“Pretty underwhelming,” Julia agreed.
They waved hello to the six people at the party, and after casually obliterating a couple of cupcakes, they each grabbed a beer and stood near the beer-pong table, listening to the Kapoors trash-talk the two guys who’d won the argument and taken next game. Every now and then Dave would help by picking up the Ping-Pong ball and handing it over, then wiping the dirt-flecked remnants of beer against his jeans.
“What about this did Brett feel we couldn’t handle?” Dave asked.
“The excitement, I’m sure.” Julia sipped from her beer can and looked around the room, disappointed. Good, Dave thought. Next week they’d be back to their movie night.
It wasn’t long before more people started showing up and the Top 40 hits started blasting. The beer-pong players kept getting louder, the trash talk unraveling into something a little more ridiculous but, Dave had to admit, a lot funnier (“My mom could have hit that shot while conceiving me!”). In came Grant Stephens, wearing of all things his letterman jacket. “I didn’t even know those existed in real life,” Julia said. The rest of the football team showed up, too, some of them hulking inside their striped polo shirts. Juan and Abby, the longtime basketball couple, arrived with their arms around each other. Dave had always thought that they pushed the limits of the school’s PDA policies, but in comparison to their performance that evening, they apparently held back quite a bit of affection on a day-to-day basis.
All the recognizable cliques came by, and so did those ungroupable stragglers who were known by their little circles of two or three, friendships that were fairly similar to Dave and Julia’s; people they knew the names of but not much more. Every one of them was pulled in the direction of the beer, then they regrouped into their little planets of social comfort, slowly orbiting around the room and briefly interacting with other planets before making it back to the beer and then hurtling away from it again, their voices louder and their arm gestures more erratic with every trip. Here they were, all these people gathering to drink in abundance and in a variety of ways, chugging beers, taking Jell-O shots from tiny cups like the kind they gave you in the nurse’s office, writing with Sharpies on Melvin Olnyck’s face as soon as he passed out on the couch, Alexandra and Louise from Dave’s economics class making out against the wall right by family photos of the innumerable Kapoor children, even though Dave had never guessed that they were friends, much less a couple.
“This is kind of weird, isn’t it?”
Julia nodded. “I can’t believe this has been happening the whole time we were in high school.”
“I was just thinking that,” Dave said. He finished off his beer and took a few steps to place it atop one of the many beer can pyramids that had started popping up around the house. “I’m gonna try to find the bathroom. Don’t get swallowed up by this madness.”
“Wait, Dave, before you go.”
“Yeah?”
God, she was beautiful. Her cheeks were slightly flushed from the alcohol and the warmth of so many people inside the house. She stepped out of her high heels, suddenly the height he’d always known her to be. Relief visibly washed over her. She closed her eyes for a second, her toes curling and uncurling against the sticky kitchen floor. “That felt so good I might start wearing high heels just for the pleasure of removing them.” She sighed with a smile. “Okay, I just wanted you to witness that. You can go pee now.”
He smiled at her, then made his way through the groups of increasingly drunken classmates to find the bathroom.