by Paul Krueger
Bailey didn’t know what to expect—a young professionals’ mixer, a college reunion, maybe even a tasteful bar. She definitely hadn’t expected a black-and-white photo of a graffitied concrete basement, the floor littered with crushed beer cans. She hadn’t expected to see a crowd of sweating young men and women with leather jackets and patched jeans, moshing furiously while three tattooed rockers wailed away on instruments.
And yet there it was.
“Regular Puke,” said her mom, pointing to the band. “They broke up two weeks later. But your dad and I didn’t.”
She clicked to the next photo, and Bailey’s jaw all but hit the carpet.
Her dad was a tiny nightmare, the cuffs of his loud plaid pants stuffed into combat boots. He wore a black T-shirt with a red anarchist A sprayed on it, and his hair detonated from his scalp in spikes that were the burnt orange that Asian hair took on when bleached. Her mom had a short crew cut Vincent would’ve envied, topped with a lopsided black bowler hat, and she wore a spike-studded leather jacket and short ruffled skirt. They held each other so tight that even with the grainy quality of the image Bailey could make out the depressions where her dad’s fingers sank into her mom’s jacket.
They couldn’t have possibly looked more in love.
Her mom paged through some of the other pictures: herself, age twenty-whatever, hiding from the rain under a black umbrella shaped just like her bowler hat; Dad, leaning against a wall and giving the camera the finger as he smoked a cigarette; Mom, hunched over and screaming into a microphone—
“Holy shit,” said Bailey. “You were in a band?”
“Language, young lady,” her mom said. “And no, my roommate was.” Her smile could’ve run the length of a football field. “I just stopped by for practice once, and they got a picture of me goofing off. No, if you want a shocker …” She clicked to the next picture. A younger version of her reclined on a leather bench as a man etched a stylized rose into her forearm. When Bailey’s eyes flickered to her inkless arm, she said, “I got it removed when you were less than a year old. No way you’d remember it.”
Bailey’s mind sagged from all this new information. “So you and Dad—”
“Were cool a long time ago. Well, your mom’s still pretty great,” Bailey’s dad said, smiling at his wife. “Beetle, when we were growing up, falling in line was important. And we both came from Chinese families, where that was important no matter what decade you were living in. We both needed out of it. We needed the time to be selfish.”
“We were some of the only Chinese kids in the SF punk scene, if you can believe it,” her mom said. “We were bound to meet eventually.”
They smiled at each other, and for once Bailey wasn’t grossed out.
“The point is,” her mom said, “I remember how long it took for me to realize I’d grown out of my parents, not the other way around. It’s just a normal part of life.”
“But you’re so normal now,” Bailey said.
“First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Bailey in the baby carriage,” her dad recited.
“We shuffled the steps around,” her mom said. “But we did go through those phases, too. And it wouldn’t be fair of us to deny you the chance to explore and try things and make mistakes.”
“Wouldn’t be very punk rock either,” said her dad.
“Anyway, Bailey, we know we raised a smart girl. You’ll find out what you’re supposed to do eventually.” Her mom squeezed her shoulder and eyed her ripped-up dress. “But maybe take it easy on the partying, huh?”
Bailey opened her mouth but was interrupted by an urgent buzzing in the depths of her battered purse. She rummaged through—where the hell was her phone?—and when she finally found it, the screen lit up with a familiar picture.
Zane Whelan calling
Her parents seemed to know enough to give her privacy, and she fumbled to answer it. “Hello?”
“Bailey?” he said. “Where are you? Trent said you left with me, but obviously you didn’t and—”
“I’m here,” Bailey said. “I mean, I’m at my house. My parents’ house.” Whichever it was. Maybe it didn’t matter. “Where are you?”
“On our way to Nero’s,” he said. “Need a ride?”
Before she could answer, a loud squeal of tires and a sonorous car horn melody sounded like …
“Was that ‘O Canada’?” Bailey said incredulously.
She heard someone in the background shout: “Tell her she’s damn right it was.”
“You’re both yelling right in my ear!” someone else yelped. Trina. Bailey laughed.
“Yeah, so …” Zane said. “We’re outside. You’ll, ah, know which car.”
She sure did. If Bucket’s vehicle had been painted white, it would’ve been a classic kidnapper van—huge and windowless. Mercifully it wasn’t white—at least, not entirely. The driver’s side was painted like the Canadian flag—a white field emblazoned on each end with a bold red bar and an obnoxiously huge maple leaf in the middle. It was stupid and magnificent, and Bailey was thrilled to see it. Them. The whole car.
“Nice,” Bailey said as she jogged over.
“Wait till you see the other side!” Bucket called.
“Or the license plate,” Trina added from beside him.
Bucket cheerfully threw the van, whose Quebec license plate read “P4RDN ME,” into reverse and proceeded to execute a not quite expert U-turn in the middle of the street, with only minimal screaming from Trina. When he’d righted the van, the passenger side revealed a sprawling mural of a beaver punching a bald eagle in the face.
“This is the stupidest van I’ve ever seen,” Bailey said as she climbed inside. Trina was riding shotgun, so the only seat was in the back next to Zane. Which was just fine with Bailey.
“Thanks,” Bucket said, not insulted in the least. “When the van’s a rockin’—”
“Speaking of rocking, I hope you have a noncrappy stereo system,” Trina said, and she plugged in her phone as they trundled off. “And I hope you like Orange Banana.”
“Tch,” said Bucket. “Do I like Orange Banana? I only went to high school with a guy who dated the bassist’s ex-girlfriend for a few months. No big deal.”
Bailey wasn’t really listening. She’d taken the seat next to Zane, not skipping the middle seat like when they were kids, and once she’d buckled up he put his arm around her shoulders. Not just to rest; he was really holding her. Simple as that.
It was going to be all right, Bailey realized. It really was.
“So, what now?” Zane said from above her. Even though the air was thick with Canadian Japanese metal from the noncrappy stereo system, she was close enough to hear him just fine.
Bailey considered what to say. Then, suddenly bold, she took his hand and held it.
“Bailey—”
“Don’t.”
“No, I have to.” Zane sighed a sigh that ruffled the top of her hair. “I fucked up. I should’ve listened to you, I was an idiot not to, and I said and did a lot of really shitty things along the way. I’m sorry for all of them, and I wish the English language had a stronger word than sorry, so I could use that instead. I was kind of the worst person in the world.”
It had rushed out of him, like air from a suddenly punctured balloon. She smiled. “Yeah,” she said, threading her fingers through his. “You really were, weren’t you?”
He blinked, taken aback. “Not what I expected you to say.”
She shrugged. Their hands looked good, linked together on top of his knee. “I care about you a lot,” she said. “Stupidly a lot. But that doesn’t change the fact that I almost died for you, and so did a lot of others. I accept your apology, Zane. I even forgive you. I think.”
“Thank God.”
“But maybe you should listen to me more often.”
“Maybe we should just not not talk ever again.”
She shifted enough to see him smiling, but then he hung his head. “No. In seriousness,” he said,
“I’m sorry. I do want to do better.”
“Okay. Good.” Bailey leaned back into his chest. “So tell me what happened after I was knocked out.”
As it turned out, a lot. After busting the tremens, Bailey was out cold, and the Alechemists had rushed her north to Trent’s (“In this?” Bailey said in disbelief. “This is a terrible ambulance.”), then returned to the field to do some clean-up and mass memory modifications.
“It was nasty, but we got it under control. Sort of.”
Zane pulled out his phone as a visual aid: the Chicago Tribune site showed a bombed-out Sears Tower splashed across with the headline TRIPLE-DISTILLED TERROR AT TOWER. Despite the alarmist headline, the content of the article claimed the source of the destruction had been a massive malfunction in the distillation equipment. The article went on to state that the Department of Planning and Development only now seemed to be realizing that a high-rise distillery was a horrible idea. Curiously enough, none of the officials whose signatures appeared on the approval paperwork could even remember signing off on it. Garrett’s work, to be sure.
“And no one caught a picture of a tremens or anything?” Bailey took the phone, incredulous.
“Nope,” Zane said. “Sorensen convinced everyone to go to this underground nightclub he owns two blocks away with the promise of free drinks—”
“Mixed by yours truly,” Trina said with pride. “We convinced them the oblivinum was a kind of exotic Canadian liqueur.”
Bucket beamed. “That part was my idea.”
“And the thing about being underground,” Zane said, “is that the cell reception is terrible.”
“Ah.” On a whim, Bailey thumbed to a stock market tracking site and saw that the values on all of Bowen Sorensen’s publicly traded companies had fallen precipitously in the past day.
“That was a long time coming anyway.” Zane was reading over her shoulder, and when he spoke she could feel his warm breath on the back of her neck. “Divinyl was doomed. Records are out. Cassettes are back in.” He grabbed his phone, then pulled up a new app and pointed to the screen. “This is the newest app: Kickassette. It makes all your modern audio files sound exactly like those old tapes.”
Bailey stared at the interface—an image of two tape reels spinning in unison—for a long moment. And then she threw back her head and let out the kind of unhinged, hysterical laugh that seemed to come only at the end of a very, very long day.
“That’s not even the best part,” Zane said. “This is.” He tapped a display of a tape recorder button, and a moment later the strains of For Dear Life’s “Dark November” started to play, just loud enough for the two of them to hear.
As the familiar lyrics and chords drifted to her ears, something unknotted inside Bailey. She’d spent so much of the past two months running from her old self, but for the first time she felt maybe she didn’t have to. She’d been a boozy demon fighter and Zane’s bitter enemy and a really awkward kisser, and all those things were contradictory and messy and totally okay. What mattered was the future, and she still had plenty of that left. It was the same bubbling excitement she’d felt the last time she’d heard this song, when they were just Bailey Chen and Zane Whelan, fresh from a show and still young and stupid enough to be excited about what was to come.
“We’re here!” Bucket wrenched the wheel for a jerky parallel park and turned, smiling, to the backseat.
His face fell. Bailey and Zane were kissing.
“Oi! None of that in my van!”
Zane lifted a hand and flipped him off. Bailey pulled away, no doubt blushing brilliantly, but kept her expression as serious as she could.
“Shut up,” she said. “Let’s get some damn pancakes.”
They burst into Nero’s with a clatter and settled into their regular booth.
“I’m hungry enough to eat a moose,” Bucket said. “Which, actually, I’ve had before. Not a whole one, though. It turns out the antlers—”
Trina, who was sitting next to him, mashed a hand into his face to silence him. “You’re more charming this way,” she said. She turned to Bailey, ignoring Bucket as he pretended to gnaw on one of her fingers. “So what now?”
Certainly seems to be the question on everyone’s mind, Bailey mused: not the future or the insanity of the immediate past. Bailey had some witty answer, but she lost it when she glanced out the window. Across the street, two men were out on an afternoon walk: one pudgy and black, the other much older and taller. He wore a green military jacket over his tight black T-shirt, and Bailey knew beneath that jacket she’d see arms covered in old tattoos.
The two of them held hands, their interlocked fingers swinging like a pendulum between them. And in front, barely restrained by his leash, a schnauzer puppy with an already impressive beard trotted along.
As the three of them turned the corner and walked out of sight, Bailey smiled. We did it, she thought. Happy retirement, boss.
“Now,” Trina declared, “I’m ordering me some bacon.”
“It’s not real bacon,” Bucket muttered.
Trina rolled her eyes. “You know what I meant.”
“Well,” Bailey said, tearing her eyes away from the disappeared Vincent, “I guess it’s back to the job hunt for ol’ Bailey Chen.” She nudged Zane in the ribs. “You’re getting this meal, right?”
“Mine, too,” Bucket said from behind his menu, “seeing as all of us are now without a home bar.”
“Well, actually,” Zane said, “here’s the thing. I kind of own the Nightshade now. Since Garrett …”
Everyone fell quiet. Zane cleared his throat.
“Anyway. I’m gonna be a good owner. Build its name and cred back up from nothing if I have to. But I’m going to need staff.”
Trina leveled a look at him.
“More staff.” Zane corrected himself.
“I accept!” Bucket said, slapping down his menu. “You won’t regret it, boss.”
Inspiration struck Bailey. “What you need,” she said, “is an assistant manager.”
Zane frowned. “That sounds.… corporate.”
“Think about it,” said Bailey. “Chicago’s a mess right now. And if the Court has any hope of staying relevant and maintaining control, then you need to step up, Zane. You’re the only one who can keep everything from going to shit again. You’re the only one who—”
Who almost made the Long Island.
Zane fiddled with his napkin-wrapped silverware bundle, but he nodded.
“So you need help on the home front,” Bailey continued. “You need someone who’s good with numbers. Preferably someone with a business degree.”
“And a minor in demon slaying?” said Zane.
Bailey grinned. “Couldn’t hurt.”
Diana finally showed up, bringing along four Americanos. Bucket and Trina went to take a sip, but Zane waved a hand.
“Wait. Hang on.” He lifted his mug. “To Garrett. Rest in peace.”
Bailey suspected that if there was an afterlife, Garrett was unlikely to rest, peacefully or otherwise, but she raised her cup all the same. So did Bucket.
“To Vincent,” he added.
“To Chicago,” Trina said.
“To you guys,” Bailey said, then thought better of it. “To us. The Alechemists.”
With a gentle clink, they brought their mugs together.
“Cheers.”
THE DEVIL’S WATER DICTIONARY.
The Long Island Iced Tea
The impossible elixir
1. Fill a highball glass or a Collins glass with ice.
2. Pour in half an ounce apiece of tequila, light rum, vodka, gin, and triple sec.
3. Pour in two ounces of sweet and sour mix.
4. Finish with a dash of cola. Stir gently until very cold.
5. Garnish with a lemon twist and a straw and then serve.
The official position of both The Devil’s Water Dictionary and the Cupbearers Court is that the Long Island Iced Tea does not exist. This legend
ary drink of the pre-Blackout days, the grand panacea of bartending, has long been sought by ambitious bartenders who were both metaphorically and literally thirsty. And yet in those centuries of striving, there are no records of its successful manufacture. Even Hortense LaRue, the art’s paragon, told the Court that her failure to synthesize one was her second-greatest regret (for details on her greatest regret, see MARTINI).
Rather than reading more on this subject, a bartender’s time would be better spent putting down this book, fixing him- or herself a drink, and doing terrible things to the first tremens he or she finds. Please do so now.
This paragraph and those that follow assume that you, the reader, did not put down this book, but instead kept reading. Very well. As you wish.
Despite the total evaporation of codified bartending knowledge post-Blackout, legends persisted of a drink that could violate all known laws of magic by infusing its drinker’s animus with enough alcohol to make said drinker equal parts magic and man. Such a being would be able to manifest more than one magical ability simultaneously, withstand greater amounts of pain and damage, and even cheat death.
The legend drove many bartenders to quest after the secrets of its manufacture. A loose recipe was decoded from pre-Blackout fragments, but all attempts to mix it ended in tragedy—always for the one mixing it, and usually for anyone else who happened to be on the same city block that day. The Court ultimately declared it to be an impossibility; today, its attempted manufacture is an infraction of the highest order. Still, even the strictest law cannot deter unauthorized attempts. Therefore, it is the advice of this book that bartenders restrict themselves to mixing only the mundane version of this drink, which, while not an elixir of immortality, does taste rather pleasant.
However, the writers of The Devil’s Water Dictionary find it likely that if you did not stop reading earlier, and indeed looked up this recipe at all, you are disinclined to listen to reason and will endeavor to create a Long Island Iced Tea of your own. To which we say again: Very well. As you wish. You’re an adult.