Again (7 page)

Kate

Carter got onto the elevator
as Steph and Alex stepped out into the hallway. They leaned against their door,
rosy cheeked and clearly buzzing. They wore tight Republic jeans and even
tighter scoop neck tops. Alex wore light blue, and Steph wore pink. Their
makeup was perfectly applied to make their eyes smoky and their lips pouty. I always
wondered when someone decided looking sexy was akin to being punched in the
face.

I was poured, thanks to
shapewear, into my Seven for All Mankind jeans and a white cashmere sweater
that showed off my supposedly nineteen-year-old boobs flawlessly. When you talk
about the geniuses of our time, you must never leave out the inventor of Spanx
and the push-up bra, especially when it came to taking ten years off.

“Are you guys ready to go?”
I asked, my subtle way of making sure they weren’t going to try to lure me into
their room for vodka shots I would have to deny myself.

“Why else would we be
standing out here?” Steph asked.

“Where are your coats?” I
replied. Then, remembering I wasn’t their mom, I closed my mouth and eyes tight
and braced myself for their
OMG you are such a loser
response.

Because what I’d asked
totally made me one.

“Is this your first college
party or something?” Alex asked.

“Where are we supposed to
put them when we get there?” Steph finished, her pink glossed lips pursing.

I’d forgotten this detail. There
was no bed to put your coat on at a college party. This was something that
didn’t happen until later in life when you cared about your property because
you’d purchased it yourself. After college, you also wanted to wear a coat
because you realized your mother wasn’t just being a nag, and going outside
without a coat in the middle of winter was asinine.

These girls hadn’t reached
that part of their lives yet, and as the nineteen-year-old I was supposed to
be, I shouldn’t have either.

“I’m not drunk like you guys.
I can actually suffer in the weather,” I tried, gripping hard to my jacket.

“Are you going to hold onto
it the whole night?” Alex sneered.

“Not sexy,” Steph added,
clicking her tongue on the x.

She was right. I wasn’t
trying to be sexy, but I did want to fit in. I did not want to be the only girl
at the party carrying her coat—the only girl carrying her coat because she was a
grown-ass woman.

I opened my door and threw
my coat back inside.

Pretty sad I could fall to
peer pressure so easily. It didn’t bode well for the night to come. No matter
what I’d said to Carter.

I closed the door, but not
before Dawn yelled that if I brought a guy home she wouldn’t be able to control
what she drew on our faces in permanent marker while we were sleeping it off.

I guessed
penises
,
but it would probably be something a little more original and undead, perhaps
severed
demon penises
.

I joined Steph and Alex back
in the hallway. Now it was me and my sweater against the twenty degree weather.
Me and my new mantra against a house full of alcohol.

“Much better,” Alex said.

I nodded, even though I was
pretty sure I was going to freeze my ass off to prove I was their age.
Considering the other stuff I would probably have to do over the next three
months, scratch that—three
years,
going coatless would definitely not be
the worst or most embarrassing.

We headed toward the
elevator, dorm life existing all around us. A dorm was a lot like a zoo. Each
room held a different species that with every open door you passed you could
either study or ignore.

The skinny, dorky guys at
the end of the hall playing Wii Mario Kart in their boxers were an ignore.

“What’s Twilight doing
tonight?” Steph asked.

“Reading,” I said, even
though I had no clue.

“About how to be a vampire?”
Alex added, laughing and flipping her hair behind her. I smelled coconuts.

“Dawn’s not so bad,” I
admitted. I mean she kind of was, but I also was starting to understand her. She
put up armor so she could make it through the crazy maze of college. Some
people used vodka, some people used sex. People like Carter I guess used
studying. Dawn used black hair dye and eyeliner and intimidation.

Steph shrugged, her identical
brown hair flowing down her shoulders. I smelled apples. “She seems nicer since
you got here, anyway.”

We stepped into the elevator
and headed downstairs. I couldn’t imagine Dawn being pricklier than she already
was. She must have
really
hated her last roommate. I wondered what she’d
drawn on her and her sexual partners’ faces in permanent marker.

“Hey,” Alex said, her laugh
reverberating off the shiny metal elevator walls. “Maybe Kate’s the real witch.”

“Yeah,” Steph added, with
her own shrill, drunk laugh. “She put a spell on Twilight to take the cunt out
of her.”

“Abracadabra,” I said pointing
at both of them and wiggling my fingers. They both tumbled in laughter. They didn’t
get the joke.

We moved through the lobby
and headed out the glass front doors of the dorm. Before I could even take a
breath, the arctic air outside hit me like a whale-sized fist made of ice. I
almost doubled over. I prayed this night wouldn’t make it so I started college-take-two
with a case of pneumonia. I might have been getting by looking like a nineteen
year old, but I didn’t have the immune system of one.

“So where’s the party?” I
asked, trying to keep the chattering of my teeth in check.

“Fraternity Row,” Steph
said.

“Or as we like to call it, ‘the
salad bar’,” Alex added, with exaggerated quotation marks.

“What? Cause of all the
choices?” I asked, wrapping my arms around myself, focusing on the sound of our
boots crunching over the snow and not on the freezing air shooting through my
clothes.

“Nah,” Steph said, her
breathing shallow. “There are so many guys there it’s like all the ranch
dressing you could want.”

“Or creamy Italian, or poppy
seed,” Alex continued, knocking into Steph with her hip. I was afraid it might
shatter from the cold. Of course, girls their age didn’t have to worry about
early onset osteoporosis.

“Really any cream based
sauce,” Steph replied with a lilt in her voice, making it clear if it wasn’t
already, which it totally was, that they were talking about spooge.

Was I this much of a pervert
in college? I mean, sure I was, now. What twenty-nine-year-old who’d lived in
the big apple and had been through the whole
Sex and the City
awakening
wasn’t, but these girls were
girls
and they had basically told me they
were on a search for cum.

“Are you guys in a sorority?”
I asked quickly, saying anything to get the image of buckets of semen with
little brown ladles in them out of my head.

They shook their heads. “We
pledged, but there were too many rules,” Alex said.

“We still get invited to
frat parties, though,” Steph continued.

Considering what they called
Fraternity Row, I wasn’t surprised.

“It was worth pledging to
meet the guys,” Alex said.

I didn’t respond, just readjusted
myself even though my extremities were numb.

“We say we have our own
sorority, Alpha Sigma,” Steph said.

“But now with you we can be
Alpha Sigma Kappa,” Alex clapped.

I smiled, even though the
bitter air was converting my bones to powder. I, for one, did have to worry
about early onset osteoporosis. I hoped walking to a party in sub-freezing
temperatures was the only hazing I’d have to endure from Alpha Sigma
Kappa.

Luckily, fraternity row was
just off campus and we were back inside and boiling in less than ten minutes.
I’d forgotten how disgusting frat houses were. The whole place smelled like
beer and feet, and I had to admit, semen. Maybe that was the real reason they
called it “the salad bar.”

The house was packed, the
music was ear-splitting and the stench in the air seemed to fill the pockets
where there weren’t people or music. Nobody cared. Everyone at this party was
too drunk to notice, or working on getting too drunk to notice.

“Let’s get a beer,” Steph
screamed above the noise, fighting through the sweaty throngs toward the keg.

“I’m going to sober up if I
don’t get one soon,” Alex added.

I followed the back of their
heads like they were life rafts, because if I didn’t it was possible I was
going to drown in the bodies around me. All of these kids had their whole lives
ahead of them and the only thing they wanted was a beer in a plastic
cup—something so simple, something so pure.

All I’d wanted was another
shot at the life they had ahead of them. It was romantic, really. Or maybe
everything seems romantic when you have music blasting and shaking each red
blood cell.

The guy working the keg had
adorably shaggy brown hair, thick football player arms, and was wearing a tight
wife-beater, but in an undoubtedly ironic way.

“Hey ladies,” he said,
giving both Steph and Alex a sweaty hug, pulling them into his well-developed
chest. “Who’s your friend?”

“Kate,” Steph said.

“She’s new,” Alex said.

“Well, hello new Kate,” he
said, handing me a beer of my own. The way his smile was as white and inviting
as the foam head on the top of it made me forget I’d even taken it from him, or
maybe it was the very long week I’d had, or that he believed new-Kate actually
belonged here.

The cup was cold, familiar, made
me a little nostalgic for my own college-take-one days. All I’d wanted back
then was something this simple and pure too—a way to fit in, to be normal. I
didn’t know what truly needing alcohol would feel like.

How it would take over
everything in my life.

Beer always made me
philosophical, wine always made me poetic, and tequila, well, that made me
hurl.

I stared at the beer.
Holding it was a little like someone who’d been suffocated, being given an
oxygen mask that might have carbon monoxide flowing through it. The craving chomped
at the deepest part of my stomach, and saliva filled my mouth, begging to be
washed away.

Get a grip, Kate
. I didn’t have to drink. I could hold onto it and at the first
opportunity dump it in one of the big plastic buckets scattered against the
wall.

I hoped they were for spent
cigarettes and not puke, but they had probably been used for both.

“Let’s mingle,” Steph said.

“’Cause I’m damn tired of
being single,” Alex added with a giggle. The kind that at eighteen is still
adorable.

We moved back into the
crowd. As we mingled, I couldn’t help taking a sip of beer. I mean, it was so
hot in here, and it was spilling. But as I knew and didn’t want to know, one
sip led to another, and another, and another until there was only the white
bottom of the cup as I drank the last warm, flat drop.

Oxygen vs. suffocation
victim had nothing on beer vs. alcoholic.

Before even having to tell
them, Alex and Steph sent some guy everyone called Shifty to get us a refill.

Someone who liked alcohol
much as I did should not have decided hanging out with college kids at a party
was the best place to start not liking it. I had been strong this past week
because I’d been able to avoid this. Now that I was here and getting a buzz on
there was no escaping. I wanted more of a buzz—craved the familiar warmth to float
over my skin and insides like stepping into a bathtub.

“You’re welcome,” Alex said,
nodding her chin at Shifty by the keg.

“You say no to Grey Goose,
but crappy beer that tastes like my used panties makes you go crazy,” Steph
said, laughing.

The thing was, it wasn’t the
beer that had finally broken me. It was me that had broken, finally.

“She’s a cheap date,” Alex
yelled, pointing at me, but it was so loud in there no one was listening anyway.

“It was just one beer.” I
bargained with myself as much as them.

Shifty handed us our newly
filled cups and gave Alex and Steph a sloppy kiss on their foreheads before he
headed back to his friends.

“Now it’s two,” Steph said.

“Cheers,” Alex said,
clinking with me.

The beer spilled and slid
down the side of the glass. I licked it clean out of instinct. “I haven’t
finished it yet.”

“No, you’re giving it a rim
job first,” Steph howled.

“You’re not even on a first
name basis, Kappa.” Alex added.

We were actually on a no name
basis. It was like my own blood, and before I came here with Alex and Steph and
tried to deny it, I needed it just as badly.

As the party went on, two
beers became three, then four, then five. The little voice in my head
persuading me from one to the next; it was okay to keep going—there was no
other choice but
more
.