Sugar High

Peter, Leo, Ellie, Yani and Alexa were bored. It was the weekend, and they had nothing better to do than sit around in Ellie’s lounge room, telling naughty jokes and consuming dangerous amounts of carbonated drinks. They had started three hours ago and showed no signs of letting up. Soon, they were all buzzing with the afterglow of a sugar high.
         “Holy crap!” Peter raised one of his hands, which shook from the seventeen cans of Sprite and thirteen cans of Coca-Cola he had just finished. “Guys, I need to stop this or else I’m going destroy some sort of major organ. ”
         “Ha! You said organ!” Leo yelled. Everybody laughed. Leo was normally a mature and intelligent boy. But sugar made him a child again.
         “You’re a sook, Peter,” Alexa said, finishing off her thirty-seventh can of Pepsi. She slammed the can against her forehead, crushing it. She threw it into the pile of cans in the corner of the room, which was now approximately one and a half feet tall. She shot up and walked in a zigzag over to the fridge. Everyone stopped when she screamed. “We’re all out of drinks!”
         “To the place that sells stuff that I can’t name right now!” Shouted a hyped up Ellie.
         “You mean store,” Leo said, in a shaky, matter-of-factly kind of voice.
         “Yeah! To the thingo!”

The five friends began a long walk to the shopping mall, which they decided would have a lot more soft-drink. They covered ground in record speed, making a trip that usually took them twenty minutes by foot take only three and a half. They bolted through the automatic sliding doors, pushed past shoppers and nearly stampeded a rather confused looking trolley boy as the approached the grocery store. They grabbed up every single drink that had bubbles in them. Coke, Pepsi, Mountain Dew, nothing was safe. Yani paid for the several dozen boxes they had managed to haul to the front desk with his credit card. They tore open the packaging and greedily drank can after sweet can. Within minutes, they had fixed their buzz.
         “Let’s go to the Dangerous Pet Store and make faces at the death adders!” Peter said, jumping up and down for no reason.
         “Hey! That’s a kick-ass idea,” Leo’s mouth moved at about a hundred metres a second and it took his friends several moments to figure out what he said. “I wanna moon the cheetahs!”
         “You can,” Ellie said, seemingly the most normal of them all. “I’m going to swing from the light fittings in the food court.”
         “I’m going to chase that blue Sasquatch over there!” Yani pointed to a rather bulky, hairy man in a blue singlet that looked mildly offended.
         “Yani, are you seeing things?” Ellie asked, suppressing a laugh.
         “Probably! But don’t stop me! I wanna harpoon it for research purposes!”
         “That’s his Japanese part coming through!” Peter yelled over the hum of shoppers. They all laughed wickedly.
         “I wanna go harpoon it too!” Alexa said. “And I wanna catch that zebra, and ride that camel!”
         “Guys, Alexa is tripping. She’s had too much.” Yani waved his hand in front of her face. She seemed vacant, but was aware of every single sound that was made. Yani just wandered off with Alexa. Peter grabbed Leo by the shoulder and ran down one wing of the mall, while Ellie was left to head to the food court.

*  *  *

         “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you not to call the crocodile a ‘handbag’” said the lanky Dangerous Pet Store shop-attendant to Leo, who was bent over the carnivorous reptiles display, with his tongue out. He turned to Peter and nearly had a heart attack. “Don’t wave your penis at the lion!”
         Peter groaned with disappointment and put it away. But it wasn’t long before he had tied a hyena to old lady’s back, who was unlucky enough to be passing by at the time.
         “This is kick-ass!” Leo said. “Hey, what does this button do?”
         “Don’t touch that!” the storekeeper cried. His words fell of deaf ears and the poor man just whimpered as Leo pushed the big red button. The store was flooded with red lights and deafening sirens blared. Then, all the animal displays opened at once. Annoyed predators of all colours, shapes and sizes streamed out of their exhibits and leaped onto the store owner, while many others fled through the door. Peter and Leo edged away from the carnivores very carefully. When they reached the door, they ran.

Ellie had managed to shinny her way up a support pole to the light fittings way above the heads of fast-food patrons. She jumped from each hanging light with ease while diners looked on, mouths agape. Some even called security. Ellie had become more confident with the swinging motion and began to become more extravagant with her swinging. She had started out by standing on the top of them and just stepping from fitting to fitting, but she had progressed and was now swinging from the cone of the lights, cheering with delight as she was flung from lamp to lamp. She was about to try a triple-forward flip, when she overshot her mark. She screamed and onlookers gasped. But then she stopped mid-air as her jeans got caught in the light’s chain.
         “I didn’t think this would be uncomfortable, but I guess I was wrong,” she muttered to herself after a brief moment of struggling. She looked down at the customers who were still looking up at her. She waited for the applause to finish when she called down to them. “Can I get a little help?”

Yani and Alexa had been following around the man for nearly two minutes and they had lost interest. Alexa had managed to regain some consciousness, and was growing less interested in the ‘Sasquatch’ by the second. Alexa stopped mid-hallway when she saw the sign.
The Fizz and Grape Bottle Shop.
She tugged Yani’s arm, and he didn’t resist.
         “Wow, this is just like soft drink, but harder!” Yani looked at all the cans and glass bottles. He didn’t know the names of any of these soft drink companies, but he decided to grab a few anyway. He was about to pay when a panther slinked its way into the store. One woman screamed. And the scream effect took place almost immediately.  There was pandemonium, and Yani’s greed took the better of him and he ran with Alexa. He managed to score a few dozen six-packs of something. But the sugar in his system made Yani illiterate. But from what he could read, he scored cans of bears.

*  *  *

They all met up outside the grocery store again. Peter and Leo wanted to leave before they were caught, Ellie wanted to get back to the drinks, and Yani and Alexa couldn’t wait to show their friends what they had.
         “We got them free ‘cus some cat walked in a scared the crap out of everybody.” Yani said, holding up one pack. “But we have enough here for two each. So go nuts!”

*  *  *

         “Ow! My head!” Ellie moaned. She was only vaguely aware of head on her tummy. She rubbed her eyes. Tentatively, she opened them and saw that they weren’t in the shopping mall any more. She sat up, and Leo’s head fell onto the delicate bed beneath them.
         “Argh!” Ellie turned around. Alexa was just waking up. Her head must have hurt as well. “Where am I?”
         “I don’t know,” Alexa jumped at hearing Ellie’s voice. “But why are you wearing Yani’s clothes?”
         “I was about to ask you, why do you have Peter’s on?”
Ellie looked down, and saw that she wasn’t in her own jeans and t-shirt anymore. She was in very boyish clothes. She examined a window with the curtains drawn. “Let’s see where we are, shall we?”
The curtains were opened. Ellie took a moment. She then awoke everyone else.
         “Where are we?” Peter said, rubbing his eyes. “And why am I wearing Alexa’s stuff?”
         Yani looked at his attire. “Hey Leo, these are yours…”
         “And I’m in Ellie’s stuff…” They all looked at each other.
         “I just hope to GOD I have my own underpants on!” Leo grumbled. Everybody looked down their pants and sighed when they saw they were in their own underwear.
“We aren’t in Australia anymore,” Alexa said, looking out the window.
“Where are we?” Ellie stood next to Alexa.
Leo looked over the landscape.
“Well?” Yani asked. “You’re the culture nut. Where are we?”
“Germany.”
“Shit.”


End