Tattoos and TaTas (Chocoholics #2.5) (2 page)

I met the love of my life, Jim, in college and I did all those things that you’re supposed to do with him. We fell in love, got married, had babies and lived happily ever after, but I found my soul mate much earlier than that. I met her in high school.

Oh, shut up, I’m not a lesbian. I’m talking about my best friend. My
person.
You might want to sit down for this next part because when I tell you how we met, I’m sure you’ll fall over laughing your ass off. There will be no judging how Claire and I met or I will cut all of your mothers.

We met during cheerleading tryouts.

Shut up, I told you this is a judgment-free zone.

Commiserating over our fellow female students bouncing around and squealing exactly like cracked-out puppies brought us together, but our bond
kept
us together. We shared so many commonalities that it even freaked
us
out. Our parents shared the same wedding anniversary, somewhere in our ancient family tree we shared the same last name and family crest, my first name is her middle name and her first dog and I shared a name (I never met Liz the beagle, but I heard she was an asshole who licked her twat all the time. Sounds about right). We liked all the same movies and books and we finished each other’s sentences. Claire and I met in the back of our high school gym, the only two girls in a group of thirty standing off on the sidelines with our arms crossed in front of us and similar resting-bitch faces plastered on.

We’ve been through everything together. Losing our virginities, college, starting a successful business, marriage, children, the imminent marriage
of
our children… through thick and thin and all the years in between, nothing could tear us apart.

Or so I thought.

Then that bitch had to go and give me the news that you never want to hear out of your best friend’s mouth.

I can already hear all of you saying to yourself, “Awwwww shit, I wasn’t expecting this; this is supposed to be funny and what you’re about to put us through is NEVER funny.” This is where I prove you wrong. The one thing this group has always had going for us is our sense of humor. Even when you get the worst news of your life, sometimes all you can do is laugh.

This is the story of the day everything changed, the day we all began looking at life a little differently than we did before.

It’s also the story of how we almost got kicked out of a hospital, a funeral home, a tattoo shop and a small handful of bars.

So, basically just another Tuesday.

I feel like a little background is needed before we get into that whole crazy mess, though, so buckle up. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Tenth day of eleventh grade.

Too many years ago to count…

I HATE MY
mother. This is probably a little bit of PMS and a whole lot of teenage-angst talking right now, but whatever. I hate her and I will continue hating her until the day I die. Or until the day I smother her in her sleep, whichever comes first. Not only did my parents ruin my life by deciding halfway through my high school career that we should move to some podunk town in Ohio, they are now forcing me to participate in extracurricular activities or suffer the consequences.

Their consequences usually entail an entire month of being confined to the house I’m forced to clean from top to bottom every single day. Being in a new school and not having any friends yet, I wouldn’t normally care about the whole grounding bit, but it’s the principle of the thing. My parents are under the illusion that if I become a sheep and follow around all the other stupid sheep with the added bonus of wearing a matching uniform, I’ll instantly have friends and will no longer spend my hours at home locked in my room playing “Teenage Wasteland” on repeat as well as watching my new favorite movie—
Heathers
. My mother seems to think my obsession with a dark comedy about teenagers killing each other off is not healthy. I beg to differ. I tried to reason with her that the movie is set in Ohio so really, I’m supporting this shitty state they’ve forced me to live in, but it didn’t work. She confiscated my VHS and it’s on lockdown until I find an after school activity.

My goal this week wasn’t really about finding a group that would be fun, because any situation where I’m forced to interact with other people is never fun. My goal was simply to pick the first thing I saw to shut my mother up and pray to God I wouldn’t die from boredom or start passing out cups of Liquid Drano to my fellow students (See? A
Heathers
reference. That movie really is sanity saving).

As I was grabbing a few books from my locker at the end of the day and in a total panic that I still hadn’t found a flock of sheep to join, a group of girls walked by all in a tizzy about some meeting going on in the gym and how they were going to have such a fun year going to all the football games. My ears immediately perked up at this information. I’m a football junkie. I love watching it, I love playing it every Thanksgiving with my cousins and, if my mother didn’t think wearing a football helmet would ruin my hair, I’d have demanded to play on the school team. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the only sport/activity that I truly would have joined the masses for without one complaint. Deciding to see what all the fuss was about, I trudged behind the group of girls and tried not to gag on the smell of Love’s Baby Soft wafting from each of them.

By the time I entered the gym and my brain caught up with what I was seeing in front of me, it was already too late to turn and run. I’d been spotted; honed in on like a raw steak thrown into a cage of rabid dogs. The mortification written all over my face was like a lighthouse in a storm to the she-devil who immediately bombarded me.

“Oh, my God, I LOVE your hair! It’s so pretty and blonde!”

I watched in horror as the perky brunette bounced up to me, her hand coming towards me like she wanted to pet my hair. I smacked it away with a frown, but that didn’t deter her.

“You are so cute! My name’s Candace, but everyone calls me Candy!” she told me excitedly.

“Candy? That’s a stripper’s name.”

She stared at me blankly for a few seconds and then began giggling as she wrapped one hand around my elbow and started dragging me closer to the large group of girls bouncing up and down in the middle of the gym, clapping their hands and squealing so loudly that I’m pretty sure my ears were bleeding.

“You are going to be perfect for the top of the pyramid. You’re so tiny and cute and everyone is going to love you! And since I’m the captain, I get to decide who makes the squad and who gets cut, so you’re in luck!” Stripper Candy babbled.

Pyramid. Squad. Captain… Oh, fuck.

“Tell me this isn’t cheerleading practice,” I mumbled as half the girls noticed us walking towards them and turned their clapping and squealing in our direction.

“EEEEEEK someone new!”

“Candy, you are a genius. She HAS to be on the squad!”

“I get to braid her hair first!”

I’m pretty sure at this point my brain went into self-preservation mode like those people who are in horrible accidents and wake up with temporary amnesia. My mind refused to process what was happening, which is the only explanation for why I wasn’t running out of here screaming like my head was on fire.

In case you haven’t already realized this, I’m not a girly-girl. Most of my friends are guys because I just can’t stand the drama that comes with having girlfriends. I don’t doodle my name with some dude’s last name all over my notebooks with hearts around them, I don’t spend two hours getting ready to go out in public, I hate pop music and the last time I wore a dress was… actually, I’ve never worn a dress. I don’t squeal, clap my hands or bounce up and down when I get excited, so obviously I’m in the wrong place right now. I am NOT cheerleader material.

“Touch my hair and die,” I deadpan to a tall blonde with her hands dangerously close to my head.

“Isn’t she just the best?!” Candy shrieks. “Who wants some bubble gum lip gloss?”

I cover my ears as the group starts screaming and reaching for the pink tube of gloss Candy pulled out of her cleavage. When the tube finally makes its way to me, I stare at it with a look of disgust on my face.

“I am not putting anything near my mouth that has
her
tit sweat on it,” I inform them with a point in Candy’s direction.

Someone blows a whistle and my faux pas of refusing Candy’s tit gloss is forgotten as the girls race to the other side of the gym. In the wake of all that hyperactive estrogen, I see a girl standing directly across from me with her arms crossed in front of her, looking just as miserable as I am. Now, I’m not one of those girls who goes out of her way to make friends, which I think is pretty apparent by now. I’ve never taken it upon myself to make the first move
—
people always seem to come to me and I am perfectly okay with that. For the first time in the history of my seventeen years, I feel the need to approach someone and share my pain with this girl. No sooner have I decided to do something completely out of character for me, when she drops her arms and I get a good look at the t-shirt she’s wearing. It’s white, off the shoulder and, in giant red letters across the front, it reads “BIG FUN.” It’s almost like the heavens opened up above her and a light from the gods begins to shine down. Or it’s just the fact that she moved under one of the gym lights, but whatever. I’m calling it a sign, thank you very much. It can’t be a coincidence that this girl is wearing a Martha Dumptruck,
Heathers
shirt. Well, I guess it could. I mean, maybe she used to be a big girl and she lost a bunch of weight and she’s trying to tell everyone that even though on the outside she’s small, on the inside she’s still big and full of fun.

Fuck it, I’m going in.

I make it across the gym to her right about the time that all the perky cheerleaders start shouting some stupid chant about the football team.

“Is this school’s mascot really the Ducks?” I ask in shock as I stand next to her and we stare at the synchronized movements across the way.

“Yes, yes it is,” she replies. “Last year, Candy decided that shouting ‘quack’ wasn’t tough enough. She changed all of the cheers to “Let’s go Ducks—RRRRWWWAAAAR!”

“Candy made ducks growl?”

She nods. “Candy made ducks growl. Candy is a dumb fuck.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t really seem like the cheerleader type,” I inform her.

She lets out a sigh and turns to face me. “Yeah, I could say the same for you. Nice effort on the stripper comment. Unfortunately, that really is what she wants to be when she grows up, so she definitely took it as a compliment.”

She finally turns to face me, sticking her hand out in front of her. “I’m guessing you’re new here? My name’s Claire Morgan. Welcome to hell.”

After listening to the Ducks growl for two minutes, we decided our time would be better spent hiding in the locker room until practice was over. I know this isn’t exactly what my mother had in mind when she told me to be a joiner, but it was safer for all those annoying cheerleaders if we were as far away from them as possible. One more growl and Claire and I were going to start throwing punches.

We had an immediate connection and neither one of us was afraid to admit that it was weird. Like me, she mostly hated other people and kept to herself and her father forced her into joining the cheerleading squad because her mother moved away to “find herself” and he was afraid that, without some other female influence in her life, she would turn into a crazy cat lady or open fire at a post office one day.

I quickly found out her shirt was, in fact, a tribute to
Heathers
and we spent twenty minutes trading our favorite quotes. We agreed that “Fuck me gently with a chainsaw” was probably the best sentence ever uttered in the history of the world and, from that moment on, we never spent more than a few hours apart from each other.

My parents and her father weren’t too thrilled with the fact that we quit the cheerleading squad before we’d even technically made the team, but Claire and I were geniuses when we banded together for a cause. They quickly realized that our friendship wasn’t to be messed with and that as long as we weren’t spending every waking moment of the rest of our high school lives alone in our rooms wallowing in misery, wearing all black and listening to The Cure, we would be okay. We had each other and nothing else mattered.

And that, boys and girls, is how the dynamic duo of Liz and Claire came to be. Next comes the part where you might want to put on that seatbelt I mentioned. Or grab a nice giant cup of vodka. You’re going to need it.