Free Generation Next by Oli White Page A

“we’re all supposed to be taking our own alcohol. How are we going to swing that?”
    “Well, I’ve had a few thoughts,” I said, grinning. “My old man has got quite a nicely stocked liquor cabinet, so . . .”
    “What’s in it?”
    “Wine, Bacardi . . . I dunno.”
    “I don’t like wine,” Austin said.
    “What do you like?”
    “I’m not entirely sure,” he said. “Where is the drinks cabinet, anyway?”
    “It’s in the living room,” I told him.
    “And where are your mum and dad now?”
    “In the living room, watching Game of Thrones .”
    “So unless you’ve developed the power of turning yourself invisible, how are we going to get hold of it?”
    Austin had a point. This required a bit of fast thinking.
    “Tell you what,” I said, after deciding on jeans and a light blue polo shirt, “what about if you, like, pretendto fall all the way down the stairs and twist your ankle and then, like, scream out and then they’ll rush out to help and I’ll swoop in and put a bottle or two in my bag and . . .”
    Austin looked at me like I’d come unhinged.
    “Twist my ankle and scream out?” he said. “Do I look like one of Dr. Who’s female companions?”
    I shrugged, wondering if Austin might come up with an alternative plan. I mean, it wasn’t exactly Mission Impossible , was it? We just had to get them out of the room and grab a bottle of something alcoholic.
    “Or,” Austin said finally, “we both go into the living room and then you say you need to talk to them in the kitchen privately and very urgently, with a proper serious look on your face. Then they get all worried and follow you out and I nick the bottle out of the cupboard.”
    “Yeah, and what do I say once we’re in the kitchen?” I asked.
    “I don’t know, do I? Tell them you feel a bit ill, or that you’ve got some really bad life-threatening illness.”
    “Tell them I’ve got a life-threatening illness and then swan off to a party?” I said. “Is that your idea?”
    Austin nodded. “It’ll work, trust me,” he said.
    And it was at that moment I realized why I liked Austin so much. He was both a clown and an optimist rolled into one, and as far as I was concerned that was a pretty good combination.
    In the end I got them out of the room on the pretense of showing them a personal website I’d been puttingtogether up in my room. Dad wasn’t all that happy that I’d interrupted a particularly bloody battle scene, but they went for it anyway. While we were upstairs, I could hear the clanking of bottles as Austin rifled through the drinks cabinet, so I spoke to my parents in a stupidly loud voice to cover up the noise. Dad complained that I hadn’t made any progress since the last time he’d seen the website so what was so urgent, and Mum asked me why I was shouting and assured me she wasn’t deaf, but I think it did the trick because when we came back down the stairs Austin had a massive grin across his face and was standing by the front door, ready to go.
    We left the house and headed off down the street armed with a small box of our new GenNext business cards and whatever alcohol Austin had managed to steal. I just hoped that neither of my parents fancied a glass of whatever it happened to be.

    In the end, Hunter’s house turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, at least from the outside. Sure, it was nice, and a fair size, but not really the rock-star mansion we’d all been imagining. It was just a smart house on the outskirts of town. My hopes of a dry ski slope in one of the back bedrooms was also dwindling. On the up side, we were greeted at the front door by a gorgeous young woman who Austin was convinced was one of the aforementioned au pairs, clearly ready to strip down to a bikini at the drop of a hat and cater to our every whim. Wrong again. Turned out it was Hunter’s older sister, Fran, who had a degree in interior design and had just set up her own business.
    The inside of the house