"I'm going to hide the piss in my camera bag!"
Oho, are you, little man? I thought, surreptitiously pressing "Pause" on my MP3 player so I could hear better. (Hey, don't judge me. Some mornings, when you're trapped on public transport with weirdos staring and body odours creeping into your nasal cavities, breakfast radio and Pimsleur's Learn Mandarin Chinese just don't cut it.)
The reason I wanted to hear the rest of what this kid was going to say was because, well, he was just a kid. His voice hadn't even broken yet. Standing up, he would have reached my shoulder. He had the face of a slightly seedy cherub.
Also, I was quite envious that he was wearing a Quiksilver hoodie. Between the mortgage and the car repairs I had to pay for yesterday (it is like the Toyota knew the exact amount of my tax refund and decided to have a giggle) I can barely afford to shop at Target.
So, the conversation the two kids were having had been going like this (my thought processes at the time appear in italic font):
Girl of 14 or 15 (she seems nice, I think she will grow up to be a model citizen, perhaps even an astronaut): So, are you looking forward to the trip?
Boy of 13 or 14: Yeah! I'm going to bring all this piss! (He really liked using the p-word. I'm going to assume he didn't care what he was bringing as long as one of the components had been fermented.)
Girl: Um, OK.
Boy: I'm going to hide the piss in my camera bag! (What? He has a camera bag too? One that is big enough to hide goon in? Even I don't have one of those. My indignation rises.)
Girl: (Pause.) I guess, as long as you don't let my mum see it. (I mentally downgrade the girl's career path from "astronaut" to "astrologer".)
Boy: It's going to be so awesome!
I know kids have been smuggling booze since the first caveman discovered that the fruit juice he left out all night made him pleasantly woozy (I have some colourful stories myself), but this kid was such a smug git that I would really like to see him busted.
So, Madame Mothers out there, if you are taking some kids out on an outing and one of them brings along a suspiciously heavy camera bag -- you know what to do.
My dobber's fee: a black Quiksilver hoodie. I think it will fit me nicely.