We walked for hours, no phone, no money and it was almost night! I didn’t know about Flaming Star but I was hungry, almost starving!

“I can’t go on any longer!” I said as I sat down on the ground, “I’m hungry!” He looked at me as if I was pathetic. “Don’t look at me like that! Aren’t you hungry?”

“Yes, I am, but I don’t see any food shops, and if I do, I don’t have a single coin with me. I guess you don’t, either. So our best chance is to keep moving.”

“You’re right. But I just can’t.” I could barely stand. How could I possibly walk?

Then suddenly he gazed at the distance. I tried to figure out what he was looking at when I saw a building with a neon sign on the roof in the distance!

“We might get some help there!” I stood up again; the fatigue I had felt was suddenly forgotten, since there was the hope of food nearby!

“It worth a shot, I guess,” Flaming Star said as we he started walking.

We reached the building, which turned out to be a dive bar called “Losers Club!” which is what the neon lights on the top of the place said. There were a few motorbikes outside, which is never a good sign. The worst part of it, though, was I didn’t just have no money, I had no I.D. That meant that if I was carded I couldn’t prove to them that I was legal drinking age, which I wasn’t anyway. For a second I was tempted to just wait outside, but I’d already been through so much with Flaming Star I felt I had to stay with him. I guess the friendship lessons are having an effect on me.

We went inside. I couldn’t see much of the interior; a lot of the light fixtures were dark or their bulbs were broken. Some of the bar stools were covered with ripped leather on the seats, and some of the chairs at the tables didn’t match the style of the others. A pinball machine stood in one corner; it had been unplugged and the glass top was cracked. What I also noticed was that everyone looked … sad, preoccupied with their own thoughts. There was a band playing on a bare stage but no one seemed to care. This bar was really living up to its name!

We reached the bar, and Flaming Star turned his back on the bartender and leaned against the bar, looking over the room. He was obviously in no rush to ask for help or even a handout. My stomach, though, told me to take the initiative. I stepped forward to talk to the bartender, hoping I didn’t look too much like a high school kid who had no business being in a bar, which is also how I felt.

The bartender had his back to me; he was wearing a leather vest with the name of a motorcycle gang: TIMBER WOLVES. That was also not a good sign, but I couldn’t wait for someone friendlier to serve me.

“Hi, sir, could you please help us? We were kidnapped and we’re far from home, so we would be grateful if …” Of all the times for me to turn into a motor mouth!

The bartender turned around. He had a scar across his face, he was bald, and his face looked like a clenched fist. “Look, little fella,” the bar tender said as he grabbed Flaming Star’s shoulder and spun him around to look at him, “no one here has single coin to give you, the food is trash, but everyone here is eating it because they have no other choice in their miserable lives.”

“What happened to them?” I asked. I couldn’t help asking, but I was curious to know who had bigger problems than we did.

The bar tender pointed out a guy at a table, about 4 empty beer bottles in front of him. “You see that guy there, he was in a car crash and after that he couldn’t speak! He was a translator back in the day. And cuz of that accident he got fired.” Then he pointed at someone else. “He’s Jimmy, he used to be a champion motorcycle racer, then one day he lost and he never made the cut in competitive racing after that.” Then he nodded his head toward a table in the back. “Those four back there, they performed in theatre in the past, but the owner got rid of them cuz they screwed up a line and made everyone laugh at them. And most of the rest used to be football players, but a couple of bad seasons and they were cut from the team.”

“But what about you?” I couldn’t help asking.

“Me?” he said as he closed his eyes. “I wanted to be a singer, but they said I looked too scary you.”

“So what?” Flaming Star said. “You all sit here waiting for a miracle to happen?”

All of a sudden being carded wasn’t my worst fear; my worst fear was finding myself in the middle of a bar fight! But Flaming Star was on a roll: “I mean everyone have falls in their lives. But you know what they do? They stand up again!” I was not prepared for what happened next: Flaming Star began singing:

You all sit here and call yourselves losers
When you have to go out and stand out for yourselves

If someone punch you, you punch him back
Now life has kicked you why don’t you kick it back!

You all are sitting there and say the things you can’t do
Have ever thought, of what you can do?

I was afraid that they’d tell him to shut up, but nobody did. Flaming Star sang with … I can only call it “authority,” like you had to listen to him. The skinny guy in the band who played rhythm guitar, who looked like he needed a meal worse than I did, found the key and began to play along:

Yes I know the hill is high
I know that you will fall
But please don’t give up

Yes I know the rocks are sharp
I know that it is though
But you can’t reach there if you don’t try

He stopped singing and looked at the bartender: “Now tell me, do you want to become a singer?”

“Yes!”

Then he started singling out other people in the bar: “How about you, do you want to perform again? You want to be a champion again, or do you want to become a football team again?”

They all said as one, “ YES!”

“Then why don’t you fight for it?”

You all have goals
But you don’t score them

You are all alive
But you don’t feel it

Now what do you say?

Then, all of a sudden, the bartender started to sing!

Scars and wounds won’t take me down,
I fell from the hill and I hit the ground

I don’t care what others say,
I want to sing and live today

His voice was actually good, but what surprised me was that the actors joined in and started dancing and the football team clapped along and started singing!

We know the hill is high
We know that we will fall
But we won’t give up

We know the rocks are sharp
We know that it is tough
But we try to get to where we want

At that point everyone was singing, except the mute guy, of course!

No we won’t run away
We won’t take the turn
We will get to where we want

Yes we know that we will fall
But we always climb back up
Till we reach the top!

“Now tell me that you do have some money, a phone, or food?” Flaming Star asked.

“Sorry, we don’t have any phone, but we got some food, and here,” the bartender put his hand in his pocket and dropped a few coins on the bar, “This should be enough for ya both to take the bus to the town, if it hasn’t stopped running for the night.”

“Thanks!” we both said at the same time.

“I think we should thank you for showing us what we missed. You may take your seats, food will be ready soon! And I’ll bring you a couple sodas, since you both look underage.”

“No problem,” I said.

We sat down at a nearby table. I looked around at the bar and saw that it was empty. I guess after what just happened, they all went to get started on fulfilling their goals.

“Nice show, by the way. Didn’t know you could sing.” Honestly, I didn’t.

“Huh, then I wrote all those lyrics and music for what?”

The food arrived. “Ah, enough chit chat, let’s get down to business cuz I’m super mega hungry!” I couldn’t argue with that, I was starving, though what I saw didn’t look like food. I didn’t dare ask what it was because the bartender was in a good mood. It looked like he’d taken whatever he could find in the kitchen, thrown it in a blender, chopped it up, and blanketed it with some kind of cheese-in-a-can. But I was really hungry so I took a bite. As soon as I did, I split it out. Same for Flaming Star. This really was trash

Author's Note

Make sure to cheek out other chapters too.

Special thanks to my editor Daniel Drazen.