Taking Brittany Home by Mario Caliente

TAKING BRITTANY HOME”Daddy, can you come pick us up?”

“Hey, sweetie,” I spoke into my cell phone. Ashley, my eighteen-year-old daughter, sounded concerned.

“So soon? Who’s ‘us’”?

“Brittany and me. You know my friend, Brittany?”

“Yeah, sure. baby. You’re still at Melinda’s?”

“Yes, daddy. Can you come now?”

It was a Friday night in late March and I was trying to get my income tax material ready for my accountant, but my little girl needed me. “Of course, sweetie. I’ll be there in about ten minutes.”

“Thanks, daddy.”

I saved my work on the computer and grabbed my jacket and keys. Backing the Porsche 911 Carrera out of our suburban garage, I glanced at the clock on the dash. It was only 8:15 pm. I had dropped Ashley off at a party at Melinda’s house only forty-five minutes before. I was going to pick her up 11:00. I wondered what had happened. The party must have been a bummer.

As I drove toward Melinda’s, I thought about how important Ashley was to me, especially after her mother ran away with her boss a year ago and left us alone. If it wasn’t for Ashley, I don’t know how I would have coped.

Ashley had a good head on her shoulders. Very unlike her mother. She had her mother’s looks, though, which was certainly okay. I saw my ex-wife in every move my daughter made.

As I pulled up to Melinda’s house, I could see Ashley among a small group of other teenagers in the bright light on the front porch. She waved as she saw the Porsche pull into the driveway, and I then saw her turn and help someone up from one of the porch chairs. I watched as Ashley helped a girl down the steps of the porch, and then began leading her across the grass to my car. I leaned over and rolled the passenger window down as they came up to the car.

“What’s going on, babe?” I asked.

“Dad, you should have brought the Mercedes. I told you I had Brittany with me.”

“The Mercedes is in the shop, sweetie. One of you can squeeze in the back.” I then noticed that the other girl, Brittany, was wobbling precariously. As Ashley opened the passenger door, Brittany suddenly bent over and vomited. Shit, not on the car, I thought!

I watched as Ashley tended to her friend, patting her head as the girl finished tossing her cookies. I backed the car up a bit so that the girls wouldn’t have to step over the vomit, or in it, to get into my car.

“I’ll get in the back, Dad. We can’t put Brittany back there. Can you come around and hold her while I get in?”

I got out of the car and did as my daughter asked. Ashley, who was wearing jeans and a jacket, pulled the back of the front seat down and nimbly hopped into the back while I held her woozy friend. It was when I was searching for an appropriate part of the girls’ body to hold that I noticed that she wasn’t wearing much: a shoulder-less raspberry colored tube top with bare midriff, and a very short white mini-skirt. It was not the way a daughter of mine would have been allowed to dress in public.

“Doesn’t she have a jacket,” I asked of Ashley, who was settled in the tiny backseat of the 911. “It’s really cool out.”

“I don’t know, Dad. I asked her, but…I couldn’t get an answer, and nobody knew if she had one or not.”

Gently, I pushed the teenage girl into the passenger’s seat of the 911. Off balance, her butt plopped onto the seat, while her bare legs, like those of a young colt, stuck awkwardly out the car door, her skirt hiking up a very unladylike distance of thigh. With her now sitting beneath my eye level, I could also not help noticing that her tube top allowed a shocking amount of cleavage—shocking for a parent, certainly! She must have been wearing a push up bra, because there was no evidence of a bra on the upper portion of her ample young breasts, a good portion of which were bare for the world to see. Not exactly certain how to proceed, I bent over and lifted the girl’s feet—she was wearing a pair of moderately high heeled shoes—and maneuvered them into the car, bending her long legs at the knees in doing so. I then shut the door of the 911 and walked around to the driver’s side.

As I pulled the car into the street and drove away, Ashley, leaning forward in the backseat, proceeded to tell me what had happened while her friend slumped in the front passenger seat. The party at Melinda’s had quickly gotten out of hand because the girl’s parents weren’t at home. There were guys who had brought a lot of booze. “Honest, Dad, I didn’t know her parents weren’t going to be there.”

I looked at my daughter in the rearview mirror. “Did you have anything to drink?” I asked.

“Duh! I’m not a total dork, Daddy. I had a gin tonic. Just one, though. But Brittany, I don’t know how many she had. And this guy I know really well told me that some of the guys had roofies, and I think they might have given Brittany one, and I was scared for her, so I thought I’d better get her out of there.”

”What are roofies,” I asked.

“You don’t know roofies? Ruffles? Rochies? Date rape drugs, Dad.”

“Oh.” I learn things from my 18 year old daughter every day, but I was uncomfortable hearing the word “rape” come out of her mouth. “You did good, then, sweetie. That was the smart thing to do.”

“Well, she might have taken some, I don’t know. She seems pretty out of it.”

I then made some comment about how inappropriate Brittany’s clothes were for a girl her age. My daughter called me old fashioned. But I remembered a slumber party that Ashley had had a couple months before. She had four or five girls over for the night, and Brittany was one of them. Actually, I found out later that that was Brittany’s eighteenth birthday. I recalled now how I had gone into the kitchen for something around midnight. I thought all the girls were in the basement, but I found Brittany getting water from the spigot on the refrigerator door. The kitchen was rather dark, but from what I could tell she was wearing nothing but a white t-shirt, and there was nothing “old fashion” about seeing the inappropriateness of that. Why, the shirt just barely covered her…her…crotch! And there definitely was no bra beneath that t-shirt!

Brittany had caught me as my eyes were making that judgment about her braless condition, and I’m sure my face reddened. There was a brief, embarrassing silence between us that she broke when she said: “Hi, Mr. Adams,” as she continued to draw water from the refrigerator door. The voice caught me off guard with its low pitch, which seemed very mature for such a young girl. “I’m Brittany”, she said.

“Hello, Brittany,” I managed to say, trying to regain a composure that had been momentarily thrown off balance by the—well, there was no other way to say it—the “sexiness” of this young girl. She had apparently just brushed her long, dark blonde hair, for it fairly shinned in what was just enough light in the dark kitchen.

She maintained eye contact with me even after she had filled her water glass and let go of the spigot, and I found that to be not only atypical of a teenage girl, but to be additionally disconcerting, as well. The fact that she did not take her eyes off mine could not prevent me from shooting an involuntary glance at what was really a remarkable pair of legs on display beneath that skimpy t-shirt. I became deeply embarrassed, and was certain that she not only was aware of my discomfort in her presence, but was rather amused by it, given the devilish little grin that seemed to play at the corner of her lips.

“I really like your car, Mr. Adams,” she then said, again breaking what had become an awkward silence. “You’ll have to give me a ride it in some day.”

She was flirting with me!

“Sure,” I said. “Anytime.”

I snapped out of my flashback recollection just as we approached our house. Ashley had been talking, but I’m afraid I hadn’t been listening. “Is Brittany going to spend the night with you?” I asked.

“Dad! I just told you. No. Can you take her home? I was talking to her before she got wasted, and she said she just HAS to be home tonight by eleven, or else her parents are going to ground her.”

“Sure. We can take her.”

”Dad, actually, well…Billy Powell is going to come by soon and pick me up. He’s leaving the party, too. We’re going to go to a movie. Okay, Dad? Can you take her home?” From the backseat, my daughter put her hands on my shoulders and massaged them as I drove. The little devil knew that her dad could not resist anything she asked when she rubbed his shoulders. “I’ll type her address into the GPS for you.” I hadn’t said yes yet. I didn’t have to. It was a done deal.

At our house, I got out of the car and Ashley squeezed out the driver’s side door, leaving Brittany undisturbed in the front passenger seat of the 911.

“Look,” I told Ashley, taking her by the arm. “This Billy character, he doesn’t have any of those…roofies, does he?”

My daughter laughed. “No, Dad. He’s the one who warned me about them.”

“Do you really think someone slipped her one of those things” I asked, motioning toward the passed out girl in the car.

“I don’t know, but she did have a lot to drink. And the more you drink, the worse that stuff is.”

As Ashley walked toward the house, I checked the GPS and saw that Brittany’s house was a full sixteen miles away, going out on the state route. I sighed, thinking the round trip would take over a half an hour. The things I do for my daughter! I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

It was at the first stop light that I glanced over to the unconscious teenage girl sitting in the front seat of my sports car. Actually, she was more laying than sitting, as Ashley, when she had been in the backseat, had reached forward and dropped the back of the front seat to a forty-five degree angle so that her friend would be more comfortable. My concern was that she would throw up again.