December exclusive - "Christmas Time" - Part 1 🎄🍸

Hi everyone! Still working on this tale, and so there may be some edits later on. Might just post a full edited version at the end. But in the meantime, here's part 1...

One

7th  December

Luke’s home

Lights down low, Adele playing on a smart speaker that’s normally reserved for telling bedtime stories for Luke’s sisters, Katie accepts the snifter. “What’s this one called?”

“B and B,” says Luke. He sits down next to her on the couch. “Brandy and Benedictine. He swirls the amber liquid.

“Smell like cinnamon.” She inhales deeply from the glass. “Smells like a forest.”

“A secret blend of 27 herbs and spices,” Luke says grandly.

Katie snorts laughter. “Like KFC!”

Luke rolls his eyes. “Just try it.”

Katie sips the drink, swallows, and groans. “Oh, that’s lovely.”

“Right? It’s been gathering dust in Dad’s drinks cupboard for God knows how long.”

Katie frowns. “No way. That stuff’s for drinking.” She clinks her glass against Luke’s. “I propose a toast…to the drink I’m proposing a toast with.”

Luke nods solemnly. “To the booze.”

“To the booze.”

Two teenagers sneaking spirits. Luke’s father is working the night shift, his sisters are upstairs, fast asleep. The fifteen-year-old friends are still in their school uniforms; ties loosened, sleeves rolled up.

But they are not ordinary teenagers.

They’ve been in Parkdale for a long time.

They’ve been 15 years old forever.

Adele sings about heartbreak. She sings, appropriately enough, about drinking.

Katie leans forward, cradles the snifter between cupped hands. “Brandy’s good for shock, right?”

Luke responds with a soft laugh. “How many days now?”

“14,” Katie replies immediately. She doesn’t have to count in her head. Every morning, she wakes up with a refreshed number on the tip of her tongue.

“Really? You joined on Christmas day?”

“Mmm. Busy time of year,” she says. “I wasn’t really ready…God, I was so green! But Sucette gave me the pendant and said, ‘Don’t worry, dear, this will be your secret weapon.’”

Luke puts his hand on the back of Katie’s neck, strokes the skin with the gentlest of fingers, and then gently tugs at the silver chain. “Hope you’re being good.”

Katie smiles. “Mmm.”

Of course Katie is being good. She is the girl with hair that shines in the sun, she is the girl with the elegant poise and tone that gives children tingles of delighted obedience.  She’s not beautiful like Rachel, she is not designed for adolescent seduction. She is not cute like Jessie, a girl who can make anyone feel like her very best friend. But she is, by all accounts, very, very pretty, and very, very, clever. She is the girl with the posh voice. She is the senior teen agent, reporting directly to Miss Brown.

She gulps the cocktail, feels the sticky, aromatic burn at the back of her mouth.

“Steady,” says Luke. “It’s pretty strong.”

Katie turns and looks into his eyes. “How can you stand it? How can you stand doing the same algebra, the same wave motion, the same fucking plate tectonics.” She shakes her head. 14 days to go, and now she hates the job. She hates babysitting, she hates school. She hasn’t finished her essay on the Hundred Years War. She might just ask her teacher to mark the one Katie wrote last year. Or the thirteen times before.

She stands up, goes over to the Christmas tree that has been decorated by a combination of expert and less expert (but very enthusiastic) hands. She looks at the hand-made ornaments; button stars with stars drawn with felt tip pens, paper doily trees, ice-lolly stick snowflakes. “I swear, this year, I was ready to lose my mind. I told Mum, I told her, don’t bother buying me a present, all you need to do is get your bags packed and make sure there’s petrol in the car.”

“Because you’re close to the end,” Luke says.

Katie turns away from the tree. “But you’ve been doing it even longer than me.”

Luke sniffs. “Seventeen years.”

“Seventeen!” She comes back to the couch, squeezes his arm. “Times up, why are you still here? Surely, you’ve made enough money.”

“The girls are settled, they don’t need the disruption. Molly, especially.” He looks towards the TV, turned-off but glittering with reflected Christmas tree lights. “I found my family here, you know?”

Katie knows. But that’s Luke’s story, not hers. She holds up her empty snifter. “One more for the road?”

Luke responds by taking the glass and getting up and delivering a little bow. “My lady.”

Katie smiles, watches him make the drinks. Handsome boy, he turns on the charm with her sometimes, giving a glimpse of what turns girls and women to jelly. Such moments are mostly lost on Katie, who knows that Luke is beyond charming; his lips are like her pendant, one kiss can turn the most intelligent of women into a simpering, lovesick idiot.

Besides, the Parkdale Parenting Association forbids sexual relationships between its agents – according to Dr Sucette, pregnancy in a regressed body – or one frozen in age like Katie’s – would have untold consequences. Katie remembers, a few years before, Rachel and Michael snogging in a dark corner. It was Katie whispering in her frenemy’s ear that stopped it; Stop pretending you’re normal. Boots aren’t about to give you the morning after pill.

“Here you are.” Luke passes her a fresh drink.

“Cheers,” says Katie. “Here’s to friendship, and here’s to getting what we want for Christmas.” Like freedom. Like the freshest of starts. She sips her drink. Steady. She’ll go home, finish her essay. After Christmas, free of her PPA contract, she can be a real teenager.

Mum has expressed her worries about that. What if you get carried away? I’m all for you getting the chance to make some teenage mistakes, but you don’t want to get pregnant, not at your age.

Age. Katie shakes her head. She’s had fifteen years of being fifteen. Besides, perhaps her insides are ruined forever, maybe they are rotten to the core.

But she doesn’t need to have sex, she doesn’t need to go wild. She just needs to get out of Parkdale.

To be continued...