20 Million Tiny Particles

23. Drinking

I was right: Sheridan had taken shots with her new friends in the room. "Well, we did go to the bathroom," she admitted with a giggle, "but the line was long, so we went up to the room instead."

After she finally returned to the table, we quickly packed up our things again. I said a flimsy goodbye to Eva, who said she wanted to go back to the room to call her kids anyway. I hoped that was true and not just an excuse not to be alone at the table.

Sheridan told me there was a singer performing at the hotel bar that night and a lot of girls from the conference were going. I wondered how she was so in tune with the pulse of the people already, but it didn't surprise me that she was. That was Sheridan.

We squared ourselves away on a couple of small dark velvet couches in the middle of the bar's lounge area, illuminated by red overhead lights and dimly burning candles. Sheridan left me alone, again, with their bags while they went to order drinks from the bar. "I'll get yours," she insisted, so that they wouldn't card me. When she asked what I wanted, I gave the standard "whatever you're having." I knew -- and she should have too, at this point -- that I would barely touch it.

This went on for hours, this sitting by myself for moments at a time listening to the guitarist rip off John Meyer and playing with the straw of my drink while the other girls got increasingly drunk. I could tell they were having fun, and I pretended to as well.

Even so, an anxious part of me knew they must be wondering what was wrong with me, why I was the wet blanket who couldn't finish her vodka cranberry. Or maybe they weren't thinking that at all, maybe they didn't even notice me sitting there, following their lead and shaking my leg rapidly, uncontrollably.

Honestly, I wasn't sure why I couldn't get over myself and drink, too. I mean, I knew why I couldn't bring myself to find the thought of getting plastered fun by any stretch of the word. That was obvious. It was elephant-in-the-room obvious. But my hypocrisy frustrated me -- I had been making questionable choices all summer. I had been doing stupid things long before that, too. I was eighteen; I was in the prime of my bad-decision-making.

So why couldn't I just down the drink and enjoy being reckless for a minute?

The good news, if you squinted at it the right way anyway, was that my social battery wasn't on the downswing as it normally would be at this time of night. In fact, I was wired -- eyes-peeled-open kind of wired. Even though I was the only one not slurring my words, I was laughing as loud at the bad jokes as the other girls. I was trying to have fun, even if I very much felt like the loser in the corner.

Around eleven (how did it get this late?), the singer wrapped up his set and I led the jello-legging girls back to the elevator.

"Can we change into comfy clothes?" begged one of the girls to the other, pouting with red-wine-stained lips. (They'd both pivoted to darker wines in the lounge, while Sheridan engineered the vodka train at high speeds.)

The other agreed heartily and pressed their floor on the elevator. Sheridan told them to meet us when they were done and gave them our room number. "See you in a minute!" she called as they hopped off and we continued our ascent.

It wasn't until we were alone that I really paid attention to how sloppy she had gotten. I watched her lean against the mirrored wall of the elevator, her hair becoming tangled at the crown as it pushed against the glass. Her eyes were closed. "You okay?" I asked.

She stared at me with glassy eyes half open but didn't respond. The floor numbers ticked by brightly above the elevator doors as we climbed the heights of the hotel.