The Numbers Game

by Frances Vidakovic

  Serena glanced down at her own provocative devil outfit and promptly discerned that next to them she already looked more like the pope’s daughter. Or make that his seventy year old mistress. What had she gotten herself into? A party with real life people, real life music and real alcohol at a time when she was feeling anything but crash hot. All thanks to a stupid bear accident that destroyed Jasper’s car.

  “Bloody hell,” she cursed under her breath.

  Whenever she thought about this morning’s episode, it made her cringe. Everything had been going so well in their relationship until then. Now Jasper was acting distant, as if he didn’t really give a crap. Serena’s first reaction - her innate “I’ve feel like I’m being treated unfairly” one - made slinking and crying in a corner seem very attractive, but upon hearing the laughter and animated talk coming from down below something stirred within her. Damn it, maybe this was what she needed: One night to forget about her stupid innocent mistake, one night to really let herself go with friends.

  Yes, she would have fun, even if Jasper couldn’t be here thanks to his ‘prearranged commitment’. She would attempt to enjoy this celebration, her celebration, given that Tabitha was right. This was her last weekend at Hotel Ancient Cave. Next week she was moving back home and who knew if things would ever be the same? Serena felt better at this resolve, slipped the horns back onto her head and walked downstairs.

  Two hours later, Serena didn’t quite know what she was thinking. The party was packed and in full force, and in the sea of floating happy faces she swore she could see people she shouldn’t be seeing; awful blasts from the past. Or maybe it was just the drink. Lord knows she had guzzled more tonight than most normal social drinkers sip in a month.

  Hey Tab,” Serena screamed, leaning across the Balinese plank of wood. On the other side of it Tabitha was buried beneath three or four gorgeous pieces of specimen. As per normal, Tabitha opted to ignore her (much better Serena guessed to have hot breath shooting down your neck) but Serena was persistent.

  “TABITHA YOU SLUT, I KNOW YOU CAN HEAR ME!”

  Oops. It appeared this time Serena was not only successful in grabbing her best friend’s attention with the magic word but the boys as well. But so what? It wasn’t like Tabitha could very well deny the insult given that the top she was wearing was see-through and her pink erect nipples were peeking through the bits of the mesh.

  “You were calling me?” Tabitha replied, removing her head from beneath Definitely a Gay Man’s Armpit. What was wrong with Tabitha? Why couldn’t she see that the man was a fag when the spiky dog collar and leather whip gave it away?

  “Yes, yes I was,” Serena screamed back. “I need to speak to you, get off that bloody couch and come with me to the bathroom.”

  “But I don’t need to go…”

  “Tabitha!”

  “Okay, okay. But it better be worth it.”

  Making it to the bathroom ended up being a feat better suited to the National High Security Defense Force.

  “Where is our bathroom again?” Serena asked, bopping up and down to see over the swarm of heads. Rather unsuccessfully she should add. The real question should have been where did all these tall people come from? She looked up to Palm Tree Tabitha for assistance and Tabitha smiled, dragging her harder through the crowd.

  “Not much further, only two meters away.”

  Hmpf! Maybe in normal houses two meters meant two seconds and two calories in exertion but here in this terrace, with a full party in progress, everything was multiplied by a hundred. The way Tabitha’s home looked now actually reminded Serena of those notorious college parties shown on teen flicks which we all knew never really took place. Nothing ever was that wild or fun and in real life something always inevitably dampened the spirit – a row between a boyfriend/girlfriend for kissing the other’s best friend, boring music, cranky neighbors, or at the very least speedy evaporation of alcohol (though usually a combination of the three). But here at Tabitha’s guests were for the first time ever experiencing the real thing.

  “What is it?” Tabitha asked when they finally made it inside, shoveling out the current inhabitants on grounds of permanent residence. “That was so important you had to grab me away from Huey and Luey?”

  “Huey and Luey? Christ doesn’t that say it all? Tab, that guy and his friend are gay. G-A-Y, do you want it spelt out for you on paper?”

  Tabitha didn’t look at all convinced.

  “If they’re so gay then why do they want to take me to bed? Huh?”

  She had the cockiness of a drunken person with none of the intelligence to match.

  “Maybe because you’d be the perfect third wheel. Even straight people sometimes add another spice into their bed for more flavor, you know. But don’t expect the cock to go anywhere except your ass.”

  Now Tabitha looked miffed.

  “So? Maybe I like it up the ass occasionally too. For a change.”

  Right… with every passing second Serena was straying further and further away from the original topic at hand. The beauty of being drunk: an attention span of ten month old. She didn’t even have time to catch the passing thought “Who the hell are all these people?”

  “Tabitha you won’t believe who I think I just saw,” Serena screeched, the moment she remembered why they were there, in the bathroom. “I think I saw some of those old South American wankers.”

  “Really?” Tabitha replied, sounding very… very strange. “That’s nice.”

  “Excuse me, did you just say nice? Tabitha look at me. What in the world are you up to?”

  But no, Tabitha insisted on swiping lipstick across her mouth like a credit card across an electronic swiper. Without even stopping to wipe off the crap she’d smudged too far across her face, Tabitha mumbled something about restocking the liquor table and took off.

  It could only mean one thing.

  “You frigging little cow,” Serena hollered beneath her breath. That was it, if she found out that bitch under any circumstances went through her precious black book she would kill her, rip her head off with bare teeth and shred it to pieces using a blender. Make it her blender.

  Okay stay calm; Serena tried not to drown in the deep doggy-do quicksand she was swimming in.

  If her suspicions were right (and they often were in these moments of intoxicated clarity) Tabitha had gone ahead and invited her ex-lays. Who exactly though, all of them? The only ones Serena could say she had seen for sure looked like Dominique, Enrique and Ramiro which meant even Feckwit Fernando could be about. Damn, and to think she would be bumping into them dressed as a high class hooker. At least all her important parts were covered.

  Serena took a deep breath as she fixed up her devil’s tail which had only being stepped on (and nearly ripped off her underwear) about a dozen times tonight. Okay, here goes, if her suspicions about her exes were correct, she had to be prepared to get launched back into the grooving and moving, bumping and grinding horde. Oh gawd, was that a flutter in her stomach? It was, it was, she realized. She actually nervous or was it excited? “Hell I don’t know”, she laughed. Who cares? As long as she had fun, that was the most important thing. Whatever she did she mustn’t think about…she didn’t even remember his name anyway.

  There they were standing in the corner by the liquor table, looking very comfortable in foreign surroundings, as if they dropped into houses of complete strangers all the time.

  And she was right; it was just Dominique, Enrique and Ramiro, three quarters of the former South American Strike Force. Older, wiser and even more good-looking. Damn. If they were ugly then it would be easy to go over, look surprised and start a casual “so what have you been doing all these years” conversation. It would help too in forgetting that she’d slept with not just one or two of them but the entire trio.

  But hey that was beside the point; it wasn’t like she didn’t witness them on the social circuit all the time back in her heyday. Serena started counting to ten again, this time with the
intention of walking over there and saying hello before the end of it. But ten quickly became twenty and then fifty until finally Serena was forced to give herself a kick up the ass.

  “A hundred, you better be giving hellos kisses before a hundred or else Tab gets to KEEP the precious black book.”

  Of course that got her scooting. In her head Serena pretended the whole scenario was an episode of Seinfeld. She was Elaine and Tabitha was Kramer and they were at a funny party, like the one Elaine and Seinfeld attended in Long Island. Just pretend you’re Elaine because she’s cool; she’d never let things like ex-boyfriends and one-night-stands bother her. The whole audience would be thinking this was so, so hilarious too.

  “Hello?” Serena stopped right in front of the guys once she made it across and they turned to look at her, eyes popping to the floor.

  “No way!” one of them said followed by a “Jesus” and “Gosh you look…”

  “I look…” Serena prompted, leaning forward.

  So far this was not going well. She knew she should have gotten changed into something more conservative, something with buttons or a sleeve.

  “It is Serena, right?” Ramiro inquired, carefully.

  “Yes it is…” Serena smiled, while drawing out the word just as slowly. “Why, can’t you tell? Have I changed that much?”

  All three heads started nodding, which was a bit worrying because it made Serena think she was a bit of a dog back in her early days.

  “Was I a dog before?” she asked.

  “No dog,” Enrique exclaimed, shaking his head. “Definitely never a dog; maybe just a lamb before in sheep’s clothing. But now you are fox.”

  Oh…a fox was a good thing she guessed. Serena smiled, finding the foreign accent situation suddenly very attractive. Mmm, she’d forgotten all about boys who couldn’t speak perfect English despite living in the US all their lives. By this point, she’d forgotten lots of things...

  Chapter 20

  When Serena reflected back on her early twenties, she asked herself just two questions:

  Where in the world did she get her gall from and how the hell did she survive?

  Both questions pertained really to her trysts with Dominique, Fernando and Enrique (all at the age of um…nineteen) and then Ramiro at two weeks into her twentieth year.

  No girl liked to think of herself as a slut. In fact thanks to our paranoia of the slut label women did everything within their power to portray just the opposite. In our heads we were virginal – it was the other girls, the ones who sprouted Pamela boobs at thirteen and gave blow jobs in exchange for ecstasy that were the real hoes. She, on the contrary, was just a girl who liked to have fun and only occasionally slipped into bed with a friend for the night. Very occasionally mind you. You see she was anything but a slut.

  Serena had almost convinced herself of this fact but then their thoughts somersaulted to the day she had met the South American Quartet. It was summertime then and on the day they met she and Tabitha had been driving around in just bikini tops and short skirts because the temperatures were scorching. It was hot, hot, hot, the type of day when one’s bottom burnt just sitting in the car, the steering wheel felt like a hot iron and bucket loads of sweat kept pouring off their faces. But a person drove around anyhow because they had no other choice; the cool wind at least blew some of the frustration away.

  Now when a girl is young they can wear very little and get away with it thanks to still-growing awkward limbs and innocent eyes. And that was the stage Serena and Tabitha were at: hot pants, midriff bearing tops and mini dresses were staple pieces in their wardrobes. If an item didn’t fall into that category then at the very least it had to be black, red or leopard print. Like most of the wealthier kids who didn’t need to work during breaks thanks to ma and pa, Serena and Tabitha wasted enormous blocks of time doing nothing but searching for ‘potential boyfriends’. Their elders called them boy-crazy; all you do is talk about boys, boys, and more boys! But that was only because they missed what was lying beneath the picture; what Serena and Tab were actually searching for was love.

  “Oh gosh why don’t we head to the South American Festival downtown?”

  Serena remembered Tabitha’s words as if they were the poison apple in the Garden of Eden. She felt good blaming it on Tabitha, who was the original tempter, for in biblical terms the sentence could be translated as: go on, have a bite Eve, one bite ain’t going to kill you.

  Ordinarily when one meets a group of guys one automatically knows which one is their favorite. You just know. He stands out as if a sparkly halo has encircled his head while all the other friends are either invisible or falling to the ground around them, as a result of lethal dosage ugly pills. When your eyes connect with his there is chemistry. You think that maybe, just maybe, he could be The One.

  Serena never had that feeling with just any one of the South American Quartet. To the contrary, the sight of ALL four sent shivers down her spine and gave new meaning to the word masturbation. Dominique had the greenest cat eyes like the Afghan girl on the National Geographic cover; Fernando was a bodybuilder in progress; Enrique’s claim to fame was his smile, as wide and compelling as the Atlantic Ocean while Ramiro, well, he had dimples. Needless to say, if you put them altogether you’d have had Mr. Perfect in the flesh.

  As one already knows however it isn’t possible to cut and paste the features of four men to create another so Serena was forced (she couldn’t help it) to project volatile emotions upon all four, though she tried to avoid Fernando who was the Untouchable. On that first day by the sweets stand Tabitha had claimed Fernando for herself, saying that a good body was a sign of a sound mind. Yeah right…

  While slobbering away on slippery South American Apricots, also known as Mameys, Serena decided who gives a hoot? Tabitha could have her Fernando as long as the attention of the others was granted all to her! To her the boys were exactly like a Mamey: on the outside, they may have looked a bit thick and russet bitter but once you got a taste of it the sweet, juicy flesh was sure to overwhelm.

  Unfortunately to say the boys were as excited as Serena and Tabitha would be misleading. No doubt, they liked being treated like movie stars and having star-struck budding groupies was always an ego-booster. But the truth was the four-year age gap between them was more like twenty to them. Dom, Fern, Ram, and Ric had little time for teen puppets when they could have been and were screwing high-class older ladies. Serena and Tabitha sensed this betrayal but ignored it; they were happy to continue acting like flies around dog poop. That was even what they boys nicknamed them, the Fly Girls. Here come the flies. Not that they really cared, as long as they got to stay cozy under their wings Serena and Tabitha were happy.

  This was where Harry Met Sally infamous proclamation “a boy and girl can never be just friends” got to be tested. After spending packs of time together, almost every night out at the water hole or local South American Café Bar, something was bound to happen. Serena and Tabitha, fingers crossed, were counting on it. After a few months the boys had taken quite kindly to their adoring behavior and enjoyed treating them like kid sisters. Go fetch me another beer, buy me a pack of cigarettes, that sort of thing.

  Thinking back on it, Serena cringed and wondered why they didn’t just get DOORMAT tattoo on their foreheads. Yes, it might be requisite to go through that embarrassing phase in order to build self respect (for how else does one know to protect and cherish it unless it has been spat on a thousand times before) but must it be so humiliating in retrospect?

  Funny though, at the time the thought of sleeping with any of them was anything but excruciating for Serena. Instead, every day that she didn’t feel the casual brush of their fingers handing her over money for snacks was a killer. At night, when the scent of Hugo Boss had long drifted from her halter neck dress, she dreamt of kisses and walks and lots of hair stroking. Serena loved having her long hair stroked back then. She was growing it and especially nourishing her locks with mystic potions and oils, just wai
ting for the day it intertwined with any one of those boys.

  Green-eyed Dominique was the first in line. Fate wouldn’t have it any other way. Not long before then Tabitha and Serena had started taking either metros or taxis down to their local hangout, an descript café bar, in hopes of scoring back home an elusive ride. They explained to the boys that they arrived in that fashion, sans car, because they both wanted to drink and no one liked to be the designated driver.

  “It’s easier this way,” Tabitha had explained. “Don’t have to worry about getting pulled over and losing my license, plus there’s a bus that drops us not ten meters from my place.”

  “And if we miss it, we can always score a ride with someone here,” Serena added on, “most guys around here don’t live too far from us you know.”

  Serena and Tabitha could tell from the looks in their eyes that this was not a valid option. The Awesome Foursome, as they were coming to be known in private, might not have felt Serena and Tabitha weren’t girlfriend material but they certainly didn’t want other boys sinking their claws in either. All it took was one or two lifts home with a few good-looking clean-cut college boys for The Awesome Foursome to swing their way.

  The first few times were a real mess-up however because Serena was usually spending the night at Tabitha’s. They had figured it was easier that way so whoever was driving them home didn’t have to go too far out on a limb. Dropping them off at one house was one thing; making two stops was another and hence inconvenient, even if only a few streets away. Plus they didn’t want to rock the boat.

  As one would expect though, it got to a point where Serena and Tabitha were at each other’s throats all the time.