Asylum

Chapter 38: A LifeSaver

Friday night

"Too much?" I asked, looking nervously down at the evening's ensemble.

"Uh, I think 'too little' is more like it," Glory corrected me. "I mean, I'm, like, a million miles away from a prude, but ... holy fuck!"

I regarded the scrap of red spandex covering my torso. Coming up with fresh, new theme outfits that worked with my natural coloring and were sexy enough for Asylum-wear was becoming increasingly difficult. Barring any radical at-home hair-dying sessions, Baywatch seemed a more practical choice than Princess-Leia-in-the-gold-bikini when I was browsing the racks in the costume shop, but maybe Glory was right.

"There's a cover-up I'm going to put over it," I assured my friend. "That should make it a little less pornographic." I reached into my backpack and pulled out the carefully folded, white beltless robe and hastily slung it around my bare shoulders. The robe's thin terry cloth and cap sleeves didn't do much for warmth, but hanging as it did to mid-thigh, even gaping open it did quite a bit for modesty.

"Yup, now you're pretty much legal in all 50 states," Glory agreed. She stepped up to me and pulled down the gold zipper on the front of the costume's swimsuit by a couple of inches, to just below nipple height. "Now it's perfect."

"Hey!" I slapped the other bartender's hand away and looked critically at my even more scandalous cleavage. "I thought we were trying to tone down the raunch factor."

"True," Glory conceded, grinning. "But we still want to draw a good crowd to our end of the bar. Maybe a little glitter?" She mused, the bejeweled fingers of her left hand sprinkling imagined stardust over my half-bared breasts.

"Pass," I insisted. "I'm not trying to spotlight them, you know." I slipped my feet into some comfy white deck shoes and gave my loose hair a final fluff.

"So what's the drink tonight?" Glory asked, expertly reapplying lipstick the color of congealed blood in the break room's full-length mirror. She smacked her lips together and gave her reflection a wink and a moue, then tucked the little plastic tube into her waistband.

I pulled out a reusable vinyl grocery bag from my pack, filled with rolls of hard candy. "A LifeSaver, of course."

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Three hours later, I was mentally flogging myself. Coming up with fun drink ideas certainly brought patrons to my station (and to Glory and Shari's shared well, by extension), and people seemed to be getting a kick out of coming back repeatedly to order LifeSavers in different colors and flavors, but getting the candy onto the straw for the special garnish was proving ridiculously complex, especially in the crowded, darkened back bar.

Chauncey had helped me at first, deftly preparing three lowballs full of ready-to-go garnish sticks before business reached its usual level of insanity and his regular duties pulled him away. Unfortunately, I had blown through those in the first two hours and had been struggling ever since. The three-candies-per-straw design had multiple times been simplified to two, and for a couple of patrons I'd just plonked a candy that matched the color of the drink directly into the glass, informing the customer that there was a special prize inside, so to be careful when they were drinking them.

Now I sat alone in the break room, feverishly jamming multicolored rings on black straws for the 30 minutes I was supposed to be using to rest and regroup and try to eat something that didn't come in rainbow colors in a paper and foil roll. My fingers were sticky, my mood was sour, and I estimated that if orders continued at this rate, I would run out of my new stash of "rainbow sticks," as the customers had started calling them, before 1:00am.