David scrambled around the island to hug Ruby. He also gave me a wave over her shoulder, which was more than I expected.
“How’s it going,” he said. “What’s up,” I replied. Two questions uninterested in answers.
Ruby extracted herself from David’s drunken death grip and slid two cups off the stack for us, handing me one.
“Always gotta be fashionably late,” David teased, and I realized nine wasn’t when the party started for anyone but Ruby. Which made the drunkenness levels around me more logical. Alex and Emily, for instance, were shiny and squinty-eyed, no longer competing with each other for David’s focus but huddled together, united against their new common enemy: Ruby, who was oblivious.
“What do I want?” she asked herself, touching every bottle.
“May I?” I reached for her cup and she handed it to me. If I’d retained one piece of useful information from the soccer parties I’d been to as an underclassman, it was how to assemble a decent cocktail from the supplies in my rich classmates’ gleaming refrigerators. I found lime juice and lemon juice and honey in various cabinets, and then remembered David was standing right there, and asked him if I could use them.
“Sure, but I want one.”
“Me too,” said Alex and Emily.
As I threw together our drinks, two more drunk girls wandered over, and then Ben and a few other guys, and soon I was bartending for half the party. People were acting insane, like my drink was the most delicious thing they’d ever tasted, when really it was pretty easy to improve upon a flat, watery beer or a mix of cheap flavored rum and Diet Coke. I let them be impressed. Though Ruby found her way to the other end of the island and was talking to David and Ben, she kept looking over to laugh at my hustle. When the crowd finally cleared, she came back over and handed me her empty cup.
“Not to make you make me another one, but…”
I grinned and took a big gulp of my drink, which I had to admit was pretty good. I felt the tequila warmth spread all the way down to my toes. I made Ruby a new one and topped off mine, and before I could get roped into making two more for the newest arrivals, Ruby pulled me away by the sleeve. “You’ve done enough,” she said to me. “Sorry, she’s off duty,” she told the annoyed-looking girls at the counter. They shrugged and filled their cups with whatever.
I followed Ruby out of the kitchen and past a den, where eight or ten boys sat immobilized by the contents of the giant green bong on the coffee table, into a room whose original purpose was unclear (houses like these always had extra) but that was currently serving as a dance floor-slash-mosh pit.
“What is this?” I yelled in Ruby’s ear. I couldn’t help myself. The music blasting through the thousand-dollar speakers was, like, EDM meets…something angry and bad.
Ruby shrugged and yelled something back that sounded like “Peter Rabbit,” or maybe “Peter Abbot” was more likely, but it didn’t matter, because I had no plans to look them up later.
“I miss Ariana Grande!” I yelled.
“What?”
I shook my head, and Ruby laughed. In universal loud-party sign language, she motioned for me to finish my drink with her before wading into the crush of sweaty bodies. I tipped my cup to hers in cheers, and then we drained them. We grimaced and grinned at each other, and Ruby reached her hand across the short distance between us and wiped the corner of my lip with her thumb. My whole body felt golden and sparkled where she touched me. I’m possibly a little drunk, I thought. Immediately I forgot everything I’d promised myself about making risky first moves and took Ruby’s hand to lead her into the crowd.
I didn’t know how long we danced. Every song blended into the next, or maybe it was just one very long one. We jumped and swayed and nodded.