Seven Deadly Queens (The FuBar Book 3)

by Jess Whitecroft

  Adam waited until Helena had gone, then pounced.

  “Busy?” he said. It seemed as good an overture as any.

  Hu, still wrangling the catches on the balloon nets, looked down from the stage. “Very,” he said. “You?”

  “Um…” Shit. Whatever half-formed opening lines Adam had had in his head had fled. “Yeah. There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just gonna come right out with it.”

  Hu dropped the net and stepped down from the stage. “Okay,” he said. “What?”

  “Could you…would you…could you provide me with a urine sample?”

  Hu’s mouth opened and closed a couple of times. “A…”

  “Yes, you heard me correctly,” said Bunny. “And I’m sorry about the words that just came out of my mouth. Believe me, I’m not happy about them either.”

  “You want me to…?”

  “Pee in a cup. Yeah. It’s sort of an emergency.”

  Hu gave him an understandably searching look. “Do I want to know what kind of emergency requires urine samples?”

  “It’s Luis. Stupid kid got fucking baked last night. Like, Elvis sandwich level stoned.” Adam sighed. “And it turns out he has another drug test tomorrow.”

  “Oh. Oh God. That’s not good.”

  “No, I know. So can you…?”

  But Hu was already shaking his head. “I can’t.”

  “Shit. You smoked?”

  “No,” said Hu. “But we did molly.”

  Huh. The good boy had gone bad. Lucky Helena. “Ohhh…so when you told me to fuck off the other morning?”

  “I’m so sorry about that,” said Hu. “I’d never done it before, and I wasn’t prepared for the crash.”

  “Wait, you didn’t have any Xanax?”

  “Xanax?”

  Adam groaned. “Fucking Helena. She always does this. You would have thought someone who loves molly as much as she does would have figured out how to take it by now. You should always have a Xanax on the way down. It’s like…landing gear. If you try to land without it you plow straight down into the ground and end up eating each other like that soccer team that crashed in the Andes. It’s dark. Ugly. Listen, next time you roll, hit me up, okay? Couple of benzos and there’ll be no more fucky mornings.”

  “Thank you,” said Hu, who looked as though he wasn’t sure whether he should be taking notes or notifying the authorities. “I’ll bear that in mind. I’m so sorry about that. I really wish I could pee in your…” He stopped himself in time. “Oh God, no. Why are these words coming out of my mouth now?”

  “Oh dear,” said Bunny. “We broke you. It was bound to happen. You were clean and sweet and innocent, and now you’ve rolled around in the FuBar filth and…well, mazeltov, honey. You’re family now.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t help. Have you asked Ryan?”

  Adam slapped himself hard on the forehead. “I’m an idiot.”

  “Did you ask?”

  “No, but I’m gonna. How did I miss that? I have a squeaky clean state employee and his drug free bladder at my disposal. And he’ll do just about anything if I put on five inch heels and a French maid’s outfit.”

  “French maid?”

  “He likes the stockings with the seams down the back,” said Bunny. “Oh, this is a cinch.” He turned to go, but Hu stopped him.

  “Wait,” Hu said. “While we’re…saying inappropriate things, I’ve been meaning to ask you…”

  “Ask me what?”

  “How that…works. The whole boy/girl thing. Steve usually likes to keep it separate, except…well…”

  Bunny remembered Helena’s disheveled appearance at the door of the back room. “Oh. You mean Helena…?” He lowered his voice. “Helena got laid?”

  Hu blushed and nodded. “Yeah. How do I…how do I approach that? Do I treat her like a lady? I mean, what?”

  “It depends,” said Bunny. “On whether she’d prefer to be treated like a tramp. Personally, I lean towards the tramp side myself.”

  “Right,” said Hu, looking no more enlightened than before. “I guess what I’m saying is that it’s new. I fell in love with a man, and now there’s a woman in the picture, which is not a bad thing, not at all…”

  “Well, no. She’s a beautiful girl.”

  “She is. And extremely…assertive. Sexually.” Hu scratched the back of his neck. “And I’m concerned because I know men have treated Stephen badly before. When he’s in drag.”

  Bunny sighed. “Hu, honey. If she’s happy to tear off the duct tape and go at it, don’t you think she trusts you?”

  “Yeah. That’s sort of the part that terrifies me. What if I fuck it up?”

  “You won’t. Just talk to her.”

  “Talk to her. Right.” Hu took a long breath and rolled his eyes. “God, I’m stupid sometimes.”

  “No, you’re not. If communication was that easy, couples therapists would starve.” Bunny squeezed his upper arm. “Just tell her how you feel. It’s not rocket science. Talk to one another, love each other, don’t do that thing with the grapefruit and don’t let her take molly without Xanax. Or Valium. Basically any benzodiazepine. Seriously. I can’t believe she fucked that up again.”

  “Right,” said Hu. “Benzodiazepines. I feel like I should write this down.”

  “Nah, you’re cool. If you have any more questions, just ask. There’s not a lot of required reading in this particular career path, but most queens have wandered into The Valley Of The Dolls before, either by accident or design. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to sexually manipulate my boyfriend into peeing in a cup so that my wayward drag daughter can pass a drug test.”

  *

  Late that afternoon, they convened at the bar for what Adam was already calling ‘The Piss Summit’ in his head. There was Sheila, who had brought several of the official plastic pots that the probation service used for drug testing. Ryan was on his second bottle of Evian. Helena – still tinkering with magic effects on stage – was avoiding the whole thing, on the grounds that she’d already heard enough golden shower jokes to last a fucking lifetime. Rose perched at the end of the bar, rumbling. The cocktail of pectin, fiber pills and cranberry juice had caused her stomach to make some very strange noises.

  Justin arrived. He was clutching a blue plastic bag and already Bunny had an unpleasant idea of what was in it.

  “Oh Jesus,” said Sheila. “Did you actually steal piss from your grandmother? I’ve heard of taking the piss, but this is ridiculous.”

  Justin set down the bag and unwound the scarf from his neck. “Okay, why is everyone so hung up on that?”

  “Because it’s not normal, honey,” said Bunny. “There’s no other way to put this. It’s not normal. You just walked into my bar carrying a pot full of old lady pee.”

  “Yeah, well. For all the good it’s gonna do us,” said Justin, and reached down to get the sample. “Like, it’s probably clean, but I think the color might be a problem.” He held up the pot to the light. Bunny recoiled. The murky liquid was the color of Tang.

  “Holy shit,” said Rose. “And how many different meds is Nana on?”

  “Uh…a lot? I don’t know. One time it was dark blue. That was weird.”

  “Fortunately,” said Bunny. “While you were out stealing pee from old ladies, we found an alternate source of clean urine.”

  Ryan raised an eyebrow. “Oh, it’s so romantic when you call me that.”

  “Cool,” said Justin. “I was thinking, maybe we put the clean sample in a Ziploc baggie inside the toilet cistern and Rose can fish it out when she goes in the stall.”

  Sheila noped right out on that one. “That’s not going to work. Have you ever moved a cistern lid? It’s not a quiet operation, especially in an echoey toilet. No, it has to sound like normal pee. And then there’s the temperature.”

  “I thought of that,” said Justin. “You fill the Ziploc with warm water. Body temperature. Float the sample in it.”

  “Right. And then the label ge
ts wet and peels off.”

  “Oh. Shit. I never thought of that.” Justin sighed. “Well, you’ll just have to microwave it, I guess.”

  “Um, no,” said Bunny. “Nobody is doing a Florida Convenience Store Surprise in my microwave, thank you very goddamn much.”

  “Okay, so then some kind of nozzle. We get a bag and strap it against the inside of Rose’s thigh or something. Keep it at the right temperature.”

  “Justin, what are you talking about?”

  “A nozzle. You tape a nozzle to your dick—”

  “—no, no, no,” said Sheila. “You’re overcomplicating. This is going to turn into the Rube Goldberg device of piss tests if we’re not careful. The trick is to keep it simple. All we really have to do is switch the samples. Two pots of wee-wee, a small distraction and a little…” Her gaze wandered down the bar, to where Helena was taking apart a broken pulley. “…sleight of hand.”

  Helena looked up. “What?”

  “Oh, hey Miss Magic,” said Bunny, cottoning on.

  “You must be kidding,” said Helena. “I do card tricks. I don’t juggle warm urine samples.”

  “But could you?”

  Helena came closer. “What? And hand you even more material for golden shower jokes? I don’t think so.”

  Bunny sighed. Hard times required big sacrifices. “Okay,” she said. “What if I promised never to make another golden shower joke at your expense?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Very. It’s like losing a leg to me. Your little pee-pee incident was a gift from the comedy Gods. But I’m prepared to develop total amnesia about it if you help us out here.”

  Helena held out a crooked little finger. “Swear?”

  They locked pinkies. “Pinkie promise forever.”

  “Oh, Bunny,” said Helena. “I was always gonna help you with this, but thanks anyway.”

  “You fucking…”

  “…I know. I’m terrible.” Helena grinned. “I do terrible things. Sometimes I get high and pee on people, and you can’t say a damn thing about it.”

  “I hate you.”

  Helena giggled. “Just call me the Howard Thurston of urine tests from now on,” she said. “Now…show me what you guys need me to do.”

  16

  The stage was set. Ryan was waiting in the other bathroom, poised to deliver a body temperature sample of drug free pee which would be switched at a crucial moment engineered by Hu and Helena, who were pretending to be busy with the glitter bombs and balloon nets for New Year’s Eve. Meanwhile Rose, who had sucked down another thing of pectin, just in case, was chugging water at the bar.

  “You okay?” said Justin.

  “Yeah. I’m good. Pee in a cup.” She rolled her eyes. “Not like I haven’t done this before.”

  “No, I know. But you were tossing and turning in bed last night,” said Justin.

  Stephen looked up from the floor, where he was pouring glitter into a homemade cannon made from a plumbing pipe and a bunch of other things he complained made his Google search results look like the Unabomber’s. “I’m sorry…what?” he said, and got to his feet. “Did you say bed?”

  “Oh, hey – did I miss the part where you were part of this conversation?” said Rose.

  “Don’t you sass me, Miss Rose. I’m about to detonate a bomb so you can pass a pee test, and now you’re banging the bartender?”

  Justin laughed. “We’re not banging. We just share a bed sometimes. Sorry, Helena – you’re still going to have to pay me.”

  “Bullshit,” said Stephen. “There’s no way you can share a bed with someone without fucking them. You don’t work that way.”

  “I do now.”

  “Yeah. We don’t have that kind of relationship,” said Rose.

  “Totes. We’re friends.”

  That seemed to take the wind out of Stephen’s sails just a little, but five hundred bucks was five hundred bucks, and Miss Montana was still down with her inner Tonya Harding. “Okay,” Stephen said. “On one hand I’m very happy for you, on the other hand, you have no way to prove you didn’t have sex.”

  Rose finished the last of her water and burped. “Actually, you can.”

  “Um…how?”

  “Test Justin,” said Rose.

  “For what?”

  “Gonorrhea. I had the clap.”

  Justin instinctively recoiled. “Ew.”

  Stephen stared. “You…what?”

  “I had an STI,” said Rose. “If Justin fucked me, he’d have it, too.”

  “Nope, nope, nope.” Stephen shook himself like a dog that had just had a bath. “Whole different issue now. What the fuck, Rose? You said you had strep.”

  “Duh. I didn’t exactly want to broadcast the fact that I was diseased. Like ‘Oh, have you met my daughter? She’s electronically tagged and she has oral gonorrhea.’ You don’t want your drag mom saying that shit.”

  “Rose, that is not the point. Did you get tested…?”

  Rose waved a hand. “Yeah. That one, too. It was negative.”

  “You could have talked to us,” said Justin. Jesus Christ, what else was the kid not telling them?

  Bunny came in from the back, and immediately guessed something was going down. It wasn’t hard. Helena was standing there with her mouth half open. “Oh God,” said Bunny. “What did I just walk into?”

  “Your daughter,” said Helena. “Is at a very difficult age.”

  But that was as far as they got with that conversation, because Cher had arrived, clutching her clipboard and her baggie full of sample pots. A totally respectable way to earn a living. She gave Justin a nod, which was an improvement on ‘fuck off’, but not real sisterly all the same.

  “Okay, I don’t have a lot of time, so let’s do this thing,” she said. “You bring a full bladder to the party this time, Valdez?”

  Rose got down from the barstool. “I’m full of more water than a camel,” she said. “Ready and willing to pee wherever you want me to.”

  “Oh God, I can’t even…” said Bunny, as Rose disappeared into the bathroom. “Please? Just one golden shower joke?”

  Stephen grinned. “Pinkie promise, bitch. Now text Ryan. He’s on.”

  Bunny groaned in frustration. “I am texting my boyfriend to pee on demand and I can’t make a joke about watersports? This fucking sucks.”

  “Shh. Jesus Christ. She’ll hear you,” said Justin. “Cher’s got ears like a bat.”

  “Actually they’re almost identical to yours,” said Bunny. “Did anyone ever tell you that?”

  “Same mouth, too.”

  “And the way your hair curls behind your ears. You’re really similar. She’s like girl Justin.”

  “Yeah, but with a stick up her ass,” said Justin, with his usual perfect timing. The bathroom door opened. Stephen – strategically positioned between the other bathroom door and the bar – pretended to be very interested in something on his phone.

  Cher set the piss sample on the bar and reached for her clipboard to fill in the details.

  The bomb went off.

  It was a lot louder than Justin had anticipated, and Bunny let out a convincing shriek. “What the hell?” said Cher, and turned. It was over in a second. Ryan – lying in wait in the bathroom – handed the clean sample to Stephen, and Stephen switched them, disappearing the first one so effectively that Justin had no idea where he’d put it.

  Hu emerged from the stage area with one finger in his ear. He was covered in glitter. “Sorry,” he said, speaking too loud. “Little problem with the pyrotechnics.”

  “Holy shit,” said Stephen. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I think we might need to scale down on the igniter.”

  “Great,” said Cher. “You’re making bombs now?”

  “Glitter bombs,” said Bunny. “We’re drag terrorists. Don’t tell anyone, but we plan to kidnap the president, tone down that fake tan and turn his ass out in Vivienne Westwood.”

  “Westwood?” Helena i
nspected Hu’s ear for damage. Glitter fell from his hair like dandruff. “Queen, are you on crack? Plaid with orange?”

  “Okay, I think we’re done here,” said Cher, filling out her forms. That was when Justin spotted it. Disaster.

  There was a rapidly expanding wet patch on the seat of Helena’s jeans. He caught Helena’s eye and she looked down. She turned quickly, facing Cher.

  “This had better be clean,” Cher told Rose.

  “It will.”

  Cher looked Rose up and down. The moment seemed to last forever. Justin forced himself not to look at the small but noticeable puddle forming behind Helena’s heel. Bunny sniffed, and his heart leapt into his mouth.

  “Yeah, okay,” Cher said, and walked out the door.

  They all stood and watched her go, barely daring to breathe.

  “Can I smell…?” said Bunny.

  “Yes.” Helena scowled. “He didn’t screw the lid on properly. Your fucking boyfriend’s piss is running down the back of my leg right now.”

  Bunny bit her knuckles. “Oh my God. This is torture.”

  Rose squinted through the window. “Wait…is she leaving?”

  And that was when Justin saw it. The clipboard. It was still on the bar.

  “Take it, Justin,” said Bunny. “Quickly. If she comes back in here we’re fucked.” She sniffed again. “I don’t remember Ryan eating asparagus.”

  Justin grabbed the clipboard and rushed outside. “Here. You forgot your…”

  Cher turned. “Oh. Thanks.”

  She looked harassed and tired, even more than usual. Mom had always said she’d be pretty if she didn’t insist on taking the weight of the world on her shoulders, but someone had to take the weight, and Mom wasn’t up to the job. She always doted on her babies, but lost interest once the new baby smell wore off.

  “Hey,” Justin said. He knew it wasn’t the right time to keep her talking, but at the same time he couldn’t stand to hustle her on her way. “What I said before…about family. I’m sorry. That was outta line.”

  She shrugged. “It’s okay,” she said. “We were never exactly functional, were we?”

  “No. No, I guess not. But we were still family. And that should mean something.”