Cordelia sat at the bar with a glass of wine in hand. The bartender had made a token attempt to card her, but had buckled at a single dark look and brought her a second glass.
Debi climbed up on the stool next to her. "Margarita!"
"How many of these have you had?" the bartender demanded.
"Bought or actually finished?" Debi wondered. "Just keep watering them down like you have been. I'm still a long ways from being as smashed as I want. She opened her purse and handed Cordelia a tissue.
"I am not crying," Cordelia told her angrily, and wiped at her eyes with the tissue.
"Good," Debi said. "Because it's more than they're worth."
"It's all Buffy's fault," Cordelia said. "How did I end up existing in her shadow anyway? Two years ago I was the most popular girl in school. Maybe nobody really liked me that much, but they respected me! And what was Buffy anyway? Sure she was popular at her old high school, but she blew it. Why did she have to come here and ruin my life?"
Debi nodded sympathetically. "I remember your sophomore year. Girls used to come into the counselor's office in tears because you and your friends had snubbed them."
"Really?" Cordelia said, brightening somewhat. "You're just saying that to make me feel better."
"No, really! Dozens of them! We had parents trying to get us to adopt a school uniform because their daughters couldn't compete with you guys fashion-wise. Principal Flutey was bummed that he couldn't do it. He was always big on that self-esteem stuff."
"Excuse me?"
Both women looked up at Angel, who was looking about the bar with a lost look on his face. "I thought Buffy might have come up here. Cordelia?"
"She's in the back dining room, either taming her pet Watchers or being tamed by them," Cordelia snapped. "Either way, it's an A ticket ride."
"Are you Buffy's boyfriend?" Debi asked.
"Uh, yes. Sort of," Angel said. "Did it look like they were going to be long?"
"Decades," Cordelia said. "Unless any of them stops being so thick-headed."
Angel pulled up a bar stool and sat next to Cordelia.
"I'm Debi." The secretary reached over to offer Angel her hand. "I'm Rupert's date."
He shook her hand. "He's right. You are pretty."
Debi flushed and looked down into her drink, grinning.
"I'm glad he asked you out. He deserves more happiness than he's gotten lately." Angel turned towards the bartender. "Tequila sunrise, please."
"They make pretty good margaritas," Debi remarked. "If they'd stop watering them down and use the good tequila."
"Maybe I don't deserve the good tequila," Angel said.
"Oh, god." Cordelia rolled her eyes. "What have you been reading now?"
Angel looked at her irritably. "I happen to have problems besides what I'm reading."
She reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a paperback copy of Crime and Punishment, and pitched it to the bar top in front of him. "Hasn't Buffy ever had a word with you, mister, about all this boring depressing crap you've been wallowing in?"
"It's a classic!" Angel protested.
Debi reached for the book and opened it up. "Of course it is! Look how thick it is. And all these words. Can I borrow it after you're done? I need to get better read; after all I'm dating a librarian now."
"Don't." Cordelia downed the rest of her wine. "You're going to regret ever getting sucked into the Buffy and Giles road show. Believe me, I should know."
"Cordelia, you're a beautiful woman," Angel said. "You should be moving ahead with your life, not wallowing in bitterness.
"Hah." Cordelia scowled "Mr. Stuck-with-Himself speaks."
"We are a bit of a pair," Angel said ruefully.
"Did you guys see where --" Xander noticed Cordelia sitting between Angel and Debi, and he stopped.
"She's in the back with Giles and Wesley," Debi said. "You're gonna have to wait your turn."
"And you just happened to stop by for the blue plate taco special?" Xander said to Cordelia.
"No, I'm here on an intimate dinner date with Wesley," Cordy said, refusing to give him the courtesy of a direct look.
"I'm noticing the distinct lack of Wesley," Xander shot back. "You're stuck with the dinner bill again, huh?"
"No, not that I'm no longer dating you. Wesley has money. And credit cards."
"Hope he realizes he'll need all of them with you," Xander said. "Why don't you just charge him a flat -- oww!" He turned indignantly, only to come face to face with Willow.
"Stop it!" Willow said. She rubbed at her ears. "Do you know how incredibly pathetic you guys have been sounding lately? Least you can do is try to act like you're 18, in public. Sometimes I just want to hire a baby-sitter for both of you."
"Are you feeling okay, Willow?" Xander said.
"No," she whimpered. "I'm hungry, you ate my taquitos, and Spike's been making evil eyes at me. And you all left me! Alone with two evil vampires and two clueless grown-ups! And now you're all bickering!"
"Sorry," Xander, Cordelia, and Angel chorused.
"Come here, hon." Debi pulled out the empty stool next to hers and patted it. "We've got some nacho chips. And we can order from the bar menu for you."
"I'll buy!" Xander said hurriedly, and steered Willow to the stool.
"Okay," she said, and climbed onto the stool. "What's that smell?"
"You noticed?" Angel looked over at her. "I thought it was Cordelia's perfume."
Cordelia glared at him.
"I have an extra-sensitive sense of smell!" he protested.
"And I'm a witch. We witches can smell stuff." Willow sniffed again. "Brimstone. And lilies. Rotting lilies."
"What does brimstone smell like?" Xander wondered. "And do they make it in an air freshener?"
Willow stood up on the lower rungs of her stool to peer over to the other side of the bar. "Euww." She looked up at the bartender, who was standing by his bottles putting together drinks. "Excuse me?"
He turned towards her with a bland expression. "Can I get you anything, miss?"
"Guess you haven't noticed, but there's kind of a gross mess back there?"
He looked at the floor. "It'll go away," he said, and turned back to his bottles.
Willow fell back into her seat. "Okay," she said.
Debi hiked herself up for a look. The broken glass had been cleared away, only to be replaced with mounds of rotting flowers. "Hey, those look like daisies! Except they smell like lilies now. How'd you do that?" she demanded of the bartender.
"The flowers?" He set a margarita in front of her. "Sick building syndrome."
Debi stared at him.
"Parts of the building are haunted," he continued. "It's not my doing. At the bar here, we get physical manifestations. If it's not broken glass, it's rivers of blood, or frogs, or rotting flowers. Ignore them. They'll go away."
"Frogs?" Willow said weakly.
"They're not so bad. They're colorful and they sing. I only have to be careful where I step because they're poisonous. But the ghost Muzak . . ." He shuddered.
Willow pulled the basket of nacho chips into her lap and pushed her stool away from the bar. "When do you get the frogs usually?"
"And then there was this one night last week when I got Shriners."
"I think there was a convention in town actually," Angel said.
"Convention?" The bartender grimaced. "Damn! I took the fire extinguisher to 'em. Oh well, at least they weren't regulars."
"So what happened?" Debi pressed. "Why's the bar haunted?"
"Please don't encourage him," Cordelia groaned.
"Well, I'll tell you." The bartender leaned conspiratorially on the bar top. "Back in the 1920's, there used to be an ice cream parlour on this site. And right here was the soda fountain. All the kids in the city used to come here in the hot summer afternoons for ice cream and maybe a furtive smooch or two. The soda jerk -- he was a guy who looked a lot like me I'm told -- knew about all of the little affairs, but he was a very righteous fellow and kept their confidences.
"Now this was during the days of Prohibition. And if you came to the soda fountain and knew what to ask for, you could not only order vanilla and chocolate, but also a rum raisin surprise --"
"Imagine," Xander said, leaning his chin heavily on one hand. "And all this before Baskin Robbins."
The bartender looked at him distastefully, but continued. "Everybody in Sunnydale knew about the rum raisin surprise, but they all kept the secret. Until the night Daisy Sue Wilkins went stumbling home drunk as the proverbial skunk. Her uncle, The Mayor, was really pissed off."
"Boy, that could bring a new meaning to the phrase 'demon rum'," Willow mused.
"Hey, you guys asked for this story!" the bartender protested. "Are you all going to insist on having your two cents in on everything I say? If you're not interested --"
"No, no," Angel insisted. "This is fascinating. We'll all be quiet as church mice."
"Just how quiet are church mice, anyway?" Xander began. "Has anybody ever actually gone and measured --"
Willow clamped a hand over his mouth. The bartender smiled at her and continued. "The Mayor had the local police chief in his pocket. Mean son-of-a-weasel by the name of Carsons."
"I think I met Son of Carsons tonight. Back in the kitchen," Debi contributed.
The bartender nodded. "That was Carsons. Or rather his ghost, still haunting the restaurant. Carsons was betrothed to Daisy Sue --"
Debi frowned. "For a dead guy, he sure had a raging hard-on."
The bartender smiled thinly at her. "-- but Daisy Sue was secretly in love with the soda jerk --"
"Who looked a lot like you! No wonder Police Chief Carsons was frustrated!" Debi sighed.
Xander leaned over to Willow. "How come she gets to interrupt his story?"
"Shh," said Willow.
"Daisy Sue came to the ice cream parlour every day to see her secret crush, but she needed an excuse so every day she ordered the rum raisin surprise. Little did she know that her infatuation was reciprocated, and that the soda jerk secretly loved her too."
Angel, Debi, and Willow all sighed. Xander and Cordelia exchanged glances, then rolled their eyes together.
"-- but he was a lowly soda jerk -- okay he also fronted the town's only bootleg liquor outlet, but he was good at heart. What could he offer the Mayor's niece besides that heart? And the lilies that grew in his mama's garden?"
"And the great wads of cash from the bootleg liquor racket?" Cordelia said.
The bartender looked pointedly at her. "Who's telling this story?"
"And a more stupid story never crossed this counter, I'm sure." Cordelia hopped off her bar stool. "When Buffy comes out, why don't you guys all form a mop gang and help this moron get his act together back there? I'm going to the ladies room. You can tell Wesley when he gets out of his conference of the lame."
"We'll send him into the girls room after you!" Xander yelled after her. Willow turned to glare at him, and he slapped a hand over his mouth.
"Somebody should go and warn her about the ghost of Daisy Sue, who was strangled by her own nylons in that very washroom," the bartender said.
"Wait, nylons weren't even invented then!" Willow looked at him suspiciously. "Besides, Buffy and I were in there earlier."
"The ghost only appears when you stare at your reflection in the mirror for a time."
Xander started, then turned to look pleadingly at Willow.
"Oh, come on," Willow whined at him. "You weren't buying into the earlier part of the story. And I haven't gotten my taquitos yet!"
Xander turned on the puppy-dog intensity.
Willow sighed and made her way back towards the restrooms after Cordelia, basket of nacho chips still hugged to her chest.
"So?" Angel turned back to the bartender. "What's the rest of the story?"
"Nah, you guys don't really want to hear it," he said testily. "It's a stupid story. Ignore the fact that I have to live with a haunted bar every working night of my life."
"I want to hear it," Debi said. "This restaurant gets good reviews in all the newspapers, and it's haunted? Who would've thought?" She looked sympathetically at the bartender. "How do you manage?"
"The tips are pretty good." He glanced about. "I got to look busy now. I'll tell you guys the rest of the story later."
Debi and Xander stared at their reflections in the mirror behind the bar for a minute. Debi fluffed her hair, frowned squintingly at the mirror, looked at Angel sitting next to her, then back at the mirror. She bent back to look at Xander, then looked at the mirror again. With a perplexed shrug, she opened Crime and Punishment and started to leaf through it. "So," she said to Angel. "You and Rupert know each other?"
"Knew is more like it," Xander said. "Yep, that about covers it." He climbed up on Willow's bar stool. "Beer?" he asked the bartender hopefully.
"ID?" the bartender said.
"Mountain Dew?" Xander sighed. "Do I look like I'm going to be such a different guy in thirty-seven months?"
"Rupert and I . . ." Angel rubbed moodily at the bar top. "My last real friend was centuries ago. And he was a drunken layabout, like me. Rupert's the only friend I ever had who I could actually talk literature with, you know?"
"Wow," Debi said.
"And opera. I mean, Whistler was a friend too, but his idea of high culture was a WWF tag team wrestling match." Angel frowned unhappily.
"Well you know," Debi said thoughtfully. "There's a time for opera, and a time for WWF tag team wrestling. And sometimes you have to say to yourself: Dang, I should go to the opera and watch some fat guy sing about his rotten love life, but there's this wrestling match I've got tickets to, and I've been in this funk all week long, and what is going to be better for my mood anyway? I mean, is it gonna do anybody any good if I'm a real downer all week long?"
"Now this," Xander laid a hand across Debi's, "is a woman of great good sense. You know you might actually be kind of fun to be around, Angel, if you'd go see some wrestling matches?"
Debi nodded emphatically.
"Debi, if Giles doesn't marry you, I will," Xander proclaimed. "Except I have to turn 18 first."
"S'okay," Debi said. "But there's a queue."
"What?!" Xander looked shaken. "You've got a line of guys waiting to marry you?"
"A line of students," Debi said. "Oh, and Mr. Rafferty too, except he's waiting for his wife to die first."
Xander frowned. "I've seen Mrs. Rafferty at the school. You might have to wait a while for that. She looks like she's outlasted mountains."
"No problem. Mr. Rafferty is a toad." She rummaged around in her purse. "Everything's all turned around in here. . ." She pulled out a roll of breath mints with a triumphant grin. "Let's see, as of last count I had six of the students -- five boys and a girl -- and one of the faculty waiting. Almost as good as last year, 'cept then there was Mr. Madison who actually was of legal age and available when he asked me to marry him. But he was drunk then, and I think he was just feeling lonely."
"One of the girls asked you?" Xander said numbly. "Uhm, any chance you could, maybe, tell us her initials?"
"Why?" said Angel. "What earthly use could you make of the information?"
"Unlike some people I could mention, I have a healthy fantasy life," Xander said.
"What makes you think I never fantasize?" Angel gave Xander an evilly lingering leer.
"I-yi-yi-yi --" Xander said, and fell off his stool.
"You okay, Mr. Harris?" Debi said, looking down at him.
"Fine, fine!" Xander said from the floor. "Could you pass me my Mountain Dew, please?"
"The bartender says it's two dollars," Debi said.
"Could you give the bartender two dollars, please?"
Angel pulled a wad of cash from his coat and tossed to bills on the bar.
"I owe you two dollars, right?" Xander said. "You didn't buy me a drink."
"If you say so." Angel handed the drink to Debi who handed it down to Xander.
Buffy came storming up out of the back dining room. Angel started to get up, took a second look at her and settled back down on his bar stool.
"Uh oh," Xander said. "What do you suppose --"
Wesley stomped out from the room, tangled a moment in the beaded curtain, threw the beads violently to one side. They caught in his glasses and dragged them off his face. Wesley fought for them, finally managing to wrestle them loose, and pushed the glasses forcefully back on his face. He glared at Debi and Angel, then down at Xander. Xander started to make a comment, glanced up at the others and shut his mouth again.
"Don't think I don't know that you're talking about me behind my back," Wesley snapped at them.
"Cordy's in the girls room," Xander offered.
"I know that." Wesley stalked over to the jukebox in the corner and began to study the selections.
Debi slid off her stool and slipped back through the beaded curtain to the back dining room. Xander and Wesley briefly locked scowls from either side of the bar area, then Xander pushed himself to his feet and followed Debi.
"Uh, Xander!" Angel said, but the teen ignored him. "Damn, don't these kids ever listen to anybody?"
Wesley gave a bitter laugh and pushed a quarter in the jukebox. The opening chords of Adam Ant's "Goody Two Shoes" pounded out of the speakers. Angel hastily got up and headed into the back dining room.