Love Me: The Manoir

The Second Party I Went To

Year 11 rolled around without much change into the existence - or nonexistence - of my life. Things remained the same, I gained a slightly larger group of friends simply by tagging along with someone, and life resumed its dull and monotonous course. It was in the Winter of this year where I went to the second party - proper teenage party - that I had been invited to.

This time, we were going to arrive with boys. Actual breathing, talking boys. Boys I had never met before and probably wouldn't speak to me but that did not faze me at all.

At fifteen the notion of alcohol was one which was much less scandalous, or at least everyone pretended that they didn't get that secret rush from taking swings of water bottles filled with straight vodka. I wanted to be cool, I wanted to get drunk. After rummaging around my parent's alcohol cabinet the week before, I had decanted half a litre of vodka into a powerade bottle knowing that my parents never drank vodka anyway. As I hid it under my bed, I had a gut instinct that something would go wrong.

The night before my mum began to talk to me about alcohol. I don't particularly know why - maybe it was because she saw this as the first big teenage party I was going to - and maybe I was slightly too supportive of the idea of teenagers drinking. Regardless, the next day I walked into the living room before I was about to leave to see her looking through my overnight bag to pull out of pathetic looking bottle of powerade.

I couldn't justify it. There is no real justification for stealing your parent's alcohol other than the fact that you wanted so desperately to feel that buzz which people rave about. It was the classically cliché 'I'm not angry, just disappointed', and I cried and cried as I left the house having been allowed to still go to the party.

The idea of upsetting my parents was gut wrenching to me. These parents who never really had to parent now thought I was a horrible child. One who stole from them, who lied to them. The idea of going to a party with boys and booze smuggled in under our clothes was now far less appealing.

In the hours that followed I cheered up slightly, gave my mum an apologetic call, and began to slowly feel myself more energized for the night ahead. I had made my mum buy me a bodysuit with lace cut-outs and a bodycon skirt - I wanted people to think I was sexy. To wonder where I had been kept locked up all this time for them to only see me now. I took a shot of vodka from the cap of the bottle and remarked at how warm it felt going down my chest, tingling through my body.

As we walked into the second location, I felt myself cramp up slightly at the sight of these boys I didn't know who were already drinking like they'd been doing it for years. I sat and passively observed and watched, conscious of how much of my skin was on display for a casual conversation. The nerves coursed through me as we left the building, and I found myself walking and having a polite conversation with the boyfriend of a friend that revolved around my rendezvous with Matt (one of his classmates) all those years before.

The party was taking place in a club at 9:00pm, and as we walked through those doors I could feel the anticipation building inside me for what was to come.

Things You Will See At A Sixteenth Birthday With Drunk, Horny Teenagers:

•    People huddled around bottles of tiny liquors which they have hidden in their bras, sipping on them in the hopes of having an excuse to act wild and say they were drunk.

•    People who are 'drunk', meaning they have had one sip of the nearest alcoholic drink and therefore are staggering around

•    A guy try and slip his hands down the jeans of the girl he is kissing (his first kiss probably) and unsuccessfully do so.

•    A girl run into the toilets to tell her friends that a boy may like her because he danced with her (that girl being me) only to find out he did so because another girl left him on the floor.

•    The groups of cool kids sat at the booths in the bar because they are far too edgy to be seen with the plebs on the dancefloor

•    Every single girl in the building using the stripper pole at one point, disguising the action as a joke but also taking it very seriously.

At 11:00pm (very late in my books) we staggered out to continue the party in someone's garden where we would recount all the things that had happened. We were joined by another attractive guy, one who I would fawn over for a couple of days before losing interest in the fantasy in my head. At fifteen, the fact that this boy liked one of the same programmes as me and spoke to me at all was enough for me to believe that we were, in a way, destined for each other. This destiny would be enough to cling onto until the next destiny arose. And the next. And the next.

As I went home the next day – the fiasco with the vodka and my parents long forgotten – I began to feel like maybe I was finally accomplishing what 'normal' teenagers did. I was living out the lives of the people I had watched in films my whole life – even if I was just a passive observer on the side-lines. When you're the centre of your own universe, you can forget that to others you are not. In reality, I was still living through other people's experiences even when I was still there. I was living through the memory of the evening that I had shaped in my head, the memory which more often than not was more fictional than true.