lineup. I drank. Soon Dawnelle told us she’d see us later and bounded back onto the lawn. Lola offered to get us more beer. I had nearly my whole cup left and Lola said I couldn’t just sip all night. “You ever do shots?” she asked, and I told her no. “Well, it’s like shots,” she said. “You just have to open your throat and let it go down. You can’t think about it.”
I tried drinking it in bigger and bigger gulps, which I found wretched, but Lola stood next to me saying silly things like “Atta girl,” and “There you go,” and I felt an almost laughable pressure not to disappoint her. I thought of those mindless chumps in the movies they made us watch in health class, the kid who let his friends talk him into PCP, only then to jump off a roof thinking he could fly, the girl who smoked pot and accidentally shot her sister. And already, even before my first cup was empty, I could feel the first hints of drunkenness with its hazy remove, as if a soggy netting had been laid over my skull. It was not a bad feeling.
When Lola headed back to the kitchen for refills, I found an empty patio chair, the braided plastic cold and taut through mypants. Positioned along the clear path between the backyard and the keg, I could see how the disorder that had so panicked me was slowly giving way now to clearer patterns: people were going either to or from the keg, looking for a place to sit, or searching for a familiar face and giving loud shouts of discovery:
HABER! What up? … Brenda! BREN!
There was an almost ritualistic moment of exclamation when someone stepped outside:
Damn
or
Shit,
followed by a variation on
It’s cold out here.
Nearly every guy wore a baseball cap. Nearly every girl had goose bumps along her bare arms. In almost any given moment, you could hear someone proclaiming how fucking drunk they were.
A near-constant stream of Danny’s friends stumbled upon me and voiced their surprise or delight or confusion at my appearance here. Gregory Baron kept calling me Linda. Kent Newman offered to get me a beer and didn’t seem to understand when I tried to explain about Lola. “I can get her one too,” he told me. Melanie St. John told a long story through half-closed eyes about the compass she found on the search today and how she really thought it meant something. “Danny wouldn’t even know how to work a compass,” I said with rare frankness, and to my surprise, Melanie laughed. Everyone was drunk, which grew more and more endearing, since it seemed to steer people away from sentimental and more toward slightly careless and friendly instead.
“Look who I found,” Lola said upon her return, her arm laced through Tip Reynolds’s. She was grinning so broadly it was as if Tip were the Queen of England.
“Holy shit,” he said. “I had to see it to believe it.” He held two cups of beer, and he did a strange curtsy-type thing as he handed me one. “What’s up, Bluebird?” he asked.
The nickname threw me, in both its overfamiliarity and its nonsensicality. I was no bluebird. I didn’t even have blue eyes. Theconsumption of alcohol, I was beginning to realize, meant that all bets were off. In the final, waning moments of my own sobriety, I remember thinking there was something both exhilarating and awful about that. From a purely sociological perspective, I was curious about what might be discovered in this sudden funhouse of human behavior. But also I had one last urge to run away and seek shelter beneath the sheets of my bed or on the nappy carpet of David Nelson’s den or even on the couch as my dad flipped mindlessly through the full array of channels.
There were no more empty chairs, so Tip and Lola sat on the concrete in front of me. Lola sidled up so close to him, she was practically in his lap. Tip looked funny trying to sit Indian-style, given his bulk; his knees bent barely at all. He reminded me of a beanbag chair. Lola told a loud, rambling story about the undercover report they
I tried drinking it in bigger and bigger gulps, which I found wretched, but Lola stood next to me saying silly things like “Atta girl,” and “There you go,” and I felt an almost laughable pressure not to disappoint her. I thought of those mindless chumps in the movies they made us watch in health class, the kid who let his friends talk him into PCP, only then to jump off a roof thinking he could fly, the girl who smoked pot and accidentally shot her sister. And already, even before my first cup was empty, I could feel the first hints of drunkenness with its hazy remove, as if a soggy netting had been laid over my skull. It was not a bad feeling.
When Lola headed back to the kitchen for refills, I found an empty patio chair, the braided plastic cold and taut through mypants. Positioned along the clear path between the backyard and the keg, I could see how the disorder that had so panicked me was slowly giving way now to clearer patterns: people were going either to or from the keg, looking for a place to sit, or searching for a familiar face and giving loud shouts of discovery:
HABER! What up? … Brenda! BREN!
There was an almost ritualistic moment of exclamation when someone stepped outside:
Damn
or
Shit,
followed by a variation on
It’s cold out here.
Nearly every guy wore a baseball cap. Nearly every girl had goose bumps along her bare arms. In almost any given moment, you could hear someone proclaiming how fucking drunk they were.
A near-constant stream of Danny’s friends stumbled upon me and voiced their surprise or delight or confusion at my appearance here. Gregory Baron kept calling me Linda. Kent Newman offered to get me a beer and didn’t seem to understand when I tried to explain about Lola. “I can get her one too,” he told me. Melanie St. John told a long story through half-closed eyes about the compass she found on the search today and how she really thought it meant something. “Danny wouldn’t even know how to work a compass,” I said with rare frankness, and to my surprise, Melanie laughed. Everyone was drunk, which grew more and more endearing, since it seemed to steer people away from sentimental and more toward slightly careless and friendly instead.
“Look who I found,” Lola said upon her return, her arm laced through Tip Reynolds’s. She was grinning so broadly it was as if Tip were the Queen of England.
“Holy shit,” he said. “I had to see it to believe it.” He held two cups of beer, and he did a strange curtsy-type thing as he handed me one. “What’s up, Bluebird?” he asked.
The nickname threw me, in both its overfamiliarity and its nonsensicality. I was no bluebird. I didn’t even have blue eyes. Theconsumption of alcohol, I was beginning to realize, meant that all bets were off. In the final, waning moments of my own sobriety, I remember thinking there was something both exhilarating and awful about that. From a purely sociological perspective, I was curious about what might be discovered in this sudden funhouse of human behavior. But also I had one last urge to run away and seek shelter beneath the sheets of my bed or on the nappy carpet of David Nelson’s den or even on the couch as my dad flipped mindlessly through the full array of channels.
There were no more empty chairs, so Tip and Lola sat on the concrete in front of me. Lola sidled up so close to him, she was practically in his lap. Tip looked funny trying to sit Indian-style, given his bulk; his knees bent barely at all. He reminded me of a beanbag chair. Lola told a loud, rambling story about the undercover report they
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