Snowbound and Irate

Well, yesterday certainly didn't end up the going the way I expected. Not that I consider it a bad thing, when all the factors are considered. Kisses from pretty girls outweigh hangovers, after all. But, as the talespinners would say, I'm getting ahead of myself.

After giving up on waiting for my ride, I hauled myself away from the train station and across town, in search of the school. Icaria isn't quite a one-horse town, but it's a hell of a lot closer to it than Miami is. Besides, after being on the train for that long, I figured it wouldn't hurt to get a good walk and some fresh air.

(Yes, you read it here first: exercise is a good thing. Who would have thought!)

I didn't end up finding Eupheme, however; not for lack of trying, but because I ended up sidetracked. Exploring a new town, however small, turns out to be thirsty work, so when I ran across the local liquor store I stepped inside. I'd been planning to pick up a bottle of water, maybe some libations to stock my personal minibar for later. Instead, I ended up running into two of my fellow students. Couple that with an offer to buy as much liquor as we could carry for the more curvaceous of the pair, and my afternoon plans had just been changed.

Important side note: you can get limes in this god-forsaken little berg. Which is good, because I wasn't quite sure how I was going to explain to my parents that importing them from Miami was a vital and necessary excuse. Is it my fault that mojitos remind me of the sun? I think not.

Our little trio ended up back at the lovely redhead's house -- one Eliza Phelp, singular. That grinding noise you hear is my brain attempting not to imagine having a plurality of them at my disposal. The fellow who came as well is Austin. I got the impression the two of them didn't know each other terribly well, though they'd at least seen each other once or twice. He seemed a bit mousy to me, but I couldn't tell if that was the way he normally was, or if he was a bit intimidated by our little alcoholic firebrand of a hostess. I can't say I'd blame him entirely, if that was the case, but either way he seemed to be a pretty good guy.

There then proceeded to be a great deal of drinking, with a smattering of 'get to know you' and 'gathering the gossip'. This is the point in the evening where things got a bit strange, I'll admit. According to my new friends? Icaria is trying to compete with Carl Hiaasen's version of Florida for weirdness, with Eupheme as ground zero. Two murders (yeah, I know, I may be from Miami, but let's consider ratio of the living to the dead here, shall we?), hallucinations, hot air balloons with strange men arriving at parties...and a student building a time machine that someone else stole. I'm just waiting for someone to invite me on the snipe hunt next.

So perhaps this Eliza is out of her mind. That, or this was her idea of hazing the new kids. This is New England, after all; look what this place did to Poe's mind. Honestly, even now, I'm not quite sure what I think, but I'm angling for the long view: mouth shut, eyes and ears open, ask a few strategic questions when the time is right, decide when I have the facts.

In any case, eventually our little triad of teenage alcoholics had consumed enough that Austin and Eliza both passed out, with a parting kiss from the latter just before unconsciousness took her. Because I am a gentleman (damn my soul), I didn't take further advantage of the situation. I'm fairly sure I made it outside into the nicely frigid air just in time to keep from passing out myself, too.

The last thing I needed was to stumble into school looking for the administration after I'd been marinating myself in rum, lime, and vodka for a good chunk of the evenings. Thankfully, I managed to find that bastion of the tiny New England town: the bed and breakfast. It's comforting to know that enough cash will still buy you a room with few questions even up here. I don't quite remember what happened after I got to the room, but I presume that I stripped myself out of my own clothes before crawling into bed. It's that, or the landlady was of the opinion that roofies were so passe compared to the good old-fashioned alcoholic stupor.

Now, however, it's a new morning. Dawn and hangovers don't mix nearly as well as gin and tonic, I'm afraid. That may be a reason to start drinking earlier, now that I think about it. But the landlady, even if she is a dirty date rapist, makes a mean blueberry muffin. I've had sufficent application of hot showers, baked goods, and over-sugared coffee that I'm starting to feel human again, so I think it's time for me to drag my sorry self up to the school and actually check in before they start sending out the search parties -- or worse, they try and get in touch with my parents.

Don't let the title fool you; I'm still on the train. I have yet to set foot off it, in fact. One thing I will give good old Amtrak: the sleeper cars are actually pretty comfortable, with the rumble of the rails rocking you off to slumber. Of course, give me a bottle of that glow-in-the-dark spray stuff they use on CSI and five minutes alone in my room, and I'm sure I'd have the heebie jeebies about just how much bodily fluid was sprayed all over the place like the scene of a bad slasher flick.

Just this morning, we rolled our way past New York. The city that never sleeps, that's so nice they named it twice, that microcosm of the melting pot that the United States used to be. If you're from anywhere at all, you can find a place to fit in there. Okay, maybe not if you're Amish, but even they would find parts of Central Park comforting, I'm sure. Especially the parts where it's harder to see all those huge skyscrapers towering around them. It's hard to find any other place where anyone at all can come and experience what it is to be truly American: choking on car exhaust, drowning in advertisements, and the victim of a hate crime from someone who just happened to get their foot off the boat a day before you did.

After a few hours short of enough sleep, I staggered my way down to the meal car in search of breakfast. Surprisingly, what they're serving isn't absolutely vile, though that may be because I'm sticking to the continental breakfast model of muffins and fruit. I think they need to see if the conductor pissed off one of the cooks, though, since this coffee tastes like someone filtered it through their jock before pouring it for us poor unsuspecting fellow travelers. At least the cheap half-and-half cuts the aftertaste.

As we've gotten further north, our progress has strangely slowed. If I were feeling poetic, I'd try to explain it in terms of the train's reluctance to leave warm weather climes as Autumn starts staking its claim on the days. Or maybe I'd suggest that, as we move up into the sprawl of the earliest areas settled by the White Man on this land across the Atlantic, the train simply has to stop and take in the sheer wonder that this experiment in exile (self-imposed or otherwise) and convict rehabilitation still manages to work, at least for one more day.

But I'm too pragmatic for that before I've had real coffee, and I know it's just that the cities are closer together up here, so the train has to stop more often. Yet we've managed never to quite hit that critical point where progress has stopped entirely, and the feeling in the pit of my stomach has blossomed into full-blown dread. Three hours, and only that much because the commuter trains take precedence, and we'll be at my stop.

Gods, I need another muffin. More tonight, if I'm not eaten alive by the natives first.