Electrify Me (The Fireworks Series Book 1)

ELECTRIFY ME: A Fireworks Novella

By Bibi Rizer

© Bibi Rizer 2014

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or other commentary.

www.bibirizer.com

Cover Design by Cover Your Dreams 

www.coveryourdreams.net

For N

You know who you are

Chapter One - Gloria

I hate New Year’s Eve. There. I’ve said it. And you know what? I’m pretty sure the feeling is mutual. I’m pretty sure Father Time looks at me like some party-pooping wet blanket of a buzz-killing stick-in-the-mud. And I don’t care. I own that designation.

Fuck New Year’s Eve. It’s fucked me enough times.

Let me sum up:

So I’m a New Year’s Baby. I was born at sixteen seconds past midnight, January 1st, on a US military base on Kwajalein Island, which is just west of the international dateline. That made me, that year anyway, the first American baby girl born on Earth. I got card from the President. I don’t imagine I was all that excited about it at the time, and I’m still not. Because New Year’s sucks.

So, my first New Year’s Eve, then, the day before I turned one, was also the day my mother left my father and took me with her. I can’t really blame her. I mean living on a military base in the middle of the Pacific Ocean can’t have been much fun. We ended up in Seattle where it rains all the time, because my mother couldn’t afford San Francisco “with a baby,” she says. As though I’m the sole reason she doesn’t live in Haight Ashbury and own an organic knitting store or something.

Mom blames me for a lot of stuff, but that’s a two-way street. Like right now I’m blaming her for the fact I tripped over my cat running for the phone. Not surprised to see her number on the caller display either. She’s as regular as a cuckoo clock.

“Hi, Mom.” She doesn’t need to know I’m lying on the kitchen floor in my underwear, with clean laundry strewn around me.

“Happy New Year’s Eve, darling! And Happy Birthday for tomorrow. I’ll let you sleep in instead of calling in the morning. I’m sure you’re heading out on the town tonight.”

“Oh. Yeah. Big party.” I tuck the phone into my shoulder as I get up and gather the laundry. “Amy got tickets at the last minute.”

“Will there be men there?”

“No, Mom. The party is in a lesbian club.” I pull on some clean tights as I wait for my sarcasm to sink in.

But it doesn’t. There’s a brief silence while my poor mother tries to reconcile her downtown sensibilities with her down home upbringing. “That’s wonderful…uh…darling. Are you and Amy together now?”

“Mom! Kidding. Jeez.” I’m slightly disturbed that she didn’t sound more shocked. Maybe she’s just so desperate for me to partner up that at this stage she’s ready to accept
anyone
.

“Well, I don’t know these days. Where
is
the party then?”

I suck at making things up on the fly so I go with something easy. “Same place as last year. The brewery.”

“Oh! That will be fun. You had fun last year. I mean except for…”

“Yeah…gotta go, Mom. Amy’s here!”

I hang up. The last thing I want right now is to talk to my mother about my various New Year’s failures. That’s like the Neverending Story parts one through six. And the root of it is something just as hard for Mom to talk about as it is for me.

I don’t remember my second New Year’s Eve or my third or fourth. But my
fifth
New Year’s Eve was the day I saw my dad for the first time since we left him on that God-Forsaken Island. He arrived with his neat hair and pressed suit, and I spent a good minute staring at him with deep suspicion. But then he called me Princess and gave me a brown haired American Girl doll. After that I was in love.

I spent the day blissful, basking in his attention, his glowing dadfulness and stuffing myself with candy and popcorn. We watched the fireworks, staying up together until just past midnight when he tucked me, yawning and exhausted, into bed.

“Happy New Year, Princess,” he said, kissing my forehead.

The next day, my birthday, when I woke groggy and vaguely nauseous from the candy, he was gone again. And all I remember thinking is that he didn’t know anything about me. I never had time to tell him my stories. I had so much to say to him about school and the squirrels in our yard and the scrapbook I was making about Ariel and the Mir Space Station and Mom’s crabapple jelly going moldy. So much to say. No time to say it.

I didn’t see him for another five years. See? New Year’s Eve hates me.

Mom never forgave him. I don’t think I have either. Every year I try to, making it my resolution to not obsess over all the ways I’ve been hurt. Sometimes I even make progress, but then I have one of those doomed summer romances with a German lifeguard and my resolve crumbles. Then the Seattle autumn comes with its incessant rain that makes me hate everyone. The holiday season only exacerbates it.  By New Year’s Eve I’ve usually become a desperate slag who thinks a Bloody Mary is as healthy as a salad and that love is for other people. Then I have a terrible night, wake up hung-over and slimy and the whole process starts all over again.

Through my childhood, I made a concerted effort to not acknowledge New Year’s Eve in any way. I would avoid the TV specials, close my curtains against the fireworks, go to bed early with ear plugs in so I didn’t have to listen to revelers staggering in with their noisemakers and high spirits. This strategy kept me clear of any further New Year’s curses until I was fifteen years old and the pathetic New Year’s hook-up that started it all.

Yeah. Maybe I’ll talk about that a bit later.

This New Year’s, I came up with a plan that I hope will break my curse. I’m going to volunteer on the suicide hotline. The gods of New Year’s Eve will surely look kindly on that. They couldn’t possibly curse someone who dedicates her New Year’s Eve to saving lives, when she could be out drinking over-priced cocktails and giving clumsy blow jobs to strangers in bathroom stalls. Could they? I mean…could they?

After I finish dressing, I take time to pack provisions before heading out to the call center just before 8PM. Tonight calls for a larger purse than I usually carry, and I can’t find one. So before I even make it out the door, I start to feel like maybe the curse is just lying in wait somewhere, plotting to have me arrested (my 20
th
New Year’s Eve), bitten by a stray dog (21
st
), catch head lice (22
rd
) or accidentally drive my (now ex) boyfriend’s Porsche into a hotel pool (last year). In the grand scheme of things, I suppose a lost purse doesn’t seem that bad, but it doesn’t bode well. The lice year I couldn’t find my favorite boots and look how that turned out.

All I ever wanted was that nice New Year’s Eve with a nice man. Kind of like that New Year’s with my dad. You know, except with hot sex. And with the nice man still there in the morning. I know it’s really not that much to ask, but I’ve given up.

Fuck New Year’s Eve.

The purse turns up under my bed and I relax for a moment. I fill it with bottled water, throat lozenges, Kleenex, tea-tree lavender Handi Wipes, and sesame snaps. Grabbing the salmon dip I made to contribute to the potluck buffet (Doesn’t it sound festive? Talking people off bridges in between nibbling on nachos and baba ganoush?), I head out the back door, checking the lock three times. (19
th
New Year’s – cleaned out by thieves. They took my
nightgowns,
which still grosses me out five years later). The salmon dip, which is the only recipe for
cooked
salmon dip I could find (18
th
New Year’s – food poisoning that lasted two weeks), gets buckled into the front seat. Then I check under and behind the car for my cat, my neighbor’s kids and anything else that is likely to cause death or heartbreak if I drive over it. When that’s clear, I get in the driver’s seat, buckle up carefully, check my oil lights, test the brakes backing out of the driveway and drive about twenty miles under the speed limit all the way into town. Sure, some impatient taxi drivers honk at me, but I ignore them.

The call center is in a church basement just off the freeway north of downtown. The church part is another reason I think my plan is brilliant. No bad luck can befall me actually inside a church, right? Isn’t that some kind of biblical law? I’d pray if I didn’t think God would haul off and smack me with ringworm for being a heathen and a hypocrite. I haven’t been to church since my mother’s third marriage, and then I threw-up in the vestry after sneaking in there to tongue kiss my step-father’s nephew during the sermon. That was my 17
th
New Year’s. Good times.

The worst part of it is that apart from that disastrous kiss and a couple of sloppy and undeserved blow-jobs, I’ve never managed to properly hook up on New Year’s Eve. Well, since my sixteenth New Year’s and the world’s most pathetic hook-up, but of course I prefer not to count that.

Traffic is quiet. Many taxis, packed buses, but few cars. I guess the message about drunk driving is getting across finally, a fact that makes me rather proud, given that I worked on the latest awareness campaign. That makes it sound like I’m more socially involved than I actually am. I’m just a junior staff designer in a small ad firm–nothing too heroic. We did some shock-tactic drunk-driving ads with messages written in blood. Each ad had the hand of a victim splayed out in the corner. A young woman’s pale fingers, her engagement ring askew. A chubby child’s hand with a mangled toy. A black man’s hand, his newspaper bloody. Pure class. The client
loved
them, and it filled our public service portfolio for the year, since most of what we do is for the Mariners and the Pike Brewing Company. I guess no one saw those as in conflict with drunk-driving ads.

I took a long holiday after we finished that campaign.

I pull up to the church just before 8PM. My shift is from 9PM until 3AM, so I have an hour of briefing before we kick off. I’ve done five training sessions already, and there is debriefing or counselling afterwards if needed. I’m a little nervous. To call a suicide help line on New Year’s Eve is pretty rock bottom. I just hope I can help some people see the light at the end of the tunnel. I’m not sure I’m the best person for the job to be honest, but I guess I’ll just have to fake it. This is going to be life and death.

It really makes you think.

“You must be Gloria,” says an obscenely hot black guy as I come down the stairs to the grey basement office. My gaydar goes “whoop whoop” within seconds though, probably tipped off by the fact that he’s wearing a faded “I survived Pride ‘94.” T-shirt. Just as well. The last thing I need is to be lusting after someone all night when I’m trying to do a good deed.

“I’m Baxter. I’m the shift supervisor tonight.” He introduces the rest of the shift. Marie Louise, a rosy, roundish woman from Quebec. “Call me Lou,” she says. Bryan, a thirty-something metrosexual with a weekend-in-Baja tan and a tidy little moustache, and Tabitha, a pretty black woman with a tiny diamond nose stud.

There are four other people already on the phones in front of computer screens in the other room, but their shift ends at nine. I wonder whether they will be able to go out and party in the New Year after spending six hours talking to suicidal people. I have a feeling that after my shift I’ll want to eat a pound of chocolate and watch
Pride and Prejudice
until my eyes fall out.

“What’s
your
story?” Tabitha hands me a coffee in a Styrofoam cup.

I add milk and three sugar cubes as I answer, deciding edited honesty is probably the best approach. “I never have a good time on New Year’s. So much pressure to hook up or whatever, and the hangovers get more and more painful the older I get.” I take a sip of my coffee and process the selfishness of what I’ve just said. “And of course it’s so superficial. Selfish even. I mean some people are really suffering this time of year, and I want to do what I can to help.” Internally patting myself on the back for the nice save, I pull out the salmon dip and add it to the table of goodies. “What about you guys?”

“I work the phones every Thursday,” says Lou. “Tonight is just another night on the front line for a good Catholic girl.” She pronounces it CAT-o-lick. I’d bet good money the maple-leaf shaped cookies on the potluck table are hers.

“I’m doing a degree in social work,” says Bryan. “I sold my tech start-up two years ago to ‘retire’ and nearly died of boredom in the first week. This is part of my practicum.”

I turn to Tabitha, who has been stirring her coffee for about five minutes. She sighs. “My brother died on New Year’s Eve five years ago. Ever since then, I can’t have a good time with everyone else. So I’ve been doing this instead.” Lou puts her hand on Tabitha’s shoulder as she continues. “Sometimes I feel like he might call, you know. Just to say hi.”

God. That puts head lice in perspective, doesn’t it?

After we’ve mingled a bit more and each assembled a plate of snacks, Baxter sits us all down at the long table, the florescent light flickering above us.

Flickering. Then dying. Followed by every other light in the room. We’re plunged into darkness.

“Uh…”

“Baxter! The phone lines just went down!” Someone shouts from the next room. Lou pulls out her iPhone and lights it up so we can see a bit.

Baxter dives for an old-style phone on a nearby desk. “Hello?” says, pressing a few clicky buttons. “Hello? Hello? No, I’m here. We’re still with you. Our lights just went off, that’s all. Hold on.” He covers the mouthpiece with his hand as a young woman comes in from the other room. “Was anyone else on the phone?” There are a few shouts of “No!” from the other room as the young woman takes the phone from Baxter and starts talking in low soothing tones. Baxter pulls out his own cell phone and dials quickly.