an instrument? On any team? I mean, any team, I don’t care what sport it is. No team? Really? What about clubs? Any after-school activities at all? What the actual fuck do you do with your time, man! Dating anyone? Huh! AP, you’ve got to be in some kind of academic— no?” She clicks her tongue. “Occult woogie? RPG nut? E sports? No way. No way! Dear fucking God I believe I am looking at a genuine tabula rasa.”
You’ve taken enough Latin to know what that means. Blank slate. “Wow, thanks.”
“Oh, no!” Alex laughs. “No, thank you! This is gonna be fun. Holy shit, we can Pygmalion your ass into whatever. Ladies, we are taking this project. Now, first up—”
The next word never materializes. Instead, the peace is shattered by a quick burst of a police siren, and a flash of red and blue. You all turn to look back at the car, pulled up on the Borman bridge, and the two officers slowly getting out of it.
“Crud,” Izzy says. “Run!”
You have little time to do anything before the three girls sprint at full speed past you, Alex thrusting a spray can into your hand as she passes, Rae hurling her iced coffee into the river. You glance toward the squad car, and the two officers now running toward you.
Time to go. The girls are all taking off down the way you came, and are already opening up a head start on you before you have a chance to think. It’s the obvious way to go, but not the only one: if you’re quick, you should be able to hop the chain fence next to the garages. From there, you can sprint across Farm Road and try to lose the cops among the houses in west Saratoga Falls. Or, you guess you could stand your ground. It’s not like you’ve done anything wrong...
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