I Don't

It’s two a.m. Do you know where your big sister is?

“Like, does my baby sister even care?”

Lainie Wells tapped her French-tip manicured fingernails on the hard enameled tabletop where she sat in a dark corner of some swank redneck place called Splitz & Strikes. Neon lights reflected off the shiny tabletop, the only illumination in the place, while the bass booming from the speakers behind her pounded out one helluva headache. Maybe she needed another shot of bourbon.

Bowling! Did she look like she was out for a night of bowling? Hell, no. She was wearing a white satin mini-dress, her plum pink fuck-me heels—with dyed-to-match cute pink shoulder bag on a silver chain and not to mention a matching thong—and a tiara. Did this say bowling? Of course not. It said bachelorette party gone bad, that’s what it said.

Bowling. Fuck! This was her night.

But it’s upscale bowling, her best friend Dee had mused… Upscale, because well yeah, the place was bouncy and contemporary and hard and slick and expensive. Redneck, because every redneck in parts of Louisville that she never went to all appeared to be gathered this evening at Fourth Street Live, Louisville’s premier entertainment district.

Must be country music night somewhere.

On the night of her bachelorette party.

And shit. There’s Dee over there flipping her skirt up and showing her ass while she’s tossing a stupid ball down the stupid lane at some even more stupid white pin things.

She’d long lost sight of her business partner, Jess, her two sorority sisters and the Derby princess, all of whom made up her wedding party. Dee, her Maid of Honor Number Two, was, of course, working the rednecks trying hard to get laid. And her baby sister Mary Kate, Maid of Honor Number One? Well, they’d left her ass back at The Seelbach hotel, kitty corner down the street, with the strippers.

Gah!

Strippers! Two of them!

Had she bet that she would sleep with them? Or was that some weird fuzzy-hazy thought her brain had eked out during the little stripper rendezvous back at the hotel, at the start of this wild night she wanted to call the best bachelorette party ever.

Not.

Fact was she was bored to tears. That’s why she’d already asked for her tab, let the server swipe her card and kept the girl’s pen to leave a note on the back of a Splitz & Strikes comment card. She wrote:

Gone to Connection. See you back at the hotel. —LW

She sat her bourbon tumbler on the card, square in the middle of the table, crooked her finger at the server again, pointed to the note, then at Dee and finally out the door. The young woman nodded, and Lainie positioned her cute pink shoulder bag across her shoulders and left.

To hell with them all. Her friends. Her business partner. Her damn little sister.

Tonight was hers. Her last hurrah before getting married. And she’d be damned if she was going to spend it alone, in the corner of a stupid (albeit shiny and chic) bowling alley bar.