The Second Party

She was off the entire day before the party, and she didn't accomplish anything. She could actually not remember what happened, it was a blur of absolute exhaustion, alcohol poisoning, and spiritual sloth. Her roommate was driving, they had arranged to leave at 8:30. She had a brief moment of ambition and changed the time to 8. At 7:45, she realized she hadn't even showered. In the end, she was ready at 8:40. She felt bad, because she had told the boys to be ready at 8:30, and she was always late. Instead of getting punctual as she got older, like almost every area of her life, she found herself getting less and less responsible, just letting things take her when and where they did.

          They grouped up when they first got there, because they got there first, of all the people they knew that were coming. There was the initial moment of just walking around looking, saying hi to people they maybe knew by sight, and then we settled into a building outside the main house, which had a large table and a basket of kids blocks. The boys sat around the table awkwardly for a moment, none of them knowing the others all that well.
        "Playing with blocks is not how you get laid," he said to her.
She thought to herself, wrong, that's exactly how you do it.
      Eventually the conversation changed to God and String Theory, and everyone relaxed, the particles between them settling.

        Her roommate and her were standing at the keyboard to the grand piano. She put down tentative fingers. When the key depressed, a low quiet tone sounded throughout the room. It rolled against the windows and light bulbs, and lapped silently against the tideline of their bones. She tried one key and then another, and slowly worked out the first bar to Fur Elise, which she had played as a child. When they were sure they had it right, she excitedly dragged over Sweetgrass and Gatsby, who were probably not as impressed as they pretended to be.

        It was while sitting in the trailer, which was planted in the garden like a very large metallic rutabaga, all lit up in warm orange and yellow lights, laying open in the cold night air, that they realized they had been grouping.

Her roommate disappeared, passed out in some corner somewhere on the property, car keys in pocket, and there were so many places he could be, really it just made sense for him to drive her home so she could go to work in the morning, and the other boys took up the cue and volunteered to crash there and find the passed out roommate in the morning.
       Knowing someone is going to kiss you at some point is a combination of anxiety and thrill.
       "I can't have you come in, my room is so messy you won't like me again."
Which everybody thinks is silly until they actually see my room.

      When she went to work the next day, the back of her head hurt from being pushed up against the car door. She told her co-worker who drover her home that day that she was worried that the soft spot on the crown of her head had never fully sewn up, that there was an open vulnerable spot in the back of her skull. Which made her think about trepanning, and how she had never bothered to look up if trepanning was a real thing or something he had might up to put in the book. Some concepts her brain was okay with not defining as truth or fiction, as if once the idea had been made up that made it truth regardless in some dimension.