the watering hole

All crowded and packed and full of that weird clingy heat generated at parties. The most terrible music grinding through a superb sound system—some suburban rap? It’s absurd because the only time knives show up in lockers is attached to those expensive Swiss Army ones boys never use for anything but filing their nails.

But it was like those fairy revels you read about where everything is insane but looks like glorious fun and if you could just have a sip of that fey wine you know you’d join the carousing and dance until the night ends or eternity, whichever comes first

But I stumble sans inebriated and people around me laugh because they think I’m wrecked and being wrecked with other people who are wrecked is funny, as opposed to being wrecked alone, which is just pathetic and sad. But I’m not wrecked so when Tucker catches me and hauls me off I don’t appreciate the condescendingness til we get to the kitchen

the kitchen’s weird at these shindigs. This kitchen was darkened and recently vacated. Good for talking and having one of those high school sweetheart love-at-first sight moments, I thought. Where you were both dragged here by friends, but it’s not “your scene” and instead you spend the whole night connecting and by the morning you’ve planned out how many kids you’ll have together. It was empty, but I liked it. It was like a treehouse you visited at 3 am all quiet and secrets and stealthy fun.

And Tucker glanced over and I looked at him through my eyelashes and weird, is this a moment? But Tucker and the persistent buzzing ended it and he read the text and

Run? Should I take the water bottle? It had my and Tucker’s DNA on it, and if they decided to run a genetic profile of all saliva samples, to see who had been engaging in underage drinking… And, God, fingerprinting! Surely that was less expensive than DNA scans. But that would just prove presence. Or was the rule that if you were in a house with underage drinking, you could be punished, even if you didn’t drink? I could say we had been here for a school project a couple days ago…but what teacher would back my story up? Then I remembered none of this would matter if they caught us and administered a breathalyzer so

I tripped over a hole and grass-stained my cute wedges and scratched Tucker’s car against a mailbox and waited sweaty-palmed in a driveway until Tucker disgustedly threw Luna in the backseat and hopped in the passenger seat and muttered “Drive!” at me but I couldn’t because by then the front yard was full of flashing lights and the back was full of people fleeing the scene like a great herd of gazelle before a lion or rats from a light flicked on in the subway and I was stuck and we were going to get caught and—there was a side street. A few quick twists and we hit a quiet road and then another and we were home free.