Placebo Kids

Age 13

Loud men cackled and clanked their beer bottles together, a gathering of spewed profanities and lost sexual fantasies erupting from their mouths. Small giggles of women in desperation for attention was also prominant, along with the crowd of boots banging on the scratched floor. All of this an escape from the heavy rain outside. The large pellets of water was hitting the greasy windows, barely audible by the bustling crowd coming in and out from the bar. Even if everyone in there barely knows each other, either by the color of their cheeks from the alcohol or from the sweat pouring out, it was all a big family of intoxication. Big eyes of swirly chocolate colors and grey hues, as big as baseballs, stared at each face, studying the harsh features of the years of drinking their liver to Hell. Will I look like that soon? I sure hope not. This young girl, with the eyelashes like a crowd of crows and the bottom lip as plump as the curve a pear but as red as pomegranates (delicious!), stood short and growing cinnamon curves. Next to her was a young girl older than her. The other girl stood stocky and limp like a cooked noodle, with the complexion of an bruised peach, leaning against her old boots from her grandmother. A slight blush was on her cheeks when she bumped into an older, husky gentlemen, who yelled, "Ay watch it ya shite!"

The splash of cheap whiskey spilled next to the girl with large eyes, the alcohol running down her scrapped knees. She created a hissing noise between her two big teeth, kneeling down to examine possible damage. In no time, the other girl grabbed her by her flaccid wrist.
"Hurry up! He won't be waitin' all day, you know."
By navigating through the drunks and the lonely ones, both of the young girls ended up at a stairwell. The noodle begins to walk, leaving behind the curvy girl. She looked down at her bare smooth skin, shifting her weigh from hip to another. Her poor heart was pounding in her box chest, a deep rumble in her stomach of acid and her own creation of chips and chicken she made before heading out.
"Ramona!" the girl exclaimed from the top of the stairs.
"I don't know Rose," she manages to squeal, her voice still rusty from yelling the day before. "What if he does a shit job?"
"I'm tellin' ya, he's the done that did mine and he did a good job! Trust me, I think you'll be fine."

A quick swallow of saliva and a quick flick of the knees, Ramona followed Rose up the stairs. The sound of the bustling crowd downstairs begins to drown out and into a subtle quietness. It flowed up the ear canals of Ramona and Rose, which made Ramona even more nervous. At the end of the stairs was a door, stained with a color not original to the wood. With the accessories of stickers advertising different items such as shoes, food, and music, and the occasional signatures of different visitors and chipped wood, she was certain that the place this noodle of a friend took her was scarier than she could ever imagine.

The girl raised her pale knuckles and racks at the door. They both stood there, with the exception of Ramona shaking in her mud splattered Nikes, awaiting to reveal the mystery behind the door. The knob began to rattle and the door opened, revealing a man, tall and skinny ("Could Rose and that man be related, they both look like noodles."), with tattoos on every graft of his skin. His thin lips didn't even peel open to greet them; he just moves back and lets the two girls in. The strong smell of lingering alcohol was in the air, making Ramona's nostrils burn up. From one end of the small room, there was a leather couch with cigarette holes. Women with clothes as thin as the curtains on the the small window next to them sat there, staring at them with dead eyes.

"Is this the girl?" the man asked, his glassy eyes looking up and down at her petite frame. Ramona placed her signature scowl on her face, flaring of the nostrils and peering of the eyes. Clearly the man wasn't intimidated, so he kept on staring at Rose.
"Yeah, she's a bit nervous though."
"Rose!" Ramona blushed.
"Ya gotta be honest when you do things like these."

Ramona slightly rolled her eyes and looked back at the man. He stared at her for a while, made her stomach very uneasy once more, and motioned her to a recliner chair. "Go sit there."
Ramona walked slowly, but began to feel a great rush of joy through her veins. It was an adrenaline that she had never felt ever since she was little, when she went into the Martins' yard to chase their old pitbull, only to be chased back. It was that rush that she felt jealous of when her mum back home, in the small flat in the huge flat complex, told her to be careful of the "forbidden sugar" that those nice men got her after she gave them a supposed gift.

"You wanted the portrait of Mona Lisa, right?"
She paused from sitting down, thinking it over. "Yeah, but just the outline." She sat down, brushing back her unruly, perfect light brown curls. She kept on thinking of those moments as she pushed back her gold tank top just a bit more. The man placed an outline on her skin, but Ramona did not dare to look, only in fear to regret everything. The buzzing of the needle was near her ear and in moments, he began to bore the black ink into her virgin skin. She bit her bottom lip with her bunny teeth, a small droplet of tears in the corners of her large eyes.

She couldn't regret it. She just couldn't.
At that moment, where she felt the rush that she hasn't felt since way back when, the envious rush her mum explains to her from the forbidden sugar, regrets were in the past. Always in the past.