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“You wanna go get a drink?”
Meri set down her tablet, on which she’d pulled up the Wikipedia article on education in the United States and leaned back in her seat. “A drink?”
“Yeah.” Rosario’s voice pulled back from the phone as she told Lance to put something down. “A group of us are going out tonight, and I thought you might like to come. Feel free to say no; I know it’s short notice.”
“No, no.” Meri stood, spinning around in search of her jacket. “I’d love to come.”
“Great!” Rosa rattled off an address, and Meri scribbled it down as she fumbled with her shoes. She’d been lagging for the last hour, almost ready to call it a night and start fresh in the morning, but the excitement in Rosa’s voice was contagious, and Meri hardly slowed to be sure she had her bus pass in her wallet before charging out the door.
She told herself this was all part of the plan. Find her successor—check. Learn the local language—check. (The occasional stumble notwithstanding.) Immerse herself in local culture by renting an apartment—check. It was a little bit lonely living so far from the cave where Blue slept, but it gave her better access to resources she might need, most notably the internet and the site called Wikipedia, which had done a great deal to fill in the gaps in her knowledge.
She had more research to do tonight, but then, she always had more research to do, and she still had years before Lance was anywhere near ready to hear the truth.
She could afford to lose one night—especially in the name of getting closer to Lance’s family.
(All part of preparing Lance to take up her mantle, yup. And not at all because Meri was painfully lonely and in the last three months Rosa had gone from a kind stranger to a good friend. Maybe as good a friend as any she’d ever had.)
In all honesty, Meri didn’t know what to expect from Rosa’s offer to “get a drink.” It was a little late for coffee, but Meri was hardly an expert on human social customs. Maybe people liked to drink coffee after dark.
Rosario’s directions brought Meri to a nondescript little building that couldn’t have been much bigger than Meri’s apartment. There was a sign out front that read Bubba’s Place with a list of words Meri didn’t recognize below it with prices beside them. There was a man at the door who asked to see her ID, and Meri wasn’t so far removed from the death of her people that her danger instincts didn’t flare up and tell her to walk away then and there.
Then again, Meri had no ID to surrender. Meri pulled out the ID she’d made under the name of Jessica Reid and handed it over. The man pulled out a blacklight to check the ID, and Meri made a mental note to thank Blue for figuring that trick out, because ancients knew Meri wouldn’t have been able to fake it on her own.
The man clicked off the light and passed the ID back to Meri, nodding her through. Inside was… an experience. Loud and dark, TVs blaring sports from two corners and a radio on the bar trying to compete. There were a handful of tables around the small space, but most of the seats lined the bar itself, several already taken by people nursing tall glasses of liquid, most clear or amber, some with a thick layer of foam on top. And the stench! Meri’s eyes burned just walking in here, but she spotted Rosa at one of the tables with several other women and forced a smile as she joined them.
“Lena, hey!” Rosa stood to offer Meri a hug, then rattled off the names of the others at the table, most of which Meri immediately forgot. “I’m so glad you could make it!”
“Me, too.”
Meri took a few minutes to look over the menu—mostly drinks under headings like “Beer,” “Wine,” and “Cocktails.” There was a short list of appetizers—the group had already ordered fries and pretzels, which were apparently communal. Everyone else had a drink in front of them, some more colorful than others, most in stemmed glasses. Meri, completely at a loss, ordered something called a Blue Arrow in honor of her lion.
It was blue, she’d give it that, a cool blue in a cone-shaped glass on a tall stem, a single cherry nestled at the base of the glass. One whiff of it nearly had Meri passing out, though. It smelled like coolant or something, quiznak. But everyone else was drinking theirs just fine and Meri didn’t want to stand out so she steeled herself and raised the glass to her lips. It probably tasted way better than it smelled.
She took a sip.
It burned. Oh, ancients. What was that? Meri hastily set the glass down as a coughing fit overtook her. Her eyes streamed, her nose and throat felt raw to the point that she fully expected to see blood in the palm of her hand when she finally pulled it away from her mouth.
Slowly, she became aware of the rest of the table. One of the other women was staring at the TV in the corner; several others were laughing so hard they’d slumped forward onto the table. Rosario had her hand on Meri’s back, patting her gently, and even she seemed to be fighting against a smile.
“Sorry, should have warned you. They make ‘em strong here.”
Meri just stared at her, gasping for air as dark spots danced across her vision. It dawned on her that everyone was laughing at her, and her face burned with shame. Had they been expecting a reaction like that? Were these drinks supposed to taste like death itself?
Apparently so. Looking around the place, Meri spotted a fair number of grimaces as people sipped their drinks. Maybe it was an acquired taste, and no one wanted to admit they hadn’t acquired it yet.
Whatever the case, Meri steered clear of the rest of the drink. She tried to brush it off, but the single mouthful she’d had sat in her stomach, and she couldn’t tolerate the smell of the food, much less force herself to eat. The burning in her mouth never went away, either, and she waited only long enough for the conversation to move on before she excused herself to the bathroom.
She had her phone out the second she locked the door behind her, and she hastily Googled ‘blue arrow drink,’ which returned a recipe consisting of ice, lime juice, and an awful lot of unfamiliar words. She searched them each in turn, starting with the one that made up the largest portion of the drink, gin.
A few minutes of searching revealed nothing except the fact that Meri really needed to look into human chemistry terminology.
They stayed at Bubba’s Place for hours, the other women each going through two or three drinks before the night was up. Rosa was the first to call it quits, standing on slightly unsteady legs after her second drink and asking the bartender to call her a cab.
“You wanna stay a little?” she asked Meri, who shook her head, beyond grateful for the out. Her head was pounding, the competing voices from the other tables, the TVs, and the radio competing to give her a headache.
“I think I’ll leave, too.”
“Perfecto. We can share a cab.”
Meri accepted, because that seemed to be the way these things went, but insisted on getting Rosario home first. Once she was inside, Meri directed the driver to a motel at the edge of Carlsbad. She had to walk an hour into the desert to reach the place where she’d hidden her speeder—not easy to do at midnight—and from there it was a relatively short jaunt to Blue’s cave.
Not that it felt short, when the motion of the speeder kept making her gag and the world around her continued to blur.
“Blue, I think I’m dying,” she said as soon as she reached the cave.
Blue’s eyes burst alight, their glow driving spikes through Meri’s skull, and she hastily dimmed them, rumbling in concern.
“Universal translator,” she grunted. “I need to know what ethanol is.”
There wasn’t an immediate answer, but once she’d fed Blue the Wikipedia article that included a chemical formula, Blue jerked upright, roaring.
Meri moaned, wrapping her arms around her head to keep her skull from splitting open. “Blue. Ow.”
Blue fell silent at once, and Meri forced herself to squint at the screen where Blue had the translation displayed. As soon as she read the word, she wished she’d just stayed ignorant.
“Poison?” she whined. “I drank quiznaking poison?”
Weak poison, Blue typed out on the screen. You’ll live.
Meri glared at the words. “Doesn’t feel like it.”
Blue purred, dimming the cockpit lights to a more comfortable level. Sleep it off?
That was just about the best option Meri could see, so she curled up in the pilot’s seat, her whole body aching like she’d come down with a virus. “Damn humans,” she muttered. “They drink this crud so much they’ve built up their tolerance or something. They think it’s fun.”
The rhythm of Blue’s purrs sounded suspiciously like laughter, but Meri was in too much misery to care.
She woke late the next morning in abject torment to the sound of her phone ringing, and she briefly debated blasting it to pieces with her bayard before she recognized Rosa’s contact photo.
“Hello?”
Rosario cooed sympathetically. “You sound terrible. Hangover?”
“Sure,” Meri said, rolling onto her back and draping her free hand over her eyes. “Feels more like I’m being ripped atom from atom, but we can go with that if you like.”
Rosa laughed, but it had a pitying quality to it. “I’m so sorry, Lena. How much did you have last night?”
Meri almost burst out laughing. Compared to the actual humans in the room? Hardly anything. “Not much,” she said.
“Well, hey. There’s nothing wrong with being a lightweight. Did you at least have fun last night?”
Not even a little. “Yeah. It was great.”
“I’m glad. We should do it again sometime. You can volunteer to be our designated driver. Then no one will give you crap for not drinking. If you want to, of course.”
“Sounds perfect.”
It wasn’t until Meri had hung up that she realized what she’d just agreed to, and she groaned to Blue as she let the phone slip through her fingers.
“Gods damnit, Blue!” she whined. “Now I have to teach myself how to drive.”
This time, Blue was definitely laughing.