Shots better be up to date, dammit

When I was in junior high school, I fell in with a bad crowd.

Okay, it was more like three or four losers drifted together, and cumulatively, we were a bad crowd. A bad, small crowd. There was Sue, really a nice girl who hadn't grown her personality yet, and some blonde kid whose name escapes me, so we'll call him "Phil." But it's neither of them that concerns me here; I feel the need to share a little about the baddest of our bad crowd, Juanita.

What Juanita lacked in common sense, she lacked even more in personality, and you wouldn't wanna have to fall back on her looks, if you know what I mean. Could I pick 'em or what? I had absolutely nothing in common with these people, save for the fact that we were all 13 years old and wanted to get drunk as often as possible. I have a long, ridiculous story about these folks that I will post here sometime, but it's Monday and I'm whupped, so I'm offering up a tale that's shorter, but really, no less weird.

One winter night, the bunch of us were wandering the mean streets of Grand Haven (the town where the junior high school had its own planetarium) with some Southern Comfort and MD 20/20. Juanita, Sue and Phil were sharin' the Southern Comfort; I was much more of a Mad Dog girl. Explains a lot, doesn't it?

Now, Juanita could knock it back pretty impressively for a 13-year-old, but it did nothing to mute her obnoxious streak - intensified it, in fact. On this particular night, I watched her tip up the brown bottle, there under the streetlight, with Christmas-fattened snowflakes wafting lazily onto her shoulders, and I saw the exact moment where she completely lost her sense. I could see the shine in her eyes turn to a glaze, and her expression told me her fragile grasp on reality had succumbed to greasy fingers and completely slipped away. And lucky me, she set her crazed eyes upon me first.

I should mention here that I was lookin' especially spiffy in my poofy, butterscotch-colored winter coat and my little matching butterscotch-colored piss cutter cap. Maybe it was so spiffy that it attracted her insane gaze, but before I had any idea what was goin' on, Juanita had advanced on me, grabbed my arm, and bitten me, fucking bitten me, as hard as she could. And lemme tell you, a drunken, overgrown 13-year-old bitch can bite pretty damn hard.

A shriek issued forth from my surprised lips, and she jumped back with a maniacal grin on her face, and a little bit of my butterscotch coat in her teeth. The three of us kept our distance from Juanita and headed home right about that time, a fairly wise decision for a bunch of drunk teenagers. Further inspection would show human teeth holes in my butterscotch coat, and very defined teeth marks in my arm.

That was a fun conversation with Mom.