"Y'know… I can't believe you're still wearing that parka."

"…...Well I can't believe you're still wearing that dumb hat."

"I got this hat in Peru."

"Oh, don't worry, I've heard about Peru."

Moments passed before Craig responded.

"It's too big on you."

Wendy took her time answering as well. She leaned up against the kiosk next to the gas pump outside Hatty's.

"Yeah, well," she murmured. "It's warm."

Craig locked the kiosk. "Did you close up the store."

"Uh-huh. Do you wanna hotbox your car before we go?"

"Yeah, we can do that."

Wendy climbed into the passenger seat of Craig's old Hyundai and started rifling around inside her backpack, eventually pulling out a small pipe and a little orange pill bottle filled with some ground-up pot. It was dark in the car, the light from the illuminated sign outside of Hatty's blocked out by a thick layer of snow that had covered the windshield and windows. Craig didn't bother to turn on the car's wipers when he turned on the engine. They just sat in the dark and waited for the air blowing out of the vents on the dashboard to warm up as Wendy packed a bowl and took a hit. The car filled with thick heavy smoke as she exhaled and passed the pipe to Craig.

"What're we smoking," he asked.

"Purple haze."

Craig finished taking his first hit and passed the pipe back to Wendy. She took a second hit and passed it back to Craig so he could take another as well. "So what's your weekend looking like," she asked.

"There are a couple spots I think I can hit up. I need to get Christmas presents too though."

"What're you getting me."

"Do you really want me to tell you."

Wendy paused as he handed her back the pipe. "No."

They sat in silence for a few more minutes, just passing Wendy's pipe back and forth as the smoke filling the car grew thicker and thicker. A Drake song played on the radio. It had become so popular in the recent weeks that they'd heard it dozens of times over the course of their regular post-closing smoke sessions in Craig's car. By now, they both knew every word to the song.

"Is anything happening up in Middle Park this weekend," Craig asked.

"Yeah, there's a few parties going on. It's the end of the semester so everyone's gonna be celebrating now that finals are over."

"How do you think you did."

Wendy exhaled the hit she'd just taken. She glanced over at Craig and smiled at him grimly. "How do you think I did?"

Craig lit another hit, finishing off the bowl. "Right. I gotta go. It's late."

Wendy took the pipe back and returned it to her backpack, dropping it inside the front pocket with the pill bottle. "Yeah. Me too." Grabbing her bag, she grasped the handle of the car door and opened it up.

The door of her own car shut behind her as Wendy made her way up the driveway to her house. She could tell by its dark windows that her parents were already asleep. Once inside, she made her way through the darkness up to her room. Dropping her bag by her bed, she turned on the lamp that sat on her desk, as well as the little space heater that she kept by the side of her bed. As the room began to warm up, she shrugged off Kenny's parka, letting it fall to the floor. Her actions slow and tired, she began to get undressed.

Wendy watched herself in the mirror above her dresser as she slowly removed her clothes. Pulling off her maroon Hatty's polo, she paused to stare at the long jagged scar that still ran along her belly.

"You jerk," she said quietly.

After changing into her pajamas, Wendy crawled into bed. Reaching down to the floor, she pulled her backpack closer and retrieved her pipe. She packed another bowl and opened her window, a frigid gust of air blowing into the room. Taking a hit, she exhaled out into the cold night. After another, she set the pipe on the windowsill, and let her head fall back onto the pillow below. She stared up at the ceiling of her bedroom, not thinking of anything at all. Finishing the bowl, she closed the window and reached over to turn off the light on her desk.

She woke up to find someone dropping a few stapled-together pieces of paper in front of her. Looking around, she found herself in a classroom at Middle Park Community College. She turned the bundle of pages over to find that it was an essay she'd submitted a week earlier. At the top of the front page was a large red "A". Wendy stared at the letter and sighed.

After class was over, Wendy went straight to her car, Kenny's parka wrapped around her to protect from the cold wind that blew across the school's parking lot. She was just approaching her car when she heard someone call her name from a little distance away. Turning around, she saw a boy from one of her classes quickly approaching.

"Sup Ben," she greeted wearily as he reached her.

"Hey," he responded, catching his breath. "What's up?"

"Y'know. You going to Michael's tonight?"

"Nah, I can't make it; which is why I'm glad I caught you. You got uh, you got an eighth you could sell me?"

Wendy shrugged her backpack off her shoulder. "Yeah," she answered as she unzipped it and reached inside. She pulled out a small plastic bag containing a few buds of pot and handed it to her classmate, who passed her back a few crumpled-up bills.

"Ugh, you're a life saver dude. See you after break?"

"Yeah. I'll see you after break."

After the boy had gone, Wendy got into her car. Sighing, she checked her reflection in the rearview mirror before rubbing the dark circles under her tired eyes. She brought the car's engine to life and backed out of her parking space, navigating around the campus towards a smaller parking lot just on the edge of MPCC. It was just beginning to grow dark as she parked her car in the most discrete corner of the lot.

After switching on the heat, Wendy retrieved her pipe and the pill bottle of weed from her backpack. She packed a bowl and started to get high. After taking a few hits in silence, she reached over to the car's center console and turned on the radio, the Springsteen CD she kept in her car spinning to life. Wendy continued smoking as the music started to play.

I remember us riding in my brother's car, her body tan and wet down at the reservoir. At night on the banks, I'd lie awake, and pull her close just to feel each breath she'd take. Now those memories come back to haunt me - they haunt me like a curse. Is a dream a lie if it don't come true? Or is it something worse?

Wendy finished the bowl just as the sun had finished setting. She looked at the clock on her car's dashboard and began packing another one. Taking a hit from the fresh bowl, she pulled Kenny's hood up and leaned her head against the window. She hoped a few more hits would be enough to ward off the dull headache that she could feel beginning to form at the front of her skull. Clenching her eyes shut tight, she tried to will the pain away.

"Yo, you need to wake up."

Wendy blinked her eyes open to find herself curled up in Michael Ryan's bathtub, the boy himself standing over her.

"What?" she asked blearily.

"I said you need to wake up, and you need to get out of here." He turned away from her and yelled out of the bathroom into the rest of the house. "Everyone needs to fucking get out of here, now!" He sounded furious. Wendy looked around to notice that the bathroom was littered with trash. Then she realized that she wasn't wearing Kenny's parka.

"I swear to fucking god," Michael fumed to himself. He began picking up the trash and fisting it into a large black plastic bag he was carrying in his other hand. "I am so done with this shit, I am never doing this again." He turned to face Wendy. "One of you assholes fucking blew up the trash can in my god damn kitchen."

Wendy rubbed her eyes and sat up in the tub, looking around the room for Kenny's parka. She couldn't see it.

"Never, fucking, again. It's like, I don't even know who half of you are!"

Trying not to panic, Wendy found her voice. "Hey. Do you know what happened to my parka."

"What?"

"Do you, uh," she started again, a hint of desperation already beginning to creep into her tone, "Do you know what happened to my parka?"

Michael scoffed in disbelief. "Your what? No, I don't! I've been too busy worrying about how I'm going to get rid of the scorch marks in my kitchen! My parents paid the security deposit on this place!"

Wendy stopped listening and climbed out of the tub, gathering her things and taking one last look around the room for Kenny's parka. Leaving the bathroom, she made her way through each room of the house in search of the coat, navigating through the remains of a party that had clearly gone on for longer than it should have. Wendy didn't even know what time it was; she tried to check her phone, but its battery was dead.

A pit began growing inside Wendy's stomach as she moved throughout the house, increasing in size with every room that didn't contain Kenny's parka. By the time she'd completed her sweep and had arrived back at the front door, all she could do was pray that she'd left it in her car, that it would just be waiting for her in the backseat once she returned.

But it wasn't.

Half in a daze, Wendy brought her Prius to life. Looking at her dashboard display, she saw that it was just past three a.m., and just below ten degrees outside. The girl shifted the car into drive without turning the heat on, making the silent drive back to South Park in the cold. She gripped the steering wheel tight the entire way, just trying to keep her breathing steady and her car straight.

She was probably already coming down with a cold by the time she reached home, her hands shivering so bad that she had trouble even unlocking her front door. Freezing and miserable, she navigated the familiar darkness of her house and retreated to her room. Once inside, she dropped her things and hurried towards her bed to turn on her space heater, crouching in front of it and holding her palms up to the warmth.

Exhausted as she was, something about the sinking feeling still lingering in her stomach prevented her from simply retiring to bed. She couldn't be alone with her thoughts; not that alone; not just yet. So instead of going to sleep, Wendy did the only other thing she could think to do, and retrieved her pipe from her backpack. But just as her still-shivering hands began to uncap the pill bottle containing her weed, she suddenly sneezed, sending the container flying from her shaky grasp and spilling ground pot all over the carpet of her room.

"Fuck!" Wendy hissed under her breath. Immediately she dropped to her knees and started trying to get the weed out of the carpet and back into its container. After getting rid of everything she'd brought to the party earlier, it was all she had on her, and she wouldn't be able to make it to Kenny's storage locker until at least tomorrow evening. Kenny's storage locker. Fuck, she'd lost Kenny's parka. It was gone. She'd lost Kenny's parka. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Wendy's hands slowly stopped moving. Hot wet tears fell from her face onto the carpet below as she began to cry, still kneeling in the center of her room. Wendy brought her hands to her face and began weeping into her palms, sobbing so loudly that her parents could probably hear her a few rooms over. Not that the sound of crying was an uncommon one to hear coming from her room these days. Still, this felt different; lower. She'd never felt so defeated in all her life.

But after allowing herself a moment of pity, Wendy stowed away her despair — as she'd learned and trained herself to do — and recomposed herself. It was late, and she'd have plenty of time to continue feeling sorry for herself tomorrow. With a final sigh, she picked as much weed out of the carpet as she could and returned it to its container, along with any stray hairs and pieces of dust that clung to some of the shreds of ground-up pot. Packing her bowl with the last of what she could salvage, she moved over to her window and opened it up, letting the cold night air in to meet the artificial warmth of her space heater. Wendy leaned out the window and started smoking. She looked out over her backyard, but all that lay beyond it was South Park. She couldn't see anything past that.

But when her gaze returned to her backyard, she did see something: a feint beam of light coming from the bushes behind her house, cutting through the night and flickering, flickering, flickering.

Wendy's eyes widened, before narrowing into slits. Taking a deep breath through her nose, she rose from her bed, left her room, and made her way downstairs. She stormed out of her house and into the backyard, until she was face to face with the light coming from the bush. Letting out the breath she'd taken back in her room, she walked into the light, crossing the yard and advancing towards its source in the bushes. She was only a few steps away when it flickered off and didn't return. Her heart practically stopped when it disappeared, her stomach plummeting. She quickened her pace, taking the last few nervous steps towards the bushes in a hurry, praying that the light hadn't already escaped.

Reaching the bushes, Wendy crouched down to part their branches. She looked inside in search of the source of the light but she couldn't find anything. There wasn't anything there. Defeated once more, she went back into her house, walked upstairs, returned to her room, crawled into bed, and went to sleep.

When next she awoke, Wendy found herself within the small confines of the kiosk next to the gas pump outside Hatty's. She lifted her heavy eyelids, a steady stream of lukewarm air blowing down into her face from the radiator above, keeping the kiosk just a little warmer than the winter weather outside.

Looking out the window of the kiosk, Wendy found that the gas station had become completely engulfed in a blizzard, the latest in a series of storms that had been covering South Park in snow for the past few weeks. It was snowing so hard that she couldn't even see beyond the parking lot. God, her world was growing smaller every day. She looked off into distance, but all she could see was snow. Everything was just... white.

Except for the red Jetta that was currently filling up with gas at the pump outside; and the blond hair on the boy waiting beside it.

Wendy's eyes shot open. Unlatching the kiosk door, she practically fell outside, racing to get the boy's attention as if he were just about to leave.

"Hey!"

Startled by her voice, Kenny turned to face her. Snow whipping around them, neither said anything as their eyes met. They just stood there in silence, so quiet that they could hear the gasoline rushing through the pump Kenny had set to fill his car; and they just kept standing there, looking at each other, until finally, the car finished filling up with gas. The pump turned off with a deafening click. Wendy found her voice.

"We're, uh. We're not supposed to let the customers do it themselves."

Kenny smiled at her. "I just wanted to make sure I hadn't forgotten how to do it."

Wendy didn't know what to say next. God, it was him. Wait though... something seemed different. But what? Studying the boy, Wendy realized that he was wearing what looked like a secondhand olive green army fatigue jacket. Fuck, what was she doing? Stop staring at his jacket and say something!

"Oh please," she laughed, trying to sound as nonchalant as she could. "You haven't been gone that long. When'd you get back?"

"Just this morning, actually. I was gonna text you and let you know, but I figured I'd swing by here first to check if you were around; and well... here you are."

Wendy lifted her arms wearily, showing off her bright yellow Hatty's windbreaker. "In all my glory," she tried to laugh, probably sounding (and looking) a little more pathetic than she would've liked. "I was gonna text you too, though; I got the pictures you sent me of your final, it looked like it came out really well! I'm sorry I forgot to message you about it, things just must have gotten away from me..."

"Dude, it's cool, don't worry about it. I mean, time does kinda move differently in South Park, right? How 'bout you though, how was your semester?"

Wendy laughed. "Honestly, I can barely remember. I feel like I've spent the last four months just locked in that kiosk."

Kenny looked at the convenience store wistfully. "Yeah, this place'll do that to you. I do kinda miss it, sometimes, though; or at least getting high back behind the dumpsters with Craig."

"Dude, Craig misses you so much."

"Oh my god, did he say that?"

"No, but it's so obvious."

"Ha. He really isn't that hard to read once you get a feel of him, I guess."

"Pffft, you'd know all about getting a feel of Craig, huh."

Wendy's remark landed with a thud as Kenny failed to respond. He just stared at her, and she stared back. Until finally, simultaneously, the two of them started to snicker and laugh.

"Did you miss me too?" the boy asked as their laughter began to die out.

Now it was Wendy's turn to fall silent.

"Yeah," she finally spoke. "Yeah. I missed you a lot."

Kenny smiled at her. "I missed you a lot too."

"How uh... how long are you gonna be in town for?"

"Till a little after New Year's. Next semester starts middle of the month."

"Cool... cool; and you've still got that place with Butters?"

Kenny smirked as he returned the gas pump to its holster. "Who do you think picked me up from the airport?"

"Why am I not surprised to hear that. Well, uh... we should hang sometime before you head back to school. If you want. I should be pretty free now that finals are over."

The boy looked at her for a moment, considering her offer. "Do you wanna come over tonight? Like, after you get outta here. I haven't gotten a chance to swing by the storage locker, but I'm pretty sure I left a little stash behind my records."

"Totally!" Wendy answered, probably a little more enthusiastically than she'd meant to. "Y-yeah, totally. That'd be cool. I wanna hear all about your first semester in New York!" She really did, too; more than she would have expected.

"Cool. So text me when you get off and uh, we'll get high. Just like old times, right?" He winked at her.

Wendy let out a little laugh. "Yeah, just like old times. Except, uh..."

"What's up?" Kenny asked.

"Let's... let's stay off the roof."

Kenny smiled at Wendy. "Good thinking."

Wendy watched as the boy's car pulled out of the gas station's parking lot and disappeared beyond the veil of snow. Realizing how cold it was, she locked herself back into her kiosk, freezing enough to be thankful for any extra heat she could get. As the rush from seeing Kenny faded, she could feel a blanket of exhaustion wrapping around her.

Leaning into the side of the kiosk, Wendy's eyes closed, the warm air from the radiator blowing into her face once more. Taking a deep breath, she allowed herself to drift off to sleep, her last waking thought, as always, a hope against hope that when she woke up, she would find herself in a better place - somewhere far away from the cold, quiet mountain town in which she'd always feared she'd grow old and die.

"Oh thank fucking god you're alive."

Wendy woke up with a groan, her vision coming into focus to meet the dark interior of Kenny's car.

Wait.

What?

Getting her bearings, she turned her head to find Kenny sitting in the driver's seat, staring at her as if he were looking at a ghost.

Wendy grimaced. "Why do I feel like I got cut open."

Kenny's eyed lowered to her stomach. Wendy's followed, finding that her clothes were soaked with blood. She looked back up at Kenny.

"I'm really sorry," he said.

Wendy leaned back in her seat, and sighed. "Me too. I'm sorry I'm a tornado."

"You're not a tornado."

"Yeah," Wendy insisted. "I am."

Kenny paused, looking at the sad, wounded girl who sat beside him.

"Well... you're my tornado."

Wendy looked over at him. Neither of them said anything. Because, well, sitting there in Kenny's car… after everything they'd been through together… everything they'd done to each other... what could they say?

The moment was broken by a searing pain in Wendy's stomach. Wincing again, she clutched her wound. "Fuck..."

Kenny's worried expression returned. "Okay, I am driving you to the hospital." He turned on his car and backed out of its parking space. "Hey can you open up the glove compartment? There's something in there that I think both of us could probably use right about now."

Her hand still holding the gash in her stomach, Wendy popped open the glove compartment to find a bottle of pink lemonade. A dopey looking lemon winked up at her from the label. Reaching for it, she twisted off the cap and took a swig, before recoiling from the taste of sour cannabis.

"You know... this doesn't taste as good as I remember."

"Yeah, well, still, save some for me."

The girl took another drink as her wound throbbed, growing more painful with each passing second. Trying to distract herself, she looked out the window as Kenny drove through South Park. "God..." she sighed, growing a little light headed as blood continued to seep from the tear in her stomach. "I can't believe I really am going to die in my hometown."

Kenny looked over at Wendy as she passed him the bottle. "Hey, c'mon, everything's gonna be okay. I mean, have a little faith. After all..."

The boy raised the lemonade, making a toast before draining the rest of the bottle.

"There's magic in the night."

That's all folks! Thanks again to everyone who's followed Pink Lemonade over all these years, as well as to anyone who may have just stumbled across it and read half a decade's worth of work in a matter of hours. Even though this story is over, I still have a few more fic ideas I'd like to get out there, so don't be surprised if you see something else pop up from me in the future. So I'll see ya round! And I'll always cherish the time I spend in South Park.