The Hard Bet

The Hard Bet

When it began, the bet's were harmless. My friends and I were young enough that there were no real consiquences but old enough to know that we could have gotten a serious telling off if we were caught. 

The first bet was a kiss. Peter Lewis was in our class in primary seven, a ginger haired boy with too many teeth for his thin face and an infatuation with Vee, Jenna, Chloe and myself. He would pass us the answers to every test, eventhough we usually had the tests completed long before he did. We'd smile -or giggle in Vee's case- and get back to pretending to be doing something constructive. During lunch break after one of these instances, Vee had looked at Peter like he was some foreign species she was keen on studying. 

"Please tell me you don't fancy gross Peter." I snorted with what I now would descibe as a distasteful glare, but back then would probably have called it my 'Yick' face. 

"Which one of us do you think he likes more?" Vee finally replied as she went back to munching on her salad sandwhich. 

"Duh, it has to be Kitty, he walks her home every day." Jenna managed to say through a mouthful of prawn cocktail crisps. 

I looked up from what I could only describe as some type of pasta with what seemed to be sliced up carrot and parsnip to find my three friends staring at me.  

"He lives two houses away, he doesn't walk me home, he walks behind me being creepy! If he would at least talk to me I wouldn't mind." Glancing from friend to friend I tried to recall a single time Peter had actually spoken to us but was coming back with nothing. The boy had been in the same class as us since primary 4 and not once had he ever talked to me directly. I repeated my thoughts aloud and they all nodded with agreement.  

He talked to teachers, had hushed arguements with his little brother during lunch as he tried to con the seven year old out of his yogurt - as he was currently doing- and had partaken in animated conversations with the staff at the after school youth centre about the newest games being released for some gaming station I would have had no hope of playing on. Peter was the type of boy who prefered the company of adults, he had no friends but that was his own choice, turning down too many offers of shared lunches for his classmates to be bothered with him anymore.  

"We could just ask him you know." Chloe had said followed by a bored shrug, more interested in creating a jelly kingdom with her Gummy Bears.  

"He doesn't talk to us, do you not listen? We should just forget about it." Vee replied with an annoyed sigh.  

The four of us sat around the wooden picnic table of our outdoor lunch area and stared at Peter Lewis. That was the day I ruined our lives. I looked at my friends and smiled, "I bet I can get him to kiss me."

Ten years Later  

We'd spent the last twenty minutes deciding between three stressed looking men in suits. The bar was almost full to capacity, slightly more than usual for a Thursday night in our favourite bar, Myths. The bar was a renovated warehouse just outside the city centre and close to the buisness district of Belfast, the perfect place to go if you wanted to relax and get hit on by rich men in expensive suits. Which is what we always wanted.  

We'd been out the week before for Chloe's twentieth, causing us to miss our usual Thursday game and my three friends and I were keen get back into it. 

Vee has won two weeks ago so she was allowed the deciding vote. She glanced from man to man before settling her gaze on the tall, more muscular of the three and her face spead to a cheshire grin. We stood and headed to seperate areas of the bar to watch him before we made our move.