the 'brook action threads

The dimly-lit pub was the same shithole it had been since the first time Troy set foot on its permanently-sticky floor nearly ten years prior.  Anywhere else, a fifteen-year-old walking into a bar sounded more like the setup to a tired joke than a reality, but this town was a mecca of fake ID's and businesses that never looked too closely if they looked at all, and by the time most kids in Stoneybrook hit twenty-one, the novelty of buying alcohol was pretty much a thing of the past. 

And it wasn't like he had anything better to do on his day off -- Good Friday or some shit according to his boss.  Troy didn't really give two fucks; he thought all Fridays were pretty badass.

"Wanna split another pitcher?"  The blonde across the table could barely keep her head up as she asked.  Two-thirty in the afternoon and this was what his social life had come to, an endless cycle of sport-fucking bar sluts.   Like the magic of any good addiction, the high never lasted long enough and you ended up feeling emptier and shittier than what you started with.  "I just gotta pick up my kids by four or the sitter starts charging double... how fucked up is that?"

"Pretty fucked up," agreed Troy, who neither knew nor cared although, in a town where no one seemed to know what a fucking condom was, he imagined a sitter could charge whatever they damn well pleased.

"Hey... you mind gettin' this next one, too, hon?"  There was no shame in asking -- she still had three Easter baskets to fill, and she said as much to Troy when he obliged with a shrug.  "God... I hope the stores aren't sold out of that shit already," she mused.

"Yeah... me too," he replied vaguely, and if she noticed the ghost of a smile on his face, she said nothing -- assuming that, like everyone else their age, he had kids of his own waiting anxiously for the Easter Bunny to deliver Sunday morning.