Who: TEENAGERS ONLY When: Sunday, mid-afternoon Where: Jubilee's room What: carousing and drinking Rating: T FOR TEEN
Jubilee's room was suspiciously neat. She was generally a neat kid, brought up as an only child and therefore responsible for all her own messes, but this was totally unreal. Anything breakable had been removed to her closet and the usual minor clutter of gaming consoles and controllers around her tv had been eliminated in favor of a simple arrangement of an X-box 360 and four controllers. The tv had once been the subject of some debate, but acquired when it became evident that it really would help her sleep during those first painful months following her parents deaths. The video-games, of course, had simply been the natural progression of things.
Her walls were lined with posters, supplemented by pictures and postcards, overlapped and covered the majority of the wall-space. The walls that weren't covered were hidden behind two enormous tapestries. The mostly blue and turquoise printed one covered the ceiling and the other, tie-dyed and picking up a few of the colors from the ceiling, hung behind her bed. It would be hard to argue that Jubilee's room was anything but a riot of color, since even her lamps held colored bulbs, but it suited her. It had a definite cozy appeal since she kept her bed against the wall, as couch-like as could be, and kept enormous pillows and cushions in her closet for just such a day as this. Today, they were spread out everywhere.
But the real star of the show was not Jubilee herself, who was currently perched on the edge of her bed, half-watching Pulp Fiction play on her computer screen while she braided a friendship bracelet. The stars were the two bottles on her bedside table, one of vodka and the other rum. Playing back-up were a small pitcher of juice, a stack of cups, a selection of shot-glasses Jubilee had long ago shoplifted, and a 2-litre of likely-flat soda.