The Queer as Folk Grocery Store Challenge

We're Not Gonna Die
by Josselin / Josselin

It all started at ten ‘til midnight on a Friday. Brian and Michael were at the grocery store, and Michael was antsy to get home, but Brian was trying to fish his favorite brand of beer out of the cooler. He had the door to the cooler open, and when he leaned down, he could see that there was one last six-pack in there, on the shelf, but for some reason it was stuck back there and not falling forward like it should. So he had his arm in there, trying to pull it down, but his fingertips only just brushed the cardboard, and he couldn’t get a grip on it.

“Come on, Brian,” Michael said for the eight-sixth time. “We have to go. The store’s closing. Ben’s waiting for me.”

“Shut up. I need my beer.” Michael rolled his eyes, and shifted on his feet again, the basket of groceries banging against his knees.

“You can’t reach it, okay? You’ll just have to bury your sorrows in domestic beer for once, and come back to get your favorite kind tomorrow, okay?”

Brian gave Michael a look that expressed his disdain for that suggestion. “I need to find a fucking clerk to get it down for me,” Brian said, musing, and then his eyes lit on the grey metal door next to all the glass cooler display cases that said, in bold black letters, “Employees Only.”

“Screw the clerk,” Brian told Michael, grabbing his arm. “Come on.”

“What the fuck are you doing?” Michael asked. Brian opened the grey door, smiled triumphantly at Michael, and went inside, dragging Michael along behind him.

“I’m just liberating my beer,” Brian explained, making his way around the waist-high pallets of Bud Light. The beer cooler of their corner grocery store was a small room, and poorly lit, with huge stacks of multicolored 24-packs lining the walls and shorter stacks of various other brands in the center of the room.

“Jesus, Brian,” Michael said. “We’re not supposed to be in here. And it’s freezing.”

Brian rolled his eyes, searching the shelves for his six-pack. “What, you were expecting the Sahara?” He grabbed his beer just at the moment when the grey metal door slammed shut behind Michael with an ominous bang. Brian held up his beer with a grin. “See, mission complete. We can go now. Aren’t you happy, Mikey?”

“Thrilled,” Michael said sarcastically. “Let’s get out of here before somebody catches us.”

Brian snorted. “You lead the way.” Michael turned back around, and pushed ineffectively on the door handle. After a moment, he set his basket down to try it with two hands. “Problems?” Brian asked snidely.

“I can’t get it,” Michael said. Brian pushed Michael aside, and tried the door himself, with no greater success. “Problems?” Michael asked, earning himself a glare.

“It’s stuck or something,” Brian said.

“Oh, shit,” Michael said.

“What?” Brian asked, grunting and pushing at the door.

Michael silently pointed to a hand-written sign on the door, which read: Don’t forget to prop the door! It locks automaticly!

“The fuckers misspelled automatically,” Brian said.

“Brian,” Michael said, his voice beginning to take on a panicked tone. “We’re stuck.”

“I’m gonna sue them until they have no store left,” Brian said, “cause there is no way that having automatically locking freezer doors is up with the fire code.”

“What good is that gonna do us when we’re dead?” Michael worried.

Brian gave Michael a look. “We’re not gonna die.”

“We’re not?”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“We’re locked in a freezer. Pardon me if I need a minute.”

“Fine,” Brian said. “You take a minute to piss in your pants, and I’m gonna bang on the door so somebody’ll hear us.”

“Hey,” Michael said, brightening. “That sounds like a good plan.”

* * *

It did sound like a good plan, but unfortunately, it didn’t work. They banged on the door for at least half an hour, and Michael threw in some yelling as well, but apparently nobody heard them—the cash registers were all the way up at the front of the store, and the liquor section was in the back.

Brian’s second plan was to take advantage of their situation and sit and have a beer.

The third plan, courtesy of Michael, was to get out through the cooler doors—they’d have to empty off one of the shelves and then slide through there, push open the glass door, and get out that way. But even Michael was not small enough to squirm onto the shelf, so that was out. Once the shelf was emptied off, though, they thought that maybe they could the long pole handle of the mop they found in there to push the glass door open and keep the place warmer or attract some attention by waving around the mop handle or something. But they couldn’t get enough leverage with the mop handle to push open the glass from the inside. So the cooler doors were abandoned.

Brian had another beer; Michael almost had a panic attack.

The fourth plan involved Brian’s cell phone, which he suddenly remembered was in his pocket. Michael slapped him on the arm for not remembering it sooner, and told him to call Ben.

“Why call Ben?” Brian asked.

“’Cause he’s worried about me!”

“Let’s call the police first, and have them come let us out of the cooler, and then we’ll call Ben and tell him not to worry about you,” Brian suggested.

The cell phone plan was another one that was good in theory but didn’t work in practice, because the walls of the freezer interrupted with the cell phone reception, and all Brian got was a message that he was out of range.

After that, it was about two, and they both had a beer, and opened the bag of pretzels from Michael’s basket.

“I’m freezing,” Michael said, munching a pretzel stick.

“Actually,” Brian reflected, finishing off his third bottle, “we probably shouldn’t be drinking all the nice alcohol.”

“Why’s that?” Michael asked, still raising his bottle to his lips.

“Because alcohol brings all your blood to the skin surface and thus lowers your core body temperature.”

Michael set the beer bottle down on the floor quickly. “You asshole! And you didn’t think to mention this sooner?”

“Plus,” Brian continued, “now I really have to piss.”

“Shit,” Michael said. “Now I have to go, too.”

“We’ll use the mop bucket,” Brian decided, rolling it over to the furthest end of the room from where they were sitting, and proceeding to unzip himself.

Michael joined him. “Well, at least this plan works."

“Hey,” Brian said, with a lewd grin, “I can assure you that everything works.”

Michael rolled his eyes.

While moving the mop bucket around, Brian found an employee’s jacket and hat, and gave them to Michael to wear.

“I can’t wear somebody else’s hat,” Michael protested. “I’ll get lice.”

“Oh, brother. You’d rather die of hypothermia than get lice?”

“So you admit we’re gonna die of…freezing to death,” Michael said, satisfied.

“We’re not gonna die,” Brian repeated. “But put the fucking hat on, so your cute little ears don’t fall off.”

“What about you?” Michael objected. “You’ll freeze to death all by yourself and I’ll be stuck in here with a popsicle.”

Brian claimed that he was fine, but finally Michael managed to get them arranged so they could kind of share the coat, Brian wrapping it around his back and Michael sitting between his legs and pulling the coat around them to put his arms in. Brian rested his arms around Michael’s waist, giving him an affectionate squeeze, and tilted his head back against the pack of beer cans.

“How can you be so relaxed while we’re freezing to death?” Michael asked.

“Why are you always so uptight all the time?” Brian countered.

That shut Michael up temporarily. But it didn’t last forever, of course.

“I never thought I’d end up dying in a beer cooler,” Michael reflected sleepily.

Brian snorted. “We’re not--”

“--Gonna die, I know," Michael finished. “I was just thinking.”

“I just, always hoped that I’d die of old age in the arms of someone I loved,” Michael said, craning his neck a little bit to look at Brian, who carefully looked away.

“I always wanted to die in a duel,” Brian said, “like in one of those Western movies.”

“A duel over what?” Michael asked incredulously. “You don’t care about anything enough to duel over it.”

That was perhaps true, or perhaps not, but Brian didn’t respond. “Or fucking. Orgasm of a lifetime.”

“Well, forgive me if I don’t indulge you,” Michael said.

“No?” Brian said teasingly, relieved that perhaps for the first time ever, they were both comfortable enough with the unfinished hand-job and unrequited love to joke about it. Brian slid his hand down to Michael’s crotch to tease. “You don’t want me to do you? This might be the last chance of a lifetime.”

Michael slapped his hand away. “Shut up. You’re the one who keeps promising me I’m not gonna die.”

“I didn’t say that your dick might not freeze off, though,” Brian added.

Michael squirmed uncomfortably. “Shut up.”

Brian laughed into Michael’s neck, chuffs of warm air contrasting against the chill.

They were silent for a while longer, the comfortable silence of friends who know each other too well and can hold each other comfortably without it meaning anything more than warmth and affection.

“You know what this reminds me of?” Michael said finally.

“Mmm?” Brian questioned.

“That time when your dad took us camping, to make men out of us.”

Brian laughed a little remembering. “God, he thought we were total failures.”

“Yep,” Michael giggled. “I pissed in my pants in the forest when I heard that bobcat--”

“It was a bluejay,” Brian interrupted.

“--And you burned yourself with the fire but didn’t say anything until your blister broke and was bleeding everywhere, and when it got dark and we were in the tent I thought I was gonna freeze to death, just like this.”

“You know what this reminds me of,” Brian said.

“What?”

“That time when Debbie took us to that amusement park.”

“Wunderwurld?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. But we had to wait until fall and go on a Sunday, because then the tickets were cheaper, or something.”

“And your mom almost didn’t let you come ‘cause you were gonna have to miss church.”

“Yeah. But I snuck out, and we went--”

“You snuck out? You told me she agreed to let you come!”

Brian didn’t bother responding to that one. “We went, and you and I went on that one rollercoaster like eight bazillion times even though you were absolutely terrified of it.”

“I was not!” Michael complained.

“Oh, you were too. I could tell from the girly way you screamed each time we did it.”

“But I went on it, didn’t I?” Michael argued. “Each of the eight-bazillion times.”

“You always do,” Brian said, smiling at Michael affectionately, and Michael smiled back, and Brian leaned in so they rubbed noses. “And when we rode on it, we had to sit like this,” Brian gestured, “and I had to sit in the back of the seat because I was bigger. And I remember that when we went over the humps, you always went flying up on the seat because the bar didn’t quite come down to your lap. And I just sort of held on to your waist because each time I thought you might just float away.”

Michael was silent for a moment, and then he said, “That’s actually kind of sweet, Brian.”

“Yeah, well,” Brian said, “apparently freezers make me maudlin. Just don’t tell Justin, or he’ll figure out some way set that up.”

Michael snickered. “Your secret is safe with me, Rage.”

“Good.”

There was more comfortable silence and then Michael asked, “Are you sure we’re not going to die?”

“We're not gonna die. We're gonna have a lifetime of free beer for our suffering.”

“Who’s going to rescue us? Justin and Ben will just assume we’re out cheating on them, so it’s not like they’ll check up on us, and they’d never guess we’d be locked in the freezer anyway, so…” Michael trailed off.

“The store opens at seven on Saturdays,” Brian said, “and at some point, somebody’s gonna have to come open the freezer. Especially after they see all the holes,” Brian pointed to the shelves that they had cleared all the beer off in their attempt at escaping. “And then we’ll get out.”

“And go find Ben,” Michael said.

“Mmm hmm,” Brian said. And then he said something very quiet, so Michael couldn’t be sure that he had caught it, but he thought it sounded like, “And Justin.”

* * *

They showed up at the diner at about eight on Saturday morning, and the tips of their ears were still pink from the cold. Brian set two enormous cases of liquor down on the table.

Ben was all frantically worried and hugging Michael, and Brian slid into the booth next to Justin, surreptitiously wrapping an arm around Justin's waist and pulling him in tight.

"Isn't it a little early for that?" Justin asked, gesturing towards the liquor.

Brian just snickered. "It's never too early when it's free," he said.

“Where were you?” Ben asked.

“You’ll never believe this,” Michael said.

“You know,” Justin cut in, “Brian always starts his stories off with that, and somehow, he’s always right.”

“Hey,” Brian objected, smirking. “I never make things up. But you’ll never believe this…”

THE END