Blinded by the Weekend

“You should wear it.”

“I’m not wearing it.” The weight of it was already digging uncomfortably into my pocket as we walked through the quiet neighbourhood, the lights of home shining at the end of the street. I’d be hearing jokes about taking bribes for the rest of the year once the story made the rounds through the rest of staff.

“Oh come on, it would look good on you! Some men wear jewellery!”

“Yeah, the fruity boys you like would love it.”

Jill puffed up like an enraged cockatoo. “Like you’re much better. You don’t even have a girlfriend, and you spend all your time hanging out with your ‘bros’ online. That’s super sus.”

I rolled my eyes. Yeah, hanging out with mates from back in college and my literal brother and his squad, playing Infamous Days: Warbreak in my free time was so “sus”. “I was joking. I’m just not the kind of guy who likes bling. Wearing a tie for Auntie Jane’s wedding was bad enough, I’m not putting on a whole-ass diamond necklace for a week.”

“Maybe you should find a girlfriend to give it to then,” she snarked at me.

Sisters. Always so touchy. I turned my attention to the street, and she turned hers back to her phone. If she walked into a light pole I wasn’t saving her.

At least there was barely any risk of running into some shady group and getting mugged. It wasn’t the most interesting neighbourhood, but we’d only ever been broken into once, and that was back when Jill and I were kids.

It didn’t hurt that we weren’t the ones with the fancy house and the pool out back. I fingered the necklace in my pocket as I looked up at one of our neighbours’ places. It had palm trees lit up by spotlights. Cheap spotlights, but come on. Compared to the scruffy butt-end of the street they’d never managed to bulldoze over for more shiny mansions, there had to be at least two millionaires around here distracting the magpies. I know who I’d steal from.

It’d pay better than a minimum wage job.

I fingered the design on the charm, feeling the curved edges. Couldn’t really blame the old man for swiping it off some rich cane toad. It was probably the cheapest of whatever haul he’d made. But if it was worth something....

I heard a car in the distance as we came up to the oldies section of the street, and I didn’t think much of it. Not until we went to cross over. It sounded like it was a ways away, nothing to worry about.

Until blazing headlights practically blinded me.

Oh sh—

I felt like a deer stuck in the middle of the road, staring down a feral ute. Meanwhile Jill just kept walking like the dill she was, absorbed by her phone, about to be run over.

So like the idiot I was, I used all my forgotten junior footy skills and tackled her out of the way.

We crashed onto the grass verge at the side of the road, practically in our front yard, missing the bullbar by a couple centimetres.

“What the hell, Wren?!”

Puffing for breath, I rolled away from Jill as she sputtered and hissed like I hadn’t just saved her life. Damn, my hands were shaking. That had been close. “You’re welcome.”

Just what the hell had that driver been doing, anyway? Trying to kill us?

“’You’re welcome’?! For getting grass stains all over my shirt and nearly breaking my phone?”

I stared at her. “You seriously didn’t notice us almost getting run over by that thing?”

“What? There was nothing there! There’s nothing there!” She gestured off at where it had vanished, and yeah, it’d been going pretty fast, so of course it was gone by now. “Are you going senile at twenty? Do you need your eyes checked? Go—” A loud, extended honk in the distance, that she didn’t seem to notice at all, drowned her out “—you hoon! If this was a prank, I’m putting tomato sauce in all your undies—”

She just kept going as she picked herself up and stomped off towards the house, spewing off dire threats. Fantastic. Now I’d become a martyr. Should’ve just let her get run over.

I rolled up to my feet, dusted off my pants, threw the finger at the empty road, and hobbled up the drive.

~~~~~ⴡ≽≎≼Ϡ~~~~~

“Oh, there’s leftovers in the fridge if you want some.”

Mum’s distant voice floated down the hallway just as the microwave beeped, my leftovers already heated up. “Yeah, thanks.”

I stuck the fork in my mouth and carted it all up to my room, plonking it down at my desk. Veggie-lasagna was mostly disgusting, but my microwave meal stash had run out and I’d forgotten to run down and grab more, so picking out the peas was my lot for tonight.

Not that it mattered. I booted up the PC and flopped into the chair, digging at the steaming pile. I’d be plenty distracted for the next couple hours.

It didn’t take long, praise be to SD cards, the essential spice of life and saver of time. Slipping on my headset and jumping into the already-filling voice chat, I stuffed a forkful in my mouth and announced myself. “G’day ya bastards.”

Couldn’t pick out much of the answering blast in my ears, but it was a snarky mess of the same thing. Apart from one. “Get over it, you bludger. Just because the oldies can’t tell you not to speak with your mouth full doesn’t give you a freebie. I can hear you grinning like a shot fox.”

I grinned wider. “Wallo! I thought you weren’t joining tonight. Hope I’m not too late for the party.”

He snorted. “The day I miss a good rage on the weekend is the day some hoon shoots me in the head.”

“Come off it, I know you’re not on deployment. If you weren’t here you’d be off your face.” I chugged some of the half-full waterbottle of sports drink permanently assigned to my desk.

“Hey, could you quit speaking Australianese for a second? I understood, like, two words,” one of Wallo’s American mates, Mike, complained.

“Nah, might as well hooroo now if you can’t do the yakka.”

Wallo laughed himself off his ass. “Wrenno. We need to brush you up, you’re sounding a bit off-blue there, mate. Been spending too much time around the seppos and the pommies.”

I chugged my blue piss. Half of nobody talked like that, anyway. It was good for having a laugh around Wallo’s clueless mates, but I’d be damned if I could do it all day.

“Care to share with the class just what the hell you were saying?”

“Smack-talk, mostly.”

“I told him he’d be drunk if he wasn’t here.” I clicked through Ice and booted up ID:W as the little green icons of everyone else getting into the game popped up.

“And me?”

“’Might as well get out now if you can’t do the work’.”

“What about ‘pommies’ and ‘seppos’?”

Wallo laughed and I grinned, joining the game lobby. “Trade secret, that.”

I heard the faint sound of typing in the background, a couple of the others chatting to fill the silence. I put them on mute for the moment, digging out a few off-colour peas that looked like they’d come out of somebody’s anus.

“Looks like work didn’t eat you. What, was everyone snoozing in Brizzvegas today?” Dan, one of my mates from college, spoke up.

“Yeah, managed to finish earlier.” The charm I’d managed to forget about poked me in the leg at the reminder, and I fished it out, tossing it on the desk. “Had a last-minute customer, some homeless old guy. Gave me a necklace in exchange for a burger.”

He laughed. “You did a burger for a necklace? What, you finally get a girlfriend?”

“He paid for it first, dickhead. I got the charm thingummyjig as a bonus.”

“What’s it look like?” Wallo butted in.

I picked up my phone and snapped a pic, dropping it into the chat. “You think an old codger like him would just have something like this lying around?”

My brother whistled. “That’s a beaut. Could be some old family heirloom. Looks like he kept it in mint condition.”

“And he gave it to me in exchange for a burger and a milkshake,” I pointed out.

“Could’ve been drunk.”

“Didn’t smell like it. High, maybe. Needed to look at a dentist, definitely.” I picked at more of the lasagna, waiting for the last lagging member of our squad to load in. “Oh, and me and Jill nearly got run over by some feral.”

“The hell is a feral? Also, you’re calling me a septic tank? I’m hurt,” Mike joined back in.

“It’s a big ute—truck—only an arrogant dipstick who pushes everyone else off the road likes to drive around in the city.” I could hear the frown in Wallo’s voice. “He probably had a gutful of piss.”

“It was right on our street, actually.” I tabbed back to the game as one of the others pinged the text chat, and unmuted the rest of the squad through the game overlay. “It’s fine, we got out of the way in time. I’m taking machine gunner—we’re in the ADF, right?”

Wallo grunted. He wasn’t happy about it, but he was in the military, not police. Wasn’t much he could do about it. And for now, we had more important things to focus on. Like keeping the Americans from putting us in the US army.

And forgetting about working through the weekend.