Free The Empty Room by Lauren B. Davis Page B

go. Ginger ale and pickle juice is my advice. My Polish grandfather told me about the pickle juice. Works a charm.”
    If she couldn’t find any battery acid, Colleen vowed to try it. She got into the cab. “Thank you,” she said, for she believed the rituals of courtesy functioned as a privacy screen at times like this.
    The woman saluted and moved off.
    The cab smelled of pine air freshener, coffee and wet wool. “Where to?” the driver asked.
    She didn’t want to go home. She wanted to talk to someone who would tell her everything was going to be all right and that the university was full of assholes. But everyone she knew was working. She gave the driver her address on Davisville. It didn’t occur to her until they reached Bloor that she might not have enough money in her purse to pay for this. How much would it be? Twenty dollars? Twenty-five? She scrambled in her purse and found her wallet. It contained sixty dollars. The question was, did she want to spend allthat on taxi fare, today of all days? The answer was, why the hell not?
    “Driver,” she said. “Change of plans. Drop me at Yonge and Eglinton.”
    “Whatever you say.”
    Colleen looked at the photo identification tag on the back of the driver’s seat. The name was Abdullah Elbaz . She doubted he would approve of the stop she intended to make. She wondered if what Minot had said was true. Were her pores really secreting alcohol? Could everyone smell it on her?
    She couldn’t tell if this odd, distanced feeling she had now was due to shock, from which she acknowledged she must be suffering, or some remnant of the hangover. She watched the world slip by outside the taxi window almost as though it were moving and the taxi were standing still, as though the scenery—the Varsity Blues Stadium, the fractured architecture of the Royal Ontario Museum, the little Church of the Redeemer nestled against all that glass and steel, the ragtag shops, the train bridge, the apartment buildings—all of it was on some enormous conveyor belt, making the city and all it contained—every person and shrub, every building and trash can—an experience to be had but not something to which one became attached. A little bubble world. She moved along behind glass and metal and no one knew her or why she was in the cab in the middle of the morning, heading to a liquor store. This was not the way she had thought she’d spend the day. This wasn’t the way she had thought she’d spend her life.

MAGIC FAIRY POTION
    T he first time Colleen got drunk, she was fourteen. Danny Gibson’s parents had gone away for the weekend and under such circumstances a party was practically mandatory.
    Okay, maybe Colleen was only there because Tricia and Crystal—the two popular girls, one dark and curvy, the other blond and willowy—were going and they let Colleen tag along, but still, she was there. Daniel was sixteen, tall and athletic, and had once been accidently pierced through the calf by an arrow his next-door neighbour shot, which gave him an air of manly, warrior-like glamour.
    She remembered so clearly the moment the drinking started. One minute they were all in the yellow kitchen, everyone giggling with pot-induced hilarity, as Danny displayed his talent for making the kitchen “work.” He turned on the blender, the toaster, the radio; he made the oven’s timer ring, and through some secret knowledge given to him by his father, who worked for the phone company, he dialled a special number and a moment later the phone rang, although no one was on the other end. The kitchen looked possessed by the ghost of Betty Crocker. Seemore, so named because he had so many holes in his jeans and you could always “see more” of him than anyone else, had apparently dropped acidand sat cross-legged on the kitchen table while examining a cut-glass ashtray with transcendent concentration.
    Even though she wasn’t the only fourteen-year-old at the party, Colleen felt a little bit like the