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Rachel loses the bet, and the rest of the table erupts into laughter at her expense.
"Top shelf, baby!" Jon declares with a hoot, waving the bartender over. He orders the table another round, pointing to Rachel and telling the bartender, "She's buying."
-
Halfway through their third round, Rachel pulls out her wallet. "I'm getting out of here before you guys drink me into bankruptcy," she says. "Anything you consume after I leave is entirely -- oh, shit."
"What's wrong?" Anderson asks.
Thumbing through the bills in her wallet, Rachel sighs. "There's the overreaching problem of not having been born a Vanderbilt, and then there's the more immediate problem of not having had the foresight to know I was going to be buying for you boozehounds. In other words, I'm broke."
Keith puts his hand on hers, encouraging her to put her wallet away as he reaches for his own. "Don't worry about it," he says. "I'll take care of it."
Rachel tosses back the rest of her drink. "Like hell," she says, pushing her chair back and standing up.
"Oh! Are we doing Dine and Dash: The Bar Edition?" Stephen guesses. "I love this game."
"There's a pool table," Rachel says, looking over her shoulder. "How do you think I paid my bar tab as an undergrad? And as a grad student. And, come to think of it, as an activist."
"You're going to hustle pool?" Anderson asks incredulously. He sounds almost offended.
"Just wondering," Jon says. "Exactly how many times have you gotten your ass kicked trying this?"
Rachel makes a zero with her thumb and index finger. "And you're going to help me, since it's your fault I'm in this mess."
"Me?" Jon asks. "You took the bet!"
"I think we should go back to the part where Keith pays," Anderson says.
"Are you kidding?" Keith asks, closing his wallet. "You need to see this. It's incredible. She did me out of two hundred dollars one night before she told me what she was doing."
Anderson gapes at Rachel. "Did you give it back?"
Rachel laughs.
"Good Lord," Anderson mutters and reaches for his wallet. "You know, if Keith doesn't want to pay, I'll do it."
"Relax," Rachel says, reaching over Keith's shoulder and picking up his drink. She takes a long sip before returning it to the table. "I'm going to play Jon, I'm going to lose, and then I'm going to move on to...that guy." She gestures across the bar with her chin, pointing to a man who is practicing trick shots on one of the tables. "I'll lose one to him, too."
"This all sounds very counterproductive," Anderson says. "Isn't the point to get money, not lose it?"
"I'm getting to that. After I lose one, I'm going to beat him. Twice. For increasingly large amounts of money," Rachel says. "And I'll get him to buy me a drink halfway through the second game, right before I turn it around."
"You also want to tell us in what order you're going to sink the balls?" Stephen asks.
Rachel cocks her head. "I don't teabag and tell," she says with a smile. She taps Jon on the head. "Let's go."
-
She loses five dollars to Jon and ten to the stranger she picked out of the crowd. His name is Richard, and he laughs when Rachel makes a joke about how many Richards she knows. He buys her a drink halfway through their twenty dollar game, and she gives the pundits a knowing look before she sinks the seven ball in a corner pocket.
The third game is double or nothing, and she walks away from it with forty dollars, another Manhattan, and a promise of a rematch at a future date.
She pays the tab, finishes her drink, and hands Jon a five as she sets her empty glass on the table. "I'm going home now," she says. Then she grins. "That is, unless one of you wants to shoot some pool...?"
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