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Harley had her best ideas drunk. She was drunk as HELL right now and so, of course, her ideas were good as hell. Roman was suspiciously absent tonight—unusual, considering that he hadn’t been at the club the night before, or the night before. Also suspiciously missing was Zsasz. Now, of course Harley had her best ideas drunk because if she didn’t, she would have had the idea that something was up here before she’d done a whole lotta shots.
Now, this was a genius idea: maybe she could check on Roman in his apartment upstairs and bring him alcohol because she certainly wouldn’t want Romy to suffer the fate of THREE WHOLE DAYS without drinking.
Also because she knew he didn’t like her, and maybe she could bring him a drink as a peace offering or somethin’ like that.
Harley was suddenly bitch slapped by reality. How do you just...wander into someone’s apartment? She needed a sneaky, clever plan.
She had another drink, to stimulate her thinking.
She joined the conga line, to stimulate her thinking.
She grabbed a pill from the woman offering them, to stimulate her thinking.
And then, like a meteor, the idea came: Harley could sneakily, cleverly lead the conga line upstairs. That way she wasn’t just bringing Roman a drink, she was bringing the whole club experience.
That’s what she hoped someone would do for her if she didn’t go out for three whole nights.
One time, Jesi from the roller derby team came in and did Harley’s brows and eyeliner when Harley was feeling sad about Mistah J.
Harley had never appreciated someone more. Except maybe when Caridee helped her roast smores over a trashcan fire of all Harley’s pictures of the Joker...
No. Harley needed to focus. She had bided her time and found herself at the front of the conga line, which she proudly let around in circles a few times around the red tables, before heading in the direction of the DO NOT ENTER DOOR.
Harley called it THE DO NOT ENTER DOOR because it said DO NOT ENTER.
Harley entered, conga line trailing after her, in step to the thumping music, swaying precariously. Some club worker was loudly informing them that she couldn’t enter.
“The conga line knows no fuckin’ limits!” She yelled back.
Now this is where the narrator, or maybe Harley, would describe the back of the club, and the nice stairs she walked up, or the conga stampede that opened the locked door, or the conga chaos, but she was far too drunk to have that kind of awareness.
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Harley’s head hurt..
She opened her eyes and looked around. Unfortunately, she still couldn’t see anything. She was curled up on one side and she aimlessly threw one of her hands up, and hit something, which caused a lot of smaller somethings to fall onto her. She fondled one of the somethings long enough to figure out it was a shoe. She put her hand up the other way, and found something promising: a doorknob!
Harley turned the knob and winced away from the light. She wasn’t hungover, she was HUNGOVER.
Harley may be HUNGOVER, but she rises with all the strength of someone who did something good last night because she knows she did something nice last night, even though she isn’t really sure what it is. She pushes the door the rest of the way open to face her bright, shining future, and threw up on a white rug.
The reason everything had been so fuckin’ dark was because she’d been in a closet. How the fuck did I get in a closet? Bigger question: whose closet is it?
“I shouldn’t be in a closet!” she said to no one. “I’ve never been secretive about being bi!” She laughed at her own joke and stood up and tottered out of the closet, careful not to step where she’d recently thrown up, wobbling a little one her one gold stiletto sandal. The other one was silver and also currently AWOL. “Ooooooh!” Harley grabbed at some sunglasses on top of the bureau and stuck them in her crop top.
Harley didn’t consider herself a thief, she just had magpie tendencies.
She took a look around the room the closet opened onto. There was a massive unmade bed with a truly absurd number of pillows. The purple comforter had been shoved off and a guy was wrapped up in it like a burrito. The Guy was starting to wake up.
“What’s that smell...?” He said blearily as she teetered by, careful of the broken drink glasses on the floor.
“Oh! Hey! You’re awake! Look, I reeeeaally hate to bother you, but do you whose apartment this is? And have you seen a silver shoe? ‘Cause I’m looking for one--”
“Lady! Lady! Slow down. This place belongs to, uuhhh, what’s-his-face—shit! The guy who owns the club. Also, you were the conga line lady right? ‘Cause you were great last night--”
“Thanks!” Harley said and tottered off to find some food. If this was Romy’s place, she was fine. He already didn’t like her, thanks to a stunt she pulled involving a toaster and a nice watch. In her defense, she’d been shitfaced and thought she was about to really do an absolute banger of a magic trick. Anyway, as long as no one knew she was single, no one would mess with her.
All thoughts of Harley’s new relationship status vacated her mind when she saw the dining room. It was like a hurricane had come through. One leg of the table was broken, and someone had pushed all the chairs together into a bed that had since been vacated. Paint splattered the walls, and broken glass dotted the floor. A blonde girl in a glittery club dress was hunched over her phone with another blonde girl whose roots were starting to grow in.
The blondes looked up when Harley entered.
“Hey! You were the girl who did the thing with the microwave last night!”
“Oh yeah! That was dope!” the other girl said
“Have either of you eaten anything?” Harley asked. “I’m starving.”
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So began their three-woman quest for food. The blonde was Rebecca, and the one with the dark roots was Amy.
“Damn. This guy only has, like, rich people food.” Amy said.
Amy was right. There were no chips or Lucky Charms or anything fun.
Luckily, Rebecca could cook. Soon, Harley and her new friends were chowing down on scrambled eggs and french toast.
“Jeez, I feel bad for this guy.” Amy said between bites. “Like, he’s gonna wake up and be pissed. We trashed his place and ate his food.”
“Wake up? I don't think he's here!” Harley said. It wasn’t like Roman to take part in true ragers, but she was pretty hungover. Maybe he'd shown up?
“I mean, I don’t know him, but parties don’t just happen at people’s houses without them being a part of it.”
Rebecca laughed. “He’s gonna need a drink when he sees the damages.”
Now that jogged Harley’s memories. She’d planned to conga stealthily through, see if Roman was there, bring him a drink; ya know. Like a good friend.
Clearly she hadn’t been too stealthy.
“Oh, by the way,” Amy said, “the thing you did with the watch and the toaster was so funny.”
“And when that one guy showed up with the blowtorch--” Rebecca added.
“That was great.”
“Okay,” Harley said, “I remember none of this.”
“I’m not surprised.” Amy said between bites of delicious french toast. “You were drinking a lot.”
“That I remember. Have you seen a silver shoe? ‘Cause I’m missing one and these are really fun shoes —” Harley swung her leg up on to the table.
“Oh, the socks with heels is a look!” Amy said. “And the other one’s like that, but silver, right? I think I saw one like that on the counter in a bathroom. You were filling a bathtub with vodka?”
“Okay, I will check there. Thanks for the breakfast; it was fuckin’ delicious.”
After a brief exchange of Instragram handles, Harley wandered down the hall to the bathroom. She LOVED drunk girl camaraderie, but hungover girl camaraderie was pretty fuckin’ great, too.
The bathroom was trashed, but that was to be expected. It smelled strongly of liquor, and half-full cups decorated the marble counters. Other than that, it was easily the nicest bathroom Harley had ever seen, with a massive walk-in shower and a mirror ringed with lights. Laying flat on it side in the middle of the floor was Harley’s prize: a silver heeled sandal. She pulled it on over her red sock, fiddling with the straps. The liqour smell was getting ridiculous, when she realized it was coming from a giant sunken bathtub off to one side.
Oh yeah. That Amy girl said somthin’ about Harley filling a bathtub with vodka. Harley leaned down and scooped up a nice drink in her cupped hands.
It tasted sorta weird.
How many drunk people do you think have been in that bathtub last night? one of her intrusive thoughts chimed in.
Harley spit the drink out onto the floor. She was usually down for fuckin’ anything, but there’s certain things even Harley Quinn won’t do.
To be fair, it’s a pretty short list.
Harley made a mental note to add “Drink vodka some drunk people probably took a bath in.” to said list.
Harley stood back up and tottered over to the vanity. It had one of the cleanest mirrors she’d ever seen, so she took a few minutes to make some faces into it and fix her newly short pigtails. Harley embraced her inner magpie by digging through the drawers under the counter. There was nothing particularly interesting in there, so she abandoned that pretty quickly.
On her way out (just because Roman wouldn’t do anything to her didn’t mean she wanted to be around when he got back) she ran back into her old buds Amy and Rebecca, hunched over the broken table with a pen and a small crowd of hungover partiers.
“Hey Harley!” Amy said, waving Harley over. “Will you come read this?”
“What is it?” Harley asked, logically.
“So, we were going around, waking people up and talking about how shitty we felt about trashing this guy’s apartment, and I was like ‘we could at least leave him a note’ and Lee—” she pointed at a guy in a blue t-shirt— “was like ‘you totally should leave him a note or something’ and anyway I thought that was a good idea, but I literally cannot spell, and I don’t know the guy or anything.”
“Do you go to the club downstairs that often?” Harley asked, “because ya probably know him if ya do; he’s the weirdo with the monogrammed gloves.”
“Yeah, we don’t go to this club. We’re only here because our friend Trey texted us that there was a party one of his friends told him about.”
“He’s got some rich friends and he always talked about wanting to go to rich people clubs, but he couldn’t come because he had a basketball game tomorrow and he takes basketball really seriously. He never parties the night before a game.” Rebecca added. “So he wanted us to ‘party for him’ or something.”
“Interesting.” Harley said, “Don’t worry too much about the letter, but maybe don’t sign your fuckin’ names. Romy can be kinda a loose cannon, like, he might literally cut your face off. So he’s about as weird as your average monogrammed-gloves-guy. I mean, he probably has bigger problems, and he can totally afford to get his place redone. But if I were you, I would not put my name on that paper.”
“Okay, then.” Rebecca laughed a little, awkwardly.
“Oh, go ahead and laugh, it’s fine,” Harley said. “Studies show laughter is great way to deal with uncertainty, like the uncertainty that comes because you don’t really believe he’ll cut your face off and think I’m just using a really fuckin’ bizarre metaphor.”
“OK, I think I got everything: we’re sorry, we were drunk, we hope he has a good day...anything else?” Rebecca said, holding up the note, written in sharpie on a crumpled sheet of lined paper.
“Yeah.” Harley said. “One moment, please.”
She clomped back into the bedroom with the closet she’d woken up in with purpose, scrabbled around on the floor for a glass that only minimally broken, zipped over to the bathroom where she filled it up with bathtub vodka, and set in on the table next to the note.
“What’s that?” Some girl with light blonde hair wearing a jean jacket asked.
“I finally remembered why I brought the conga line up here: Roman hasn’t been in his club for days, and I was like ‘I should bring him a drink’ and I realized if he’s not here, I never brought him a drink.”
“Why?” The blonde girl asked.
“I don’t know now, silly, I was drunk then, and I have my best ideas drunk, so if I remember something when I’m sober that I thought of when I was drunk, I just fuckin’ do it. Like Nike.”
“OK.” The blonde shrugged.
“Any more weird gifts, or can I go now?” Rebecca asked.
Amy pulled five dollars out of her tiny purse. “Sorry for eating your eggs, dude.” She dropped the bill next to the letter.
Some people clapped.
“Okay, come on, hurry it up, I just realized how late it is, and I really don’t wanna be here when he gets back.”
Harley turned and walked towards the exit, and the hungover group followed. They weren’t quite a conga line, but it was close enough for Harley and a few others to catch the irony.
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On the way out, Harley and the Conga Crew, as she’d mentally dubbed them, did cross paths with Roman, who was back from the worst impromptu vacation he’d ever been on.
“Hey, Romy! You look terrible!” Harley said brightly. “Thanks for the party, though.”
Some members of the Conga Crew also thanked him.
Roman made a mental note to yell at every person working at the Black Mask club for allowing people to fall asleep and remain in the club all night.
Imagine his surprise when he found out the club wasn’t where the party had taken place.
Also, imagine his face when he took a sip of the bathtub vodka shot. Not ’cause it furthers the plot. Just because it was really funny.