around the apartment, trying to get his turntable to work and switching on more and more fans as we sweated our balls off. We hadn’t talked about it, but I could kinda tell Kevin hated the other two people in our apartment, too. They were shut up in their tiny rooms doing god knows what.
“So how do we find out what’s going on tonight?” I asked at one point. First Friday in the new home. Seemed critical.
“Shit just goes down,” he said, pulling a beer out of the fridge. Pretty sure it wasn’t his. “People just keep their doors open.”
Like the dorms. Okay. I’d liked the dorms enough. Hot girls wandering in and out of our room in search of vodka or pot or whatever. Just had to make sure the evidence was buried by the time Mom arrived at noon tomorrow.
Around eleven Kevin and I heard a booming dubstep bassline coming into our apartment from the left, so we ducked out in search of the source. It was three doors down with a bouncer out front collecting cover, but some girls in jorts arrived right when we did and grinned and giggled and did whatever it is girls do to gain free entry, and we kept our heads down and got waved in with the group, a Brojan Horse, if you will. Inside there was one of those stupid green light machines shooting beams like a sprinkler over a bunch of sweaty dancing people, and whiskey all over the kitchen with a short creepy guy watching over it and collecting five bucks a pour. Kevin spotted a ripped dude in nothing but sequined shorts and wandered off, and I leaned against the wall, waiting.
I saw a chick from the hallway pointing me out to her friend and I turned away, pretending to look for someone. They both moseyed over.
“Hey, did you sneak in with us without paying?” one shouted over the music. Her hotter, freckled friend stood behind her, smirking.
“Maybe,” I shouted back. “Are you going to tell on me?”
“Not unless you piss me off,” she yelled jokingly. Then, “What’s your name?”
“Alex. What’s yours?” I watched as her friend turned and left. The retreating girl had long, mermaidy red hair that swung as she walked, and I pictured myself running my fingers through it. This girl gave me her name, but I promptly forgot it.
“Wanna dance?” She put her hands on my wrists.
“Let’s get a drink,” I yelled back.
We took shots of off-brand whiskey, her grimacing and looking around for a chaser. She already seemed pretty drunk, like falsely confident; you know those people who pack all their ballsiness behind the safety of booze? When the creepy bar-guard wasn’t looking, I took another pull straight from the bottle. The girl giggled delightedly. She was wearing a crop top and neon-green shorts. She didn’t totally have the stomach for it, but she had a pretty nice ass and legs. Kind of a big nose and brown bangs scratching at her eyes, but cute. She asked if I wanted Molly, which was a form of X I’d heard of four hundred times that week and not at all in the twenty-two years before; she said it was clean, but I said no. I didn’t feel like bothering. The electronic music was already getting less annoying, anyway. She told me she knew where to get it if I changed my mind. We danced for a bit, her pulling me over by her friends. The redhead was gone.
The whiskey started to wear off and it was still early, so I said I had to piss and left the apartment in search of something new. A floor up, I found a bunch of people in a circle toking up. Someone had bongos, fucking stupid. I ignored their stares and moved on. The hallway hit a fork and I spotted people standing around outside a door with the shraaaaaw of electric guitars coming out of it, so I headed that way.
I stopped in front of two girls and glanced around like I was lost, then smiled at the one who’d noticed me.
“You looking for someone?” she asked me, cutting off her friend.
“Oh, just my roommate. I live here.”
“Here?” She gestured inside with her beer.
“No, just in the building.”
“Us, too!” She introduced herself. I said hello and tried to remember her name. It was something dumb like Dallas. Not Dallas but something like that. I suck at names.