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  I drank some of my beer. It tasted horrible, like something you’d swallow on a dare. Lola laughed at the face I made. She told me it was an acquired taste.

  “Lydia. Flippin’. Pasternak,” someone shouted from the dark of the lawn. Drunk people, I realized, took readily to shouting. It was Dawnelle Ryan, one of Danny’s old, fleeting girlfriends, bounding across the lawn toward us, pushing her long brown hair out of her face over and over again as if she were trying unsuccessfully to get a strand of it out of her mouth. “Holy shit. What are you doing here?”

  Dawnelle had spent last Thanksgiving with us, since her parents let her stay home while they visited a sick aunt. “Lymphatic cancer,” Dawnelle announced matter-of-factly at our table. “She had a tumor on the side of her neck the size of a damn fist.” She held her own fist to her neck. Her father was in sanitation, and she peppered dinner with stories of weird things people threw away. Complete dinette sets. Full refrigerators. Framed and matted art. Her father once thought he’d found an original Giacometti. He hadn’t, “but it was a damn good copy.” My parents kept exchanging glances at the swearing. Danny didn’t even seem to be listening. I found Dawnelle fascinating, mostly because she was louder than any of his other girlfriends and her boobs were so big that they rested on the table while she ate.

  Now she was right up on top of me, her breath sour and hoppy from the beer. “How are you?” she said, and then suddenly touched my face. It was very strange to have her touch my face. Her hand was damp, and I wasn’t sure what to do.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” She laughed at her own joke and then paused, and I was unsure if I was supposed to really answer. I drank more of my beer. It was slightly easier if I tried not to breathe through my nose while doing it. Dawnelle stared at me smilingly. She asked the standard questions about how my parents were doing, if we had any news.

  “Okay, this is going to sound completely silly,” she said, and then told a story about one of Danny’s hooded sweatshirts she still had—he let her keep it, she clarified; she’s not some crazy stalker—and how she’d done this “like Buddhist” ritual to it with sage and a smudge stick that she’d read about in a book, and it was meant to protect Danny, and she’d gotten a really good vibe from it so she thought we were going to get some good news soon. “I really, really think so,” she said, her face so close to mine it seemed like we were going to kiss.

  “Thank you,” I said dumbly. “That’s nice.” And it was, in a sense. Better than her coming up to me and crying.

  She and Lola talked about Peter Cohagen, who was dating Dawnelle’s best friend and who Lola heard had mono. I wasn’t sure I could identify Peter Cohagen in a 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 my pants. 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. The consumption 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 did on the news about how dirty the bedspreads were in local hotels. I drank my beer more assuredly now. Out of necessity, I fashioned a system of holding my breath and counting down as I swallowed, making it a test. If I could drink for three counts, the next time I would try five.

  “Semen,” Lola was saying. “Vomit. Blood.”

  Tip asked how I was doing, if the search had turned up anything. He said that all things considered, you know, my folks looked pretty good that morning. “We found a dead bird,” I said, and let Lola tell the story of the factory. Tip referred to Bayard as “the French fag” and Lola scolded him, but in a joking voice. She was draped against him, her shoulder pressed against one of his beefy arms, one of her legs hooked around one of his, her hands dangling in his lap, as if she were trying to weave herself, pretzel-like, into him. I felt a wave of contempt for Lola right then, the mindless, un-apologetic way she seemed to devote herself to the attention of boys. She and Tip were chuckling about something, I wasn’t sure what. The disgust morphed loosely into: envy, annoyance, fascination, and a hopeless certainty that I would never be capable of whatever guilelessness or wiles or bravery made Lola Pepper Lola Pepper.

  By the end of my second beer, I could swallow for a count of seven. My throat grew thick and gummy. My fingers started to feel far away. I was tingly.

  The group around the woodpile passed a joint, the smell wafting onto the patio. One of the guys was coughing so hard he was doubled over as his friends either ignored him or laughed. People made out in dark corners of the lawn. A particularly bold couple was pressed against a tree trunk ju
st north of me, the girl’s shirt practically up around her neck, one of her hands slipping down into the back of the boy’s pants.

  “Look at them.” I pointed. Lola acted aghast. Tip said Tracy Weller was a slut. I laughed. I wasn’t sure why I was laughing, but I was laughing. Already the beer was making me feel unbound, loosened from the harness of self. I had the urge to shout “Bleh!” or “Hah!” I wanted to wave my hands in the air. I wanted to be tickled so hard I might pee. Almost instantly, I loved being drunk. I still do. The prospect of it is dangerously seductive, much more so than the pot or acid all my roommates grew so enamored of in college. Those drugs, the ones that steered you more deeply into yourself, held no appeal to me. Drinking, though, in the way it made me foggy and loose-limbed and slightly dim, was a revelation. A blessed relief.

  We sat out there for a long time, Tip going inside to refill our cups every so often, coming back with all three clasped together in his huge hands, as if he were our waiter. “Your brother,” he said at one point, “tried walking across that last year.” He pointed to the top bar of the swing set. “Climbed up there from the slide and tried balancing for a long time, finally made it a few steps before falling on his fucking head. Could’ve broke his neck, the bastard. But then he jumped right up, like one of those gymnasts, his arms up over his head, like it didn’t even hurt him, except his face was all bloody and muddy.”

  “You’re a poet,” I said. “And you don’t even know it.”

  On the swing set now, three girls sat spread-legged, butt to crotch at the top of the slide, trying unsuccessfully to come down together; they were too wide and stuck. They did a lot of squealing. It was so easy to picture Danny here, I could almost taste him—salty, tough, sinewy. I could feel him in the back of my jaw. I remembered the night Tip was talking about, or the next morning at least—Danny sitting at the kitchen table, his forehead and cheek scraped a rashy red, spots of pus leaking from barely formed scabs. He fell down, he told my parents bluntly. They’d looked worried but somehow knowing and conspiratorial too, in the way they always were with him, nothing ever really condemned.

  “That’s what made him such a good defensive end,” Tip said. “Un-fucking-breakable.”

  I didn’t want to talk about Danny. I was feeling good. “You know what I think about football?” I said loudly. “You know?”

  “No, what?” Tip said. Lola was watching me with her regular bright-eyed expression, ever hopeful.

  “One word,” I said. “Homoeroticism.”

  Tip squinted at me. Lola put her hand to her mouth.

  “An excuse for boys to touch boys. An all-male environment that condones a level of physical contact that borders on the erotic.” I laughed. Lola laughed too, but in a nervous way. I could tell that this wasn’t necessarily the best idea, but the drunkenness propelled me forward. Even that first time, I could see how it made for a good excuse. “Like a fraternity. Like a monastery,” I said.

  “Monks?” Tip said. “You’re saying monks are homos?”

  “No, not necessarily. But maybe some men are drawn to monkhood because of a need to repress and fulfill unspeakable urges.”

  I went on for a while about a monk’s vow of chastity. I compared that to football’s bullying heterosexuality. I think I said something about fraternity gang rape. I talked and talked. I was warm-cheeked and emboldened. I could feel my eyeballs.

  “So now we’re rapists?” Tip said, two deep lines creasing his brow. Lola was still at it with the nervous laugh.

  “No, no, you don’t get it.” I tried explaining it more, though I started losing my train of thought. I was on something about the movie I’d seen in social studies the year before about the African clan whose men would take monthlong retreats together when Tip broke in with, “You’re crazy, Pasternak. You’re one of those people who knows so much stuff, it makes them crazy.”

  He was smiling at me, but his brow was still tightly knit and I saw something of a glare in his eyes. It was a shade of the old Tip, the one who held my fridge door closed with one broad hand when I tried to get a pop out. I glimpsed quickly how I may have gotten careless and overly familiar, saw the way things could go wrong be-tween us. It gave me that same uneasy feeling I used to get in conversations with Danny, when he would turn red-faced, sure that some comment or offhand remark was intended to make fun of him. It was still early enough in the night—I was still more or less in control of my faculties—that I was able to right things, socking Tip lightly in the arm, saying simply, distractingly, “I’ve come to like beer.”

  This made him laugh. Lola stroked his shoulder like he was her pet. He was shaking his head, looking openmouthed at me like Where did I find this one?

  Later, in the bathroom, I peed longer than I’d ever peed before. My breathing was loud and strange, almost panting. I was sweaty, hot from the contrast between outside and in. There was no toilet paper. In the bathtub there was one red shoe. “One red shoe,” I said out loud, which seemed funny. There was no hand soap. The hand towel lay crumpled and dirty on the floor. I wiped my hands along my jeans. I stared for a long time in the mirror at my pores—how had I never noticed before they were so huge?—and at my red splotchy face.

  I let the crowd bandy me about in the hallway. They were an ocean of people, elbows, earrings, fingernails, and I tried to make myself rubbery and soft for when they knocked into me. Someone said my name; I couldn’t tell who. The carpet felt spongy beneath me. A girl said, “Are you okay?” and I told her I was fine. She put a hand on the small of my back, which seemed nice, and I leaned a little back into it. “Whoa, girl,” she said.

  The rest of the party passed in a blur. We kept drinking. Aside from the brief hiccup, Tip seemed to have anointed himself, alongside Lola, as my steward and protector. He led me at some point into the kitchen, where I witnessed my first beer bong, Tip guzzling an endless amount of beer through a giant-sized funnel, most of it frothing out of his mouth like a rabid dog. Lola lay across the den coffee table late in the night and let a freshman drink tequila out of her belly button. The freshman followed her around for what seemed like hours after that. A war movie played on the huge TV and everyone cheered whenever someone got blown up. And it all made sense to me in the sloppy, hazy way alcohol made sense of things. I could see why Danny loved this life, why this or a rough equivalent of this in some other parentless house was where Franklin students flocked every weekend. It was so absent, so free of weight or heft—it was life as meringue pie, life as whipping cream.

  We tried to play some euchre, but the rules made little sense to me, even after they were explained a few times. “You’re smart,” Tip kept saying. “You’ll catch on.” He and I were a team, and he had to keep reminding me which suit was trump and how jack was higher than queen. All the people waiting to play huddled behind us, some looking at my cards and giving me advice during my turn, since I kept holding up the game, staring foggily at my hand, unsure what to put down. Tip took to leaning across the table to peek at my hand and advise. I was too swimmy and cotton-headed to care how poorly I was doing. It was nice being stupid, the way it made people take care of me.

  For a while Lola fell asleep on one of the couches, her tank top riding up and exposing the pale, blotched skin (she literally had freckles everywhere) of her belly. Some of her eye makeup had started to run, black smudges dotting the crescents beneath her eyes, making her look interesting, like she had a story to tell. When she woke up, she was cranky and disoriented, blinking and blinking like a child. She wanted to go.

  It was not until those very last moments, as we were heading out the door and down the front steps, that the beer began churning in my stomach and an acidic gas rose up my throat and dizzied me. Within seconds of our departure, I was bent over in the grass, sick on my coat and the tips of my shoes and all over some sort of shrubbery that the Daws family had pruned so severely it looked to have been left for dead.

  Tip held me up in the backseat as Lola drove us home. My throat burne
d and the car smelled of vomit. The front windows were rolled all the way down, the air freezing. Lola stomped hard on the gas and the brake, making our bodies shudder regularly, but Tip braced me against him. It reminded me of the roller coasters that locked you in by a harness around your shoulders.

  Lola was saying sorry for letting me drink so much. Tip was saying, “Easy, easy,” about her driving. “Red light!” he had to yell once. We pulled over once for me to throw up out the side door. My ears rang from the music still.

  “Are your parents going to kill you?” Lola said, and I knew they would be long asleep, having assumed David and I were up late reading about Namibia or quizzing each other on the physics of Arctic ice floes.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Are your parents going to kill you?” I felt like I was very funny. In spite of my sick, I felt proud of myself; for what, I didn’t exactly know. Surviving without David Nelson? Going to a party? Escaping myself for some number of hours? It was no matter. I was filled with a drunken satisfaction. The night had offered me possibility that there could maybe be a life here in the after, something beyond just waiting for Danny to come home. What that something was exactly, I had no clear inkling. But that was no matter. The possibility of possibility—it was enough.

  Tip and Lola walked me up the stairs of my front porch, but I kept telling them I was okay now, okay, okay, okay. Tip let go only after I, with considerable effort, fit my key in the lock and pushed open the door. Lola patted my head. We all said our goodbyes in loud stage whispers.

  My head was buzzing as I fell into bed, still in my clothes. I had managed to rummage a bowl from the kitchen cabinets and rest it next to the bed, though it would come to no use. Yes, the room spun, and yes, my stomach lurched, but only for brief moments, because for once sleep came like an anvil, heavy and sudden and relievedly free of thought.