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The Cool Kids

Posted on August 25, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

They were fairly unobtrusive at a party which wasn’t a particularly raucous affair to begin with. If anyone had stopped to think about it they would have realized that before the night was through someone would be too drunk to remember how she got home the following morning; someone else would have puked all over the stairs or a corner of the hardwood floor and someone would suffer a few weeks of worry over whether she had remembered to enforce the condom rule before accommodating whatever man had said enough nice things to charm the pants off her. The quiet duo in the corner would not become any of the above-mentioned case studies. They were the cool kids.

Hell, they would have been the ones to identify people who slid neatly into the various categories. They recognized the insecure, balding smartass who hid his total lack of self-worth behind an air of cagey smugness. They saw and ticked off the rich chick who brought her own bottle of Dom to a Bring Your Own Booze party and was swigging from it with greater regularity than should have seemed advisable. The cool chick leaned over and whispered into the cool dude’s ear, “What do you want to bet she has a spare bottle in her car?”

He tore his eyes off the slutty one in the tank top that resembled lingerie and evaluated the object of her query, “No sale. She must have at least two more bottles in the car. I’d even go so far as to say she has an expensive single malt in her hip flask.”

“What makes you think she has a hip flask?”

“The uneven bulge of her butt cheeks?”

“Oh. Right.”

He nudged her and together they looked at the girl with the long Alanis Morissette hair from her nude video days, the singer’s not the girl’s. She was wearing a snug jersey dress that other girls would have pulled down at unequal intervals but not her. She seemed content to let it ride up over her budding cellulite while she laughed at something a long-haired, bearded dude in baggy pants and an ironic t-shirt whispered into her ear. The cool chick watched for a moment or two and then she said, “Okay…so?”

He smiled, already proud of himself for the turn of phrase he was about to utter, and said, “She looks so sloppy, when the guys get her into bed their dicks probably just fall into her.”

“Eww, that’s disgusting!”

“Doesn’t she just look like a free spirit who doesn’t wash often but needs sex to feel a ‘connection’?”

“Maybe. She stopped interesting me before I laid eyes on her.”

He moved on, indicated two women sitting by the fireplace and asked, “What about those two?”

“Oh I know one of them. She’s an artist of some sort.”

“Meaning what?”

“I don’t know, filmmaker or photographer or something.”

“So what’s their deal?”

The cool chick took a deep breath and said, “The one doing the listening has recently returned from a trip…abroad. Somewhere I don’t know, exotic.”

“And yet she’s the one who is quiet?”

“Of course. The more people see and observe, the less they feel the need to lecture to the world. It’s the inexperienced ones, or rather the half-experienced ones, who think the world can’t do without their opinions.”

“So what do you think will happen?”

“The talkative one with the inflated opinion of herself will witter on for an hour or more while the experienced one listens patiently. When more than enough time has passed she will excuse herself and that will be that.”

“How do you know?”

“What can I say. I have instincts. Totally pointless and utterly useless but they are mine and I don’t know how to get rid of them.”

“What about her?”

It was the one with the tank top that resembled lingerie. On one of the occasions that she had passed their perch she was complaining about the music. Back then they had exchanged a glance and let it go. She sighed and murmured, “Ah yes, your sex goddess.”

“What? No! I’m just appalled that someone built like that would dress like that.”

“Confidence goes a long way honey.”

“And yet it couldn’t take her to the nearest mirror.”

“What are you talking about?! She thinks she’s superhot and the guy with her agrees.”

And that was how they spent the rest of the night. The cool kids. The ones no one seemed to remember inviting. They didn’t speak to anyone else and the only times they got off their perches was to use the bathroom or get a drink. They didn’t care what other people thought about them because they knew they were better than everyone else.

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