Photo: John Irvine, Thumbnail photo credit: Lynne Carty
Prologue: “A Farewell to Welcome Week”
It wasn’t much of a pregame—that was for sure.
There were three of us: myself, and my friends Oliver and Gina. Gina had seeded the iTunes genius playlist with Katy Perry, and though it wasn’t as suffocatingly bad as you might think, it still wasn’t the kind of thing I’d ever choose to listen to. It was her room, so any requests to change the music were shot down as soon as they were raised. I’d brought up to Gina that this couldn’t actually be a pregame, since it wasn’t really in anticipation of anything specific. What she’d told me was that we were pregaming the entire school year. It was hard to argue with her reasoning sometimes.
Oliver was on-duty, and despite Gina’s wheedlings, he wasn’t drinking. I wasn’t drinking, either, but I only rarely drank to begin with. I was nursing a Vitamin Water, while Oliver was tumbling a bottle of water between his hands, watching its contents slosh from side to side. The three of us were all CA’s, but Oliver was the unlucky bastard with the duty-phone that night.
That left Gina. Gina definitely was drinking, and enough to make up for the two of us. “Gaaawwwd,” she said, the word itself practically stumbling out of her mouth. “This is really—this is turning into quite the—” She hit me right above the knee with a rolled-up issue of Cosmo. “Are you listening, Charlie?”
“I’m listening,” I told her.
She looked up at me from the place on her bed where she was sitting. “You don’t look like you’re listening,” she said. She reached for the plastic handle of spiked rum on the floor.
Again: “I’m listening.”
“Finish what you were going to say, Gina,” Oliver said. He looked more peeved by her than I was. Can’t say I blame him. He watched her pour herself another shot, and I could tell he’d been counting.
“What I was going to say—I was gonna say—” Again, she stopped. Then she laughed, the sort of drunken half-giggle that might be endearing were I myself drunk. “I forgot what I was going to say, guys.” There was a little desperation in her voice as she said it, like she knew we weren’t taking her as seriously as she was taking herself. “What was I going to say?”
“‘God,’ you said,” Oliver recited perfectly. “‘This is really—this is turning into quite the—’ And then you trailed off.”
She thought about it for a second. “Okay. Okay. I’ve got it,” Gina said.
“Yeah?”
“This is turning into quite the one-woman shit show,” Gina deadpanned. Then she looked back at me. “That was funny, right?”
“Real funny, Gina,” I said.
“But you didn’t laugh.”
“It’s not that kind of funny.”
“Oh.” She finally took the shot and took it like a champ. “I wish you guys were drinking,” she said after giving it a chance to settle.
I shrugged. “Doesn’t do much for me.”
“Then you just have to keep tryyyying,” she said.
“She’s really drunk, dude,” Oliver said to me.
“You’re the CA on duty,” I said. “Perform your—I don’t know. Your duties.”
“I’m pretty sure saving Gina from a Tuesday morning hangover isn’t one of them,” he said. He got up from his seat and walked to the door. “Are you going to be okay?” he asked Gina.
“I’ll be fiiine,” she said. She laid back on her bed, her hair dangling over the side where the bed met the wall. “No more Welcome Week!” she called out, louder than maybe I was comfortable with. “Class on Tuesday! Wooooohh!”
Oliver shook his head and left me in there with her. No more Welcome Week: “Wooooohh,” indeed.
