Find A Way

Day 1: Alaina

The summer before my third year in college was the hottest June I could remember, and I had lived in Covington for my entire life. I was born and raised in the shadows of the Rocky Mountains where there was snow for most of the year and when there wasn't snow, there was rain or hail or some other form of water trying to drown the entire state of Colorado. But that summer was different; that summer, I actually had to buy a brand-new pair of denim shorts and stock up on tank tops and camisoles and sundresses. I even bought a bikini and went swimming more than three times.

With a population of close to 59,000, it should have felt like I was always surrounded by strangers in Covington, and it did. That didn't bother me though; strangers never made me nervous. In fact, strangers were just people I hadn't become friends with yet. Strangers surrounded me that night, all except for two people: Sam and Adrienne, my best friends and, frankly, the most interesting people Covington had to offer. Adrienne and I had been best friends for as long as I could remember; she was also a Colorado native, but she wasn't born in Covington. It was simply the first place she remembered living. As for Sam, he moved here just in time to start seventh grade with us and witness the first time I fractured my wrist. It was more than obvious that he wasn't from the state at all. A true California boy, Sam both looked and acted the part.

Sam had barely turned 21, a late spring baby, while Adrienne and I were still twenty for a little while longer. Since we were all inseparable, none of us were going to any bars without the others. We always joked that one day, after we were all old enough, we would hit up each of the bars in town, one a night. On a particularly desolate and boring drive sometime during the winter of 10th grade, Sam and I counted a grand total of seventeen. On an equally boring, but not as lonely night, Adrienne declared that seventeen bars meant there was a bar for every 3470 ½ people, roughly. We had been trying since then to figure out how many of those 35 hundred people were of the legal drinking age.

We tried again that night. "I could figure it out if I just knew what percent of the population is over the age of 21," Adrienne was saying, her obsession with numbers shining brightly in the dull light of Sam's living room. She was a mathematics major, by far the nerdiest of the majors to all of the people in our circle of friends except Adrienne herself. We were all sprawled out across the tacky red and gold rug; Adrienne on her back, raven curls fanned out behind her like dark tail feathers on a peacock, and me and Sam, leaning on each other, exchanging tiny smiles and Eskimo kisses each time Adrienne looked the other way. "You two are disgustingly cute," she pointed out at least once without looking up from her smartphone, "It makes me want to hurl."

I blushed. Sam might've blushed too, but I didn't look to find out. Instead, I tried to focus on something else in order to keep my face from growing any pinker. I listened for the sounds of the apartment: Paul, one of Sam's two roommates, talking on his headset, more than likely playing some kind of shooting or killing video game on his oversized television; the dripping showerhead that their landlord swore he was going to fix months ago; Adrienne's fingers frantically tapping out another Google search; the roar of the air conditioner, perched in the living room window; Felicia, the second of Sam's roommates, loudly having sex with whomever it was she brought home that night. Making a face, I wished I hadn't even bothered. I was scarred for life, even though this wasn't something new to hear.

"There's a bathroom over there. If you miss the toilet, you're cleaning it up," Sam commented at some point. He was playing with my medical alert bracelet, his fingers running along the plain silver links.

I laughed, but Adrienne sipped her beer and ignored the witty comment, instead returning with, "The internet claims that 26.5 percent of Covington households have children under the age of 18 residing in them, but that doesn't really give me much information. How many kids are in each of those households? That is what I really need to know." She heaved a sigh, muttered something more than likely inappropriate in Spanish, her second language and heritage, and continued on, "That doesn't account for how many people are between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one either."