99 Bottles

By Samantha Fedor

Peter Bell drinks, writes, and lives the sarcastic life of a slave-boy for the hot, young Hollywood thing, Ashton Greene. Yet, although he doesn't quite realize it, his life slowly begins to morph and change when Clara Marks pops into his life and forces impulse upon him. In a whirlwind of publication and cheap booze, everything in Peter's life changes substantially.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312727113

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99 Bottles

99 Bottles

Samantha Fedor

Copyright Page

This book is a work of fiction. Names, Characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

© 2014 Lulu Author, Samantha Fedor.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing, 2014

ISBN 978-1-312-72711-3

Acknowledgments

I should probably start thanking people right about now, and I’d like to start with my teachers, the people who watched me grow from awkwardly odd freshman to still awkward and odd senior (but obviously a much cooler version of awkward, let’s be real). I’d like to thank Ms. Wroblewski, the first face I saw when I walked into homeroom freshman year and gym first period senior year (we brought it full circle, huh?). You seriously rock for encouraging me to take on the insanity that is writing a novel for my graduation project, and I’ve never met a gym teacher I’ve actually liked, so way to change my perspective on athletics, you fabulous lady. I’ll forever remember our talks about books and you docking me five points for not bringing shoes to gym for three consecutive years (sorry!). Onward – I’d like to thank Mrs. Leopold, my French teacher throughout all four years of high school and the woman who pushed me in a language with the most difficult grammar as well as pushing me in our native language (I’ll forever loathe French grammar but will forever love you). Thank you for reminding me that, no matter how difficult, I can and will do it. Je t’aime (is that right?). To keep the ball rolling, I’d like to thank the Kaszonyis. Keep doing what you do best because I will forever reap the benefits. You two are such an impressive force, and APUSH and AP English junior year only cultivated my abilities (In the future just remember this: I still hate Jimmy Carter, and I still love correcting dreadful grammar). Without you guys as teachers and mentors in my personal edification, I don’t know if this novel would exist, and I’d probably just end up moving to Ohio. Also: special shout out to those weirdo student teachers (Uhouse, Cygan, you know who you are) & sixth period AP Lunch (Penn State is the equivalent to overboiled brussel sprouts).

What would life be without weirdo friends? Dearest Kurka, you will forever inspire me to be the weirdo that I am (because we’re basically weirdos together, right?). Thank you so much for always cheering me on like I am the female equivalent to Jim Morrison (minus the sex appeal and leather pants). Without you, I’d be a lonely girl in purple lipstick and a flannel, searching for someone to read my shit and tell me I’m fabulous. You rock, babe. And now, Peters, you’re next. middle school was a weird time, and then a little bit of high school happened, and you disappeared. Funny story: you left me in Pittsburgh and moved to Florida to soak up the sun and tell everyone to lighten up (ha). I’m still sad about that, but I’ve never had a friend who believes in me more than you do. Thank you for being there every crazy step of the way – from 3 AM to 3 PM. You mean the fucking world to me. To Tay, my best friend since that bad haircut you got in seventh grade. Please never let me do something like that to myself, and thank you so much for loving me unconditionally. You’re such a kind soul, and I couldn’t write without you boosting my ego 24/7. Also: Thank you for the perpetual state of imminent obesity (aka, always baking me cookies and shit). To Leah, the Voltaire to my Frederick II in the straightest of ways, we hate each other and love each other simultaneously, and no matter what you do, you’ll change the world, and I’ll be right there to write about your political ingenuity – you filthy democrat. Stay as radical as you are. To my pals in Creative Writing during senior year who applauded me for publishing (Leah, Deej (is this hipster enough for you?), Laura, Anna, Sophia, Sarah, Sandyha, Colin, Alyssa, and of course, Mr. Fluhme for all the guidance in my endeavors of creative writing thus far). Thank you, Beth, for inspiring me to be strong no matter the situation. To my fellow writer: Paige, you harassed me on my first day of school with you; I still don’t play sports, and I’m so glad to know that you’ll be reading this. You’re a phenomenal woman, and I love you. Don’t forget me when you’re like the lady version of Poe. To The Statesman Staff: Thank you guys for dealing with my authorial fluff because that is not what journalism is about, but I tried (hold the applause). Ian, thank you for reading my drafts and listening me to at odd hours of the late night/early morning; you’re annoying, and you infuriate me, but thank you so much for just listening. When you miss me, read a copy of Gatsby, and I’m there in spirit. To the other Leah (Fran?): You’ve always been there no matter what. You listen to me ramble about books, you laugh, and you’re still my friend. I love you. I love every one of you; thank you so much for giving a damn.

Finally, I’d like to thank my birth givers. Mom and Dad, Ron and Maria, you are two of the weirdest people I know. You gave me a last name that I guarantee everyone will mispronounce at least once (Theodore? Where’d you get the th??). And you’ve made it so easy for me to be myself; you’ve both made it so easy for me to be the girl who follows her dreams without considering the cautionary tales. If I didn’t have you fools, I’d be unborn and not alive, so thanks for that; I’d also be some lesser version of myself. You did it, you raised the most ludicrously awesome kid ever, congratulations! I love you. To Nayte: you don’t know how many times I’ve looked to you for inspiration, for the drive to keep going. You’re five years younger than me, and sometimes I wonder if you’re five years wiser than me. You’re my favorite person because you’re literally a male version of me; keep being you, never forget that. You get me, brother, and for that I am eternally grateful. Also, do you remember that one time when you hit me in the face with a hockey stick? Thank you because I think you might’ve knocked the brilliance into my brain. Love you, bitch (and this is where you say jerk). Thank you people who happen to be my relatives for being as wonderful to me as you could ever be, and thanks for tolerating me during the entire time I was writing this novel. I love, love, love you even when I hate you. Don’t ever forget it.

Also, I’d like to thank my best pal, Maltyese. I’m sorry mom decided to name you after your breed; you’re my favorite pup regardless (dogs can’t read, so this is more for me because I’m obsessed with my dog).

And when you are all thinking that you are fortunate to be on this page, just know that I am the fortunate one because I encountered each and every one of you incredible people. Thank you, again.

We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreparably broken.

-John Green, Looking For Alaska

I: Welcome to my World…

My parents have been together for a long time, they knew each other long before I was born. My father, Bradley, met my mother, Amelia, at the smallest diner known to man in the smallest town known to man. It was two in the afternoon, both fresh out of the ridiculously tight-knit high school community and full of potential to succeed in almost anything. Isn’t it amazing how a woman can just catch a man’s eye without doing anything more than smiling? Well, honestly, it isn’t amazing to me, but my father still talks about the way he saw the pearly light of my mother’s teeth brightening the room. That’s even strange, if you ask me, but I’m your standard asshole – a family and barely a few close friends that earn a verbal beating from me every day or so. Anyway, my parents, they’ve been together ever since that afternoon at that tiny diner. They’re inseparable. We were never rich, never perfect; we were middle-class, happy enough, but we struggled from time to time. Paychecks meant paying bills and buying a few groceries here and there, and it was the normal way to live. I never went hungry; I never felt too full. My mom and dad loved me enough, with the right amount of function and dysfunction, and they love one another just as well. I fully believe dysfunction (in the right way) is a sign of love – always used to say that my parents put the fun in dysfunctional.

Generally, I was a happy kid. I found joy in cheap bouncy balls from those quarter machines in the grocery store or the mall and books, and maybe that was my problem. I isolated myself way more than a kid should isolate himself, but my parents never really seemed to see a problem in it – I was creative, and I preferred to be alone. Yeah, I had friends, but I decided that I didn’t need Timmy Williams or his brother to have fun. Playing by myself meant playing how I wanted, by my rules. I did what I wanted, and I felt lonely doing it, not that it seemed to pose a problem during my childhood, but it changed me for the present. I’ve never really made good choices, to say the least.

I have a brother, he is ten years my junior, and I was so pissed when my parents broke the news of a sibling to me. Dad pulled me aside, mom sat at the table glowing, and they tossed it up in the air expecting me to catch it with glee and some sort of stupendous performance. I didn’t. I asked where babies come from, why they decided to have another, and if he would steal my toys. They reassured me my toys would remain in my own room, that my brother was special, and that they would get to where babies came from in a few years when I would understand the topic better.

Eight and a half months after the short-lived conversation about offspring, James Cornelius Bell was born and the light of my parents’ lives.

Not to say that I was pushed aside by my loving family, but I was the dull first child and Jimmy was the sparkling, spanking new version of me. Also, there is the fact that I happen to be a natural introvert, so I avoided the hubbub and excitement over my newborn brother like the plague. As much as I hate Jimmy, I love him. My brother and I have a weird bond; we’re very close, or we were very close. He and I always teamed up when it came down to conflict within our family. And it wasn’t so much that we were particularly against my mom and dad, but we struck together for the most part. I would’ve done anything for that kid; I would’ve taken a bullet for my brother, cliché as that may sound. We were that close as kids; when he got himself into trouble, I would say something snarky to my mom or dad, turn the heat away from him, make them upset with me so Jimmy could slither off to his room and hide away until the moment passed. It was easier for both of us that way. I hated seeing him upset, hated the idea of him feeling the way I felt sometimes.

We were a package deal, – Peter and James, Pete and Jimmy – at least until my demons snatched me.

A slight problem hung over my head during high school that worried my parents quite often. First off, they noticed the attitude I had regarding any of my peers. Remember that bit about wanting to be alone nearly all the time as a kid? That followed me into my adolescence. I didn’t go to football games, didn’t participate in clubs, and didn’t go to parties. Life felt better alone, and when loneliness struck, I tried my best to ignore it and hope for the best. Isolation is always, always, easier – ask anyone who looks uncomfortable in a group setting. It’s not easy to put yourself out there when you don’t know what to expect or if you even want to receive feedback on yourself. I just couldn’t do it and be happy, but then most things couldn’t just make me happy.

Partying never appealed to me, and by partying, I mean going out and getting wasted in a group setting, causing embarrassment and probably jeopardizing my possible future by making shitty memories and bad decisions. I just preferred to make bad decisions by myself because it was always easier that way.

Most of the other teenagers found enjoyment in that obnoxious behavior, but I simply found solace in my laptop and countless bottles of beer. Dad drank on a nightly basis, though not enough to cause domestic issues or make anyone unhappy. He drank in moderation, a beer a night, and quickly noticed his surplus of Coronas depleting. My father and I, we enjoyed the crisp taste; we shared that much. He drank legally, I didn’t, and that made us completely different – as well as the fact that he did it because he liked the flavor, and I did it because gulping down toxins made me forget why I was so unreasonably bothered all the time.

I just felt so needlessly sad all the time, couldn’t help how I felt, and searched for a way to make it all go away. I watched everyone grow into the people on television shows, watched my friends involve themselves in high school the way I didn’t want to involve myself. While everyone spent freshman year getting acclimated and feeling like they belonged, I felt like a disaster on legs. I felt like I sat in a ditch, undiscovered and sad, an example of how not to be a high school student, while every other one of my peers laughed and danced and did what teenagers do.

And the worst part about being stuck that way is that no one knows how to help you get out of your own personal ditch. No one knows what to say to you because they couldn’t possibly understand what goes through your mind, what pumps through your veins and through the blood that supposedly sustains you. And for the most part, no one tries or cares to try, which isn’t very inspiring when you’ve got nothing but hope for something better to come along and to replace what you’ve become. 

It’s easy for everyone to ignore the hormonal, moody teenager, and so they do because that makes life less of a burden for the general population. And it’s always easier than that when the moody teenager isolates himself to save everyone the trouble of forced socialization.

I spent my hours inside, with my books and my booze and myself. To make up for the lack of the good teenage life that books and movies and popular culture seemingly romanticized, I studied. I drank, and I studied, and I did well in school. It was easier to be an intelligent catastrophe than it was to be a fun catastrophe, so that was what I did, and it worked up until some boiling point hit my family.

How old was I when I started drinking? Fifteen, maybe… Like I said, I didn’t go out to parties and binge, no. I stayed in the comfort of my home and binged, because that made it better.

Mom worried more than she should have, dad didn’t yell, but they punished me by grounding me and forcing me to go out with friends. Their reasoning relied on the fact that I spent too much time wallowing in whatever nipped at me, so I needed to get some fresh air.

The first week resulted in a forced bowling trip – a sort of group date my distant, estranged friends set up for me, and so my parents allowed my buddies to pick me up and to take me to the very local, ludicrously irrelevant bowling alley. My date, named Esther (was she born sixty?), showed up with her friends, and we intermingled for a solid half an hour before I was bored and she was tired of my shitty jokes and awkward conversation about underlying themes in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. Apparently, Esther didn’t care about Montana Wildhack being a porn star or the way Vonnegut condemned society and the detriment of war… I’ll never understand why people can’t just have intellectual conversations. And my friends tried to help me, they really tried, but they failed and did not conquer the abrasive personality of Peter Bell, much to their own gloom. Being a despondent teen didn’t mean I didn’t want to particularly fit in; it just meant I didn’t know how, and after trying, ultimately decided that fitting in was only meant for punk-ass kids with nothing to lose and for guys and gals who would peak at graduation and live a downward spiral of a life.

Obviously, the date failed. Esther never spoke to me again, and my friends decided to leave me alone when I asked them to do so, and we never found reason to try out that horrible double, triple, quadruple date shit ever again.

Suffice to say, it didn’t work. They should’ve known, but no parent ever really knows how to deal with a premature development of alcoholism, I guess.

The grounding, the forced socializing, none of it worked for me. I didn’t drink while my parents were around, and I always made sure to replace what I consumed in order to avoid confrontation. Confrontation is a funny thing. It leaves you alone once the problem is resolved, but you can’t rely on it disappearing for good. About a week or so after graduating, valedictorian of my class, I drank myself silly on a fake ID at a pub just fifteen minutes down the road from my parents’ house. We lived in a small town, so the bartender knew who I was, but he was of the gluttonous variety. He took my money and proceeded to call my father to come pick me up.

A tad upset with my actions, Brad decided the silent treatment fit the situation.

I couldn’t blame him at all. The majority of my fellow graduates and their families talked about how I seemed to be falling to pieces since the commencement. It insulted my father; he worked hard for all he had, worked to create a reputation for our family, I guess, and I existed in a world of ruin rather than flourishing, as I should’ve. His anger with me subsided, and the rest of his rage manifested in ways we all considered unexpected. My dad was never cold.

To the people he heard gossiping about my inebriated condition, he froze. He stared them down with a chilled gaze none of us ever saw before those nights, and he shook his head in disdain, not saying anything but brash insults when prompted about how he felt about me. He didn’t take shit from that town, from those people, and he simultaneously breathed ice and fire, destroyed the assumptions as they came at him.

-

I didn’t excel in the family business, not like my father. He tried to teach me how to handle wood, how to be the carpenter he knew I could be, but his efforts were in vain. Weeks on end spent teaching me how to perfect a piece of furniture didn’t matter because I couldn’t put any of my father’s lessons together. It frustrated both of us to no end.

I would try to hammer in