“Yeah, my day was pretty chill. I surfed, I skated, surfed again. It was chill. Tomorrow should be pretty chill. How was your day? Was it chill?”
I couldn’t help wincing at the Matthew McConaughey lookalike’s overuse of the word “chill”, as he fumbled his way through the first ten minutes of his date in the back of my car. He was such a nice guy and I hoped he’d managed to pull it together. I dropped the awkward two at the Coogee Pavilion and headed south.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Vicky – 6 minutes – Maroubra
I pulled into the street Vicky had entered into the app. All hell was breaking loose. Close to two hundred people were piling out of a house party which had just been shut down by the police. I used to love house parties like this when I was a bit younger, but I also instinctively knew that two hundred boozed-up teenagers forced out onto the street is a recipe for disaster. “SMASH!” There went the first bottle crashing into the bitumen, causing me to jump. I reached forward to my phone to cancel the job, do a U-turn and get the hell out of there when a girl walking by suddenly hurled herself onto the bonnet of my car.
“STOPPPPPPPPP!” she screamed as she pointed her finger at me. “Felicity, Lauren, Pandora! Our Uber is here!” she bellowed into the crowd of people cascading down the driveway like a swarm of drunken bees.
Three heavily intoxicated girls, holding their high heels in their hands above their heads, emerged from the raucous crowd and began stumbling and swaying toward my car on their tiptoes. “Tonight is the night I get spewed on,” I thought to myself as I breathed a deep sigh and hesitantly unlocked my doors.
All four tumbled into my car. For the next two punishing minutes my ears were peppered with a cacophony of high-pitched whistling, woohoos and ohmigods, as I attempted to navigate my way through the lawless streets of Maroubra. The horde of cackling hyenas continued to talk in gibberish to one another about the party. I could make out a sentence here and there: “Ohmigod. Did you see Damo hook up with Cara? Vanessa is going to go effing batshit!” said Vicky from the front seat in what sounded like a forced American accent.
I was taking the girls to the Home Nightclub in Darling Harbour to meet up with their boyfriends. For the next five minutes of our trip I was completely invisible until Vicky turned to me suddenly and yelled, “OMIGOD, WHAT SCHOOL DID YOU GO TO?”
I found this such a bizarre question to randomly ask. It turns out all four girls were in Year Twelve at one of Sydney’s most prestigious all-girl schools. Vicky was keen to see if I was cut from the same cloth.
“KING’S, SCOTS, KNOX, RIVERVIEW?” she fired at me aggressively. When I told her the name of the very ordinary high school I attended in southern Sydney she turned away and said flatly, “Never heard of it.”
One of the girls from the back seat suddenly piped up, “Omigod, I know people from that area.” The next five minutes involved all four girls yelling out the names of random people, none of whom I knew. This game ended abruptly when the girl sitting directly behind me said, “Omigod, he doesn’t know anyone.” Everyone laughed. Everyone except me.
I decided to stir them up a little bit. “How are you going to get into Home Nightclub when you’re not eighteen?” I asked incredulously.
“Ummmmm, excuse me! We are actually all eighteen,” said Vicky in an annoyed tone.
“Hahaha. Shut the fuck up, Vicky! You’re nineteen. You repeated third grade, you retard!” said the girl sitting in the middle of the back seat. Everyone laughed again, me included this time.
“Why the fuck do you bring that up all the time, Pandora? You’re a bitch!” Vicky fired back.
The car again erupted into high-pitched laughter as the girls in the back seat pointed at Vicky, who was now shaking her head furiously. Their laughing fit was cut short as a four-wheel drive, with green P-plates, pulled alongside us at a set of lights.
“Omi-fucking-god, is that Bryson next to us?” said Pandora as she reached across from the middle seat and lowered the back window.
“BRYSON! BRYSON!” yelled Pandora to the carload of boys. The boys turned their heads to face us and Pandora screamed, “Bryson! Show us ya dick!” I looked around the car in absolute disbelief. Did she really just yell that out?
“Omigod, Pandora! His girlfriend will bash you!” screeched Vicky. “Quick, Uber man, drive!” Fortunately the boys turned down a different street and we continued along Anzac Parade.
The girls weren’t done with shocking me yet. They asked their next question through a bizarre game of Chinese whispers, minus the whispering:
Back driver’s seat: Omigod, can he get us pills?
Pandora: Do you reckon he can get us pills?
Rear passenger seat: Vicky, can he get us pills?
Vicky: Do you think you could get us pills?
I didn’t even have a chance to answer before they were at it again, this time delivering a statement:
Back driver’s seat: All good. The boys got us pills!
Pandora: Cancel that, the boys got them.
Rear passenger seat: Vicky, we got them.
Vicky: Yeah, don’t worry about it, hey! We’re all sorted now.
I was surrounded by four Ja’mie’s from Summer Heights High. They were worse behaved than Philippe, the car seat-kicking, popcorn-eating man-child, from last week.
The girls still weren’t done shocking me, though. It turned out the boyfriends they were going to meet at the club didn’t actually acknowledge the girls as their girlfriends in public.
“Brandon better not hook up with anyone in front of me again,” said Pandora as she applied a bright-red lipstick.
“Sorry, aren’t these guys your boyfriends?” I asked, confused.
“Yeahhh . . . but they kind of don’t really speak to us much when we are out,” replied Vicky with a touch of sadness as she lowered her head.
I almost started to feel sympathy toward the group when Pandora revealed: “We’re all dumping them when we go to Europe after exams anyway, so whatevs, hey!”
With those final words the girls piled out of my car and off into the night, leaving empty bottles of Skyy Blue Vodka as a souvenir.