Confessions of a Prairie Bitch by Alison Arngrim Read Free Book Online Page A

“Finish your breakfast, or you’ll miss the bus.”
    So from the time I came home from school, until the time my parents came home, which some days might not be until the early evening, or all day during summer vacation, I was alone in this huge, rambling house on a hill with Stefan. And his friends. He had the room on the side of the house with its own entrance, so he and his friends simply came and went at all hours of the day and night as they pleased. They liked to have parties.
    One day, when I was about eight, I walked into the kitchen and saw that someone had baked a cake. Now, this was unusual, as I was the only one who did any baking in that house. My mother certainly didn’t, my father only did stuff like that at the holidays, and besides, they weren’t home. My father taught me how to make scrambled eggs when I was five, and cooking became my great passion. By the time I was nine or ten, I could make anything: cakes, pies, Cornish game hens in orange sauce, whatever. And here was a great big chocolate cake and an enormous bowl of purple frosting. What with the lurid purple color, I quickly deduced this to mean my brother and his friends must be having another party. I decided to inspect their handiwork. The frosting tasted pretty good, sweet with a slight hint of peppermint extract. Just as I was having my second or third spoonful, my brother and one of his buddies walked into the kitchen.
    I heard a gasp. I looked up, spoon still in my mouth, to see them both staring at me wide-eyed. The boy next to my brother was getting very pale and looked as if he might start crying. My brother remained calm. “Put down the spoon and step away from the frosting,” he ordered.
    “What?” I said, my mouth full of frosting.
    “Don’t…eat…any…more… frosting !”
    I put down the spoon.
    “Okay, how much frosting have you eaten?” he asked.
    “I dunno, a couple of spoonfuls. I licked the beaters.”
    At this point, his friend began to hyperventilate. He started whispering hysterically, “Oh, shit! Oh, shit! We’re going to go to jail, man! We’re going to go to jail!”
    My brother turned to him. “Shut up” was all he said. The friend complied.
    Then Stefan explained the situation to me: “We’re having a party. We made a cake and put LSD in the frosting. Since we calculated the correct dose to be about one slice per person, and you’ve just eaten several large spoonfuls—and licked the beaters, where most of the acid we poured may still be concentrated—you’ve just taken enough LSD to pretty much fuck up all of West Hollywood.”
    His friend made a painful, gurgling noise and almost fainted.
    “So what exactly does this mean ?” I asked.
    He smiled in a way I never liked to see. “It means you’re coming to the party.” I shrugged and followed him downstairs.
    As they like to say in the drug books, “LSD’s psychological effects vary greatly from person to person.” Now, there’s an understatement. I was nowhere near as stoned as the other guests, who each had way more than one piece of cake, along with champagne, pot, and anything else they could get their hands on. At one point I asked for a glass of champagne, and someone protested that I was too young. My brother laughed and said, “She’s dropped more acid than all of you put together; what possible difference could it make now? Give her whatever the hell she wants!”
    So I sat back, sipped my champagne, and watched the other guests. Some seemed to be enjoying themselves, chatting and laughing. Others were acting like people on acid in an antidrug film—sitting in the corner all freaked out, staring at their fingers. Someone even kindly gave me a balloon. I soon figured out that all of these people had been instructed that I was to be kept amused and happy at all costs, because if the kid freaked out, everybody was going to jail.
    As soon as I realized the power I had, I began to mess with their heads as much as possible.