12/12/2004
I'd just walked in the backdoor when my parents gave me the message.
"Hey Leigh," they said, because they speak as one unit for the purposes of convenience. "Courtney rang."
"Oh, okay," I reply, and head into my room.
"Uh, I think she wanted you to call her back, dooder," they continue.
"Oh, okay," I reply, and come back out of my room.
To cut out the phone call, which was unnecessarily long, as our phonecalls usually are, we agreed that some hanging out was in order. It was Saturday. We were young. And alive. And I'd had Starburst snakes for lunch, and Courtney hadn't been to bed yet from the night before due to a shocking fanfic secret.
Here is where I, our faithful, observant author with a marvellous vocabulary, gets a little confused about what to say next. The next actual event to occur is something I like to call, The Hunt for Purple Earrings.
We were hurtling towards the centre of town at what Courtney thought was a frightening speed - actually, that's a dirty lie, I remember distinctly that we were stopped at the street lights at the Ferguson-Fitzherbert intersection and eventually I changed lanes - while Courtney endeavoured to explain how important it was to her to have four earrings the same and how her ear holes would never, ever in a million years close.
"Uh, Courtney, isn't that a good thing?" I asked, confused.
"Yes. But holes are weird," she replied. Something to that effect.
It turned out she didn't just want another set of little amethyst earrings. Oh no. Her new pair of earrings had to be exactly the same as the old pair, which she probably got when she was like, thirteen or something and had her ears pierced for the second time, and I think I was actually there, but I don't really remember it. Point is, they had to be sort of goldy, with unobtrusive settings, purple stones, and cut into an angular NOT ROUND shape. I mean, how important is that? Very.
Eventually, after going into all these stores and shit, and running into enough of our old highschool buddies to melt our faces... Not to mention practically gagging over the hideous sparkly trends of the local teens which for some reason involve a lot of sequins and a lot of satin in the mid afternoon sunshine (we, of course, were both wearing jeans and black tops. Oh yeah. We're Sensible)... Oh, and like walking across town because in Christmas shopping there are no convenient parks and even if there were, I am so poor, I had not a meagre twenty cents to pay for the metre...
Eventually, after coming across Nikita in the hat section in K Mart where she works at the moment I happened to be trying on two sun visors simultaneously and proclaiming what a marvellous invention Stuff (by Hilary DUFF) was and after we both disturbed the girls in the cheap jewellery store by trying on all their mardi gras beads and $170 hats...
Eventually, WE FOUND THE EARRINGS. Or as close as we were going to get without dying, and going to some sort of earring-shopping heaven, where you can easily find the exact earrings you need. Oh yeah. That was the end of task one. We also left town one fuzzy bunny-eared baby book richer, titled 'Funny Bunnies.'
"I'm hungry," I whinged.
"Well suck it UP," Courtney replied. "Now, chauffeur me to Woolworths!"
"But Courtney!" I pleaded. "I see Le Countdown! It's like two hundred metres away!"
"That's a damnable LIE!" she shouted, before glancing over her shoulder at said supermarket. "Plus, I'm not walking that far, so drive me to Woolworths."
It's around here that I notice that I've switched tenses on you somewhere. I mean, didn't I start out in present tense? Exactly. That's what I thought. But we'll just have to ride it out, now. Also, why isn't there any ice cream in my house? Back to your regular programming...
Woolworths. The land of good food. We walk in and we're all...
Oh Christ, did I just switch tenses again ANYWAY? It was an accident! Damned if I'm going to let my brain get away with THAT.
We walked in and were all, Wow, the land of opportunity.
And then I said, "Hey, what did we come to buy, again?"
And Courtney shrugged and said, "I don't know; probably you."
(Actually, dear reader, we had come, or gone, to purchase marshmallows because, despite our lack of firewood, we were intent on toasting them even if we had to do it over candle flames.)
We wandered down past the fruit and veg. It was around the deli that inspiration struck. "I'm so hungry."
"We could buy an entire chicken... Nah, they're ten dollars."
"Hey, I could buy a breadroll and make them put some ham on it."
Courtney laughed. She was probably thinking, Oh Leigh. You card.
We wandered back to the breads... Conveniently adjacent to the deli meats.
"You can't actually do that. That's too funny." Courtney said.
"But I'm so hungry! If you pay for it, I'll do it."
"You'll actually go up and say, hey, can you put some ham on my roll please?"
"Yes."
It was at this point that Courtney started laughing. "It puts the ham on the breadroll!" she shouted.
I nearly fell over. Then we stood in the breads section and laughed for about five minutes. Desperate, crazy laughter. Occasionally repeating those marvellous words. A few Woolworths employees look at us suspiciously. Their suspicions were unfounded, although, as Courtney put it, little did they know what was about to occur.
We had to get Pocky first. Pocky rules the hearts of children and fangirls with its sugary fist of love.
"Where the hell is the Pocky?!"
Courtney shrugged.
This was because we had been up and down the confectionary and the biscuit aisles, and no Pocky had we found.
"I'm sure they keep it to our left, but I don't know what aisle it's in."
Courtney said, "I don't know where I am."
"Pocky!" I shouted.
"...It points the Leigh... Towards the Pocky!"
Oh, thank you, Courtney, for another five minutes of staggering and helpless laughter through the aisles of Woolworths.
Eventually, some Japanese people moved out of the way and I shouted POCKY! again, this time because I had actually found the Pocky on the shelf, in new, 100g bags, no less. That's nearly twenty per cent more Pocky, folks!
We meandered back to the deli and I grabbed a breadroll. "I guess I'd better get the one without sesame seeds. Don't want to make a mess, you know."
"'Please use tongs provided,'" Courtney helpfully recited as I seized a lump of bread in my fist.
I shrugged and tore it open.
Courtney gave me a doleful stare.
"What? I'm about to make a sandwich."
We sidled down to the deli meats.
"Hey," I further observed. "We could get some coleslaw on it, too."
"It puts the coleslaw... On the ham!"
"I don't actually want ham. What should I eat?"
"Turkey," Courtney promptly replied.
I shrugged.
"Can I help you?" In case you can't tell, that was when the deli assistant finishes serving the previous Meatlord and moved over to assist us in our sandwich making venture.
"Yeah, can I please have a single slice of turkey?" I say, holding up my bun.
She shrugs. "Okay." She weighs. "That'll be fifty eight cents."
"Great!"
She hands me my plastic bag, which I promptly rip open so as to apply my turkey to my roll.
"Would you like anything else?" she says, as Courtney and I stare lustily at the coleslaw.
"Is it possible to get, like, a forkful of coleslaw?"
"Uh..." She shrugs, nonplussed. "Sure, I'll just put it in a container."
"GREAT!"
She does. "Will that be all?"
"Yeah, can I get one of those fork thingees?" I say, gesturing to said plastic sporks with my turkey-filled roll.
She hands us our 32 cents worth of coleslaw.
I promptly place my empty paper bag (from the bread roll) on top of the Steinlager cases in front of the deli display, and begin to fork my coleslaw onto my turkey. Giggling as I went.
A few seconds later the girl peers down at us. "...Did you want something else here?"
I look up at her. My eyes are probably making freaky cat shapes as I hiss and giggle.
"No," Courtney says helpfully. "Just making her sandwich."
The other supermarket patrons give us impressed looks as we continue our wandering, and I consume my 4:30pm lunch. They were probably wishing they had the guts to demand 32 cents' worth of coleslaw and consume it on the spot. I guess that's what separates them from us.
Forty-five minutes later we were renting our movie at the video store counter... Allow me to stop the chronological narrative for a minute to explain that the video store is right across the road from the supermarket. That didn't stop us driving there, but yes, that means we spent about 45 minutes in the store. This is a fairly usual occurence. The video store is my home away from home. Which is why I felt perfectly comfortable crawling along the floor in the Action section to knock the medieval dramas out of Courtney's hands, and shout any potential movies across the store to her with little regard for the other, less hip, video store customers.
So we were standing at the counter while the clerk, and NOT the new cute clerk either (sadly), was checking out Le Placard (that's right, babies, a foreign language film, we have some culture somewhere in there, probably in the bad-french-speaking parts of us) when Courtney shouted, "Oh no!"
"What?" I said, whirling. Or not so much whirling as whinging, because I was pretty tired, though much happier now that I'd finally had some food.
"We FORGOT TO GET THE MARSHMALLOWS!"
It had appeared we failed in our marshmallow toasting quest. First, we forgot to get the wood for the fire from Courtney's place, and second, we forgot to get actual marshmallows. Obla dee, oblah da, life goes on, as you may have heard in popular song lyrics. And hell if we were going to do either of those things NOW.
"Enh, now we have something to do another day," Courtney wisely concluded.
We went home. We watched our movie. We ate dinner, prepared by my mother. Thanks, Mom. Did I mention I had crazy relatives at my house making plenty of noise and drinking Black Russians? No! We shouted. Do not drink them! Russians are people too! But alas, they ignored us. Anyway, we ignored our relatives and watched our movie.
Then came the low point of our Saturday. We sat in the increasing darkness watching Predator 2 with the sound off, complaining how bored we were. For two hours. It went a little like this:
Loneleeeeeeee, I'm so loneleeeeee, I have nobodeeeeeee, to call my ooooooooown.
Mixed with a little bit of:
R-E-S-P-E-C-T, Find out what it means to me!
Mostly because we were also watching that American version of Stars in their Eyes and the chick that was all up ons being Aretha Franklin won.
"That's it!" I declared. "It's time to make clothes out of newspaper."
"Ah, okay," Courtney said.
And so we did. Snip snip here, rub rub there and a couple of la dee dahs... That's a song from The Wizard of Oz, but it works pretty well here, too.
"I'm putting on Fruits Basket." I said.
"Hey, put on the radio, then it will look like they're singing." Man, Courtney is sooooo wise.
For a while we laughed and almost ripped our paper couture as a Japanese cartoon man in a red dress appeared to be singing It's Gettin' Hot In Here. Good times.
My mother and aunt came in about an hour later, as I was fashioning... What was I fashioning at the time, anyway? I think it was quite possibly my paper sword. Yes, there I was, wearing the most awesome paper tunic ever to be fashioned, and also some great paper boots. Courtney was wearing her Tiger Lily-styled band with a paper feather in it, and fashioning some wings that took her two hours to make. And then she didn't wear them.
"...What... Are you doing?" My mother said, laughing.
"Um... Nothing?" we replied. "Okay, MAKING PAPER CLOTHES."
"Why?"
Because we were terminally bored, that's why! Oh god, the rustling! Even now I can hear it!
So, um, we finished our clothes at about 11:30pm and decided we needed to show them off. Afterall, in her dashing feather-band and skirt, Courtney somewhat resembled David Duchovny. No, actually, Princess Tiger Lily. And I, in my tunic, hat, boots and with my retarded sword, somewhat resembled a spastic version of the Dark Magician Girl from that heart-string-tugging costume drama, Yu Gi Oh.
We went to Le Pak N Save.
