Eight people were pre-gaming in the dorm room, under the watchful gaze of popular actors and movie stars on the wall posters. A typical college student’s living room. Messy. Uninteresting. A coffee table next to two couches was being used to level vodka, shot glasses, and guava pineapple juice. The girls’ clothes and bags, in slow-motion, were falling off the couch overflowing with people. The debate among the group was whether the drink that Dennis made tasted too much like alcohol: they were sharing the cup from mouth to mouth.
A semblance of a connection, perhaps nostalgia, bound the pre-gamers together. They hailed from the same town and high school. The girls knew Joshua tangentially—he was Dennis’ friend. Joshua thought himself an outsider and observer of the excesses he thought he saw. But what were the excesses that he saw? Did his thinking interfere with his sight?
Daphne, then on her umpteenth shot, handled the Morgan’s Ionized Salt carton with uncanny care. No one noticed as she, with the look of a confused six-year-old, took yet another lime, poured salt onto her forearm, wiped it off, and licked her extended limb. Her arm was the pale-white that people choose among colors of white when considering paint. Not that considering paint was at all related to her skin color. It was just as Joshua thought.
“Can someone pour me another shot?” she asked.
Daphne self-volunteered to do so when seconds passed without a response and she trembled, seemingly struggling to aim the vodka bottle into the glass.
“Daphne, you can’t do it. Just give me the bottle,” Marisa pointed out impatiently.
“No, no, here. I did it.”
A small puddle of vodka could be seen on the coffee table.
Faye was on her sixth shot.
Connection between them seemed vain and forced. Conversation, in fact, turned toward memories of Granada High. Concern began to permeate the room as Daphne closed her eyes, with her head still on one of the couches’ legs.
“Did she pass out?”
A quarter of a minute later, she opened her eyes to the disappointment of many.
“I’m fine, I promise,” Daphne replied. Approximately forty minutes into the pre-game, in the vicinity of her bed behind a closed door, she puked.
Still, she wanted to go to the party, under the pretense that she was fine.
