Pirate keyboard via CrunchGear

“I should go out tonight, because I’d really like to get laid.”
“Tanya, it’s pirate party.”
“I know.”
“So?”
“So what?”
“Phi Delt, Tanya.”
“Yeah . . .”
“The water polo team.”
“Isn’t pirate party a date party?”
“Technically.”

“Well, how are we going to get in?”
“Renshaw.”
“How do you know? Besides, everyone will have dates.”
“Haven’t you heard? There’s no dating at Stanford.”
“When did you see Renshaw?”
“Narrative Technique.”
“You went to class?!”
“I resent your tone.”
“Well, who is Renshaw taking?”
“Nobody. That’s what I’m saying. Technically it’s a date party. Really, it’s just a party. With a guest list. That we’re on.”
“OK . . . it has been so long since I got laid.”
“It’s been three weeks, Tanya.”

You knew everything about Tanya’s sexual escapades, whether you wanted to or not, and you questioned how much of it was performed for the benefit of . . . someone? You had never met a woman who talked — thought — this way about sex, and you did not believe it. You did not trust that a woman would authentically start to track her sexual partners in this way, lining them up literally as notches on her bedpost, whose partners already numbered beyond her age in years. It was an act, you thought, but maybe there was part of you that allowed for error, since just because you could not understand did not make it automatically false. And so you went along with it, like you did with all of Tanya’s absurdities, because with all of them there were just as many fascinating things, strange tidbits that hinted at a past and experience beyond what you would ever know.

Tanya was the kind of person that nobody back home would ever meet, much less know like you did. Nobody from where you came from would be friends with this kind of a person, or be able to teach themselves her language, as you had. And that was what made it all worth the effort.

Getting Tanya out of her dorm on party nights had become a giant pain in the ass of late. As far as you could tell, Tanya’s reluctance to leave her room was connected to her exaggerated pre-party beauty ritual. Perhaps it was because she was anosmic, but Tanya seemed to feel it was crucial to stay in the shower for upwards of an hour at a time in order to truly get clean, a fact which had annoyed and frustrated you more than another person’s personal maintenance routine ever should be able to do. You had explained, rather rationally, to Tanya that soap merely needed to be afforded a brief opportunity in which to bond with dirt on skin and hair, perhaps scrubbed a bit, and then rinsed off. That more than, say, twenty minutes — tops! — was just superfluous time wasting and skin drying tomfoolery! To no avail. Tanya was convinced her routine was essential, and if she did not start it by 7pm, the likelihood of her ever making it out was very low.

Tanya’s three-hour pre-party beauty regimen annoyed you because it often meant the difference between (over-)drinking alone or (over-)drinking with company. Because for you, the niceties of beauty routines ought rightfully be cut-cornered to the greater good of going out and drinking in a socially acceptable context. Perhaps Tanya’s alcoholism was not yet so pronounced. Or perhaps it was the fact that Tanya at that time had appetites that ranked higher in priority than drugs and alcohol ever could have, and it was to accommodate those appetites that she felt the regimen was necessary. So you went through this ritual of your own, carting over a 6 pack of Sierra Nevada in the early evening, and camping out on Tanya’s futon until she agreed to go to the shower. And checking in on her progress, periodically, in the hours that followed.

“Water polo, Tanya. Eyes on the prize.” You poked your head into the women’s bathroom at the end of the hall, and went back to drinking and hanging out with Cate and Linda, and talking about the evening to come. Time would pass, and Tanya would still not be ready, and after eseveral more attempts at gettin gher moving, you agreed to meet her at the party, and somewhere inbetween the brownish haze that descended after that pack of Sierra Nevada was gone and scrounging around for Old Smuggler in the back of Andy’s liquor cabinet at the end of the night, you remember seeing Tanya at the pirate party, talking to a guy named Brant that you had seen before but never spoken too. And thinking, what an odd choice, and going for more alcohol, and then everything went blurry again.

You would sleep on Cate’s floor, too drunk to drive, and in the morning attempt to piece together the disparate parts of the evening, to reconstruct the narrative that you had certainly been a part of but could not wholly claim subjectivity for. And as you and Cate were chatting, in came Tanya to the two-room double they shared that year, her black leather biker’s jacket and eyelash curler still intact, her hair looking only slightly worse for the wear. She headed over to her bedpost and carved in another line.

“Who?” you asked, never surprised by the circumstances of the notch, always curious to hear the notchee.
“Some pirate.”
“Right.”
“No, really, he was a pirate.”
“Dressed as a pirate, yeah. Brant, then?”

“Was that his name?”
“That’s who I saw you with.”
“Well, the only way we’ll know for sure is to examine him.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was calling him Captain Hook. For a reason.”

“He was missing a hand? Strange.”

“No, it was more of a reference to the shape of a crucial piece of his anatomy.”
“Oh Tanya.”
“Captain Hook! AAAAAR!”

With that, she put her hand over her eye and chased you down the hall, and the two of you were off to the sunporch where you could further deconstruct the evening, unfortunate references to the shape of people’s penises and all. And if Tanya’s insistence upon the casual insignificance of it all still seemed forced, well at least there was some intimacy forged there, in spite of it all. Because at the heart of all the destruction and hazy recollections, was laughter, and the precious bond of two lost souls clinging to each other, and clawing back to themselves, one shared cigarette at a time.

"Tanya: Captain Hook" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT and was originally posted on November 06, 2009. Copyright ®2009 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

Tracy, my friend from early sobriety, had been a cocaine addict when she was only 12 years old. I don’t know where 12-year-olds find cocaine, but you can be sure that if they want to they will. Tracy had gotten sober for the first time shortly after she turned 14, and all of this happened before she had ever had even a sip of alcohol. Because she was active in the program, Tracy knew that real sobriety meant abstaining from all mind-altering substances. But, as is the case with many people, there was still a part of her that thought other drugs might be safe for her to try–a part that believed it was impossible for her to be an alcoholic without ever having been drunk.

And so at the age of 28, after a kind of poetic 14 years of sobriety, Tracy “went out” and started drinking for the first time in her life. Shortly thereafter, Tracy was a daily cocaine user again, and shortly after that, she was shacking up with her dealer. It was not long before Tracy was just a heartbeat away from cataclysmic physical, financial, and emotional ruin. Luckily for her, Tracy had picked up a few things by spending her formative years in the program, and was only “out” for about two years–but those two years were turbulent ones, and perhaps they were what convinced her, finally, that she couldn’t do any kind of substance without turning her life into chaos.

Initially, I referred to Tracy as “Crazy Tracy” as a means of differentiating her from the several other Tracys in the same community. At the time that she was Crazy Tracy, we were not yet friends, and even if I had less time than she did, she was, by her own admission, totally batshit crazy. She would sit in meetings and drone on and on about things like her mother’s speakerphone and the two lanes on the 405 that would always be backed up at the 101 North interchange (before they redid it). She would be dizzy with anger about this kind of stuff and though I, too, was angry about stupid stuff at the time–it was still something to see.

There is a school of thought that says you are crazy for at least the duration of your first year of sobriety–if not longer–just by virtue of the fact that you’re adjusting to a new way of living life, feeling feelings, and just generally taking responsibility for yourself and your own actions, often for the first time ever.

Eventually, Tracy stopped acting so crazy, and I mustered up the nerve to ask her how on earth she could have had fourteen years of sobriety under her belt and then convince herself that she could start drinking. What she said was that life got good, and you started thinking that you were different. And then you started making excuses, finding evidence that you were different. For Tracy, the fact that she had never drank alcohol made her different: though she was sure that she could not handle cocaine, she had been able to convince herself that–for her–alcohol was something different.

This was back in the days when I wanted to have a year of sobriety more than anything. And it wasn’t because I didn’t think I could make it a year. I always knew that I could. Because I knew I was different–the same but also defiantly different, saying that the rules DID apply to me but knowing, deep down, not all of them did. People would talk about how we were all the same, deep down, and to look for the similarities rather than the differences, but this was a much harder thing to do than it was to say. People would say some are sicker than others, and they would tell me, “Don’t you get the impression sometimes that you’re not as sick as the rest of us?”

And the answer for me was yes, had always been yes–but at the same time, I knew that I wasn’t like the rest of the world, either. I could not both control and enjoy my drinking at the same time. And that was all I needed to know I belonged. And if I needed to have a year it was not because I felt like after a year anything would change for me, but rather because I was sick of being new, sick of not having any credibility. It was a new feeling to me and I didn’t like it. I did not like former heroin addicts coming up to me and asking “how [I was] doing” meaningfully, people who had been off the syringe less than two years but because I was a newcomer, they felt they knew what it was like for me, with under a year of sobriety, they knew what I must be going through. It made me indignant and I was told that this indignant egotism was the kind of thing that might one day lead me to drink again. That would make me think that I was different.

When you share your story in a meeting, it is sometimes referred to as “qualifying”: e.g. you are instructed to “qualify” for a few minutes before opening the meeting up to general discussion. This always struck me as a strange expression–why would anyone ever need to qualify themselves as an alcoholic? Wasn’t showing up at a meeting enough, pretty much? Did anyone try to get in and just not quite meet the standards? I had spent my life over-qualifying for things and I felt the impulse during those moments to let that mode kick-in again: I would talk about the blood alcohol level I had when I got my DUI, because it was higher than anyone else’s, and most people would have been passed out with that percentage. It was not because I was proud of it–far from it–but because I always felt like people were looking at me and thinking I didn’t qualify, that I didn’t belong–no, not EVEN here, I wasn’t at home.

And then there were other times when I felt the need to qualify my qualification: when the circumstantial, educational and class-based knack I had to pass as a normal person served as a kind of crutch that I needed to make myself feel better. It was at those times that I would talk about how I had been a periodic alcoholic: I had never been a daily drinker, and I had never been physically dependent upon alcohol. I had never shown signs of liver disease, and my drinking career was short enough to save me from the lined, hard faces that prematurely aged so many women I saw in my regular meetings. I would tell them that I had quit drinking because I knew that something awful would happen to me if I hadn’t: I had cheated death twice already and wasn’t sure I would be so lucky again. But then I would go back to being me, in the corner, thinking of myself as the same and different, because I had never even tried heroin and didn’t even know what it was like to have a dealer of one’s own.

Last Wednesday was the eighth anniversary of the day I got sober, but I forgot. I took my last drink in the very early morning of June 2, 2001, just a few hours before I tried to kill myself. I failed at that. Now, it is gaining on a decade later, and I have a wonderful husband, a beautiful son, and for the first time ever, I feel like I belong somewhere. At 8 years of being substance-free, sometimes my world gets so full of beautiful things that I can forget who I am. I can start thinking that I am different. Last week I forgot my anniversary. And this post is to remind me that, howevermuch I might have changed, I will never be different.

"Different" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT and was originally posted on June 10, 2009. Copyright ®2009 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

Chris was a foot soldier in the Coke Wars of ’97, but when he enlisted he was already a three-time loser. Surfing, selling, and stealing had already bested him, so by the Fall of 1996, he had long since laced up his Doc Martens, packed up his Social Distortion collection, and rolled up and over for the proverbial Tour. They were happy to have him. He had always been the most promising of their group, and when he, too, failed, it was a triumph of sorts, a tacit endorsement of their way of life, whether Chris would acknowledge it as such or not.

Battling valiantly against the post-apocalyptic backdrop of the spare living space of somebody’s mother’s house in Lotophagi, a realm beyond the reach of time, ambition, moral development, and fiscal responsibility, Chris held his own in a quest for? death? destruction? the results were hazy. Lotophagi was no kind of place. More of a sleepy stupor than a real location, Lotophagi was most notable for a group of inhabitants who had vowed, silently, unconsciously, never to leave it. And though it boasted the kind of natural beauty that one might see on a postcard, the vows were not made because of these attractions, but rather because they had become unwitting slaves to it–out of apathy, lethargy, the tendency never to move again once ensconced within its foggy confines.

Like any ragamuffin rebellion, the Coke Wars were fought with whatever improvised weapons could be procured at a reasonable price, which is to say free, or next-to-free, compliments of the kinds of shady connections you develop as part of the underbelly of a small town when you have never thought to leave it. Necessarily, video games were played, King Cobra malt liquor was drunk, and whatever illicit substances they could procure from the guys at Pizza King were ingested. Few lines were drawn. Everyone pooled their resources, but nobody turned up their noses: the appellation of “Coke Wars” was, therefore–like many historical events–constructed after-the-fact, and merely the romanticizing of a shared past by those who had lived through it and needed it to mean more than it ever could.

The plain fact was that cocaine had outclassed Lotophagi. They would never be the kind of glamorously debauched people you meet in a Bret Easton Ellis novel, or more especially the movie based on a Bret Easton Ellis novel: they were a decade late, a couple hundred thousand short, haphazardly clothed in whatever free swag they could pilfer from so-and-so’s cousin, who was sponsored by Rip Curl. It is a strange thing to class people by their ability to afford and procure illicit drugs, but then Lotophagi had seen worse. And how else could you think of them?

They were the kinds of people who were always rubbing against greatness, or whose girlfriends were rubbing up against greatness. Greatness in the form of Kelly Slater, at a house party in the Keys–who was, apparently, a “total douche”–but who never expected it for themselves. Nay, they eschewed it for themselves. The greatness to which the Lotophagi aspired instead took the form of collecting rare Morrissey discs and rockabilly memorabilia, an enviable set of drums, a stack of inside jokes and quotable movie lines. You could say they lived life one day at a time, but only in the worst sense. But before you pity them, know that they were happy, after a fashion, because from where they were sitting–on an easy chair, in an easy apartment, in a lifetime of never-having-to-do-anything, they were happy. And in that sense they had won, Coke Wars or no Coke Wars.

Chris had seemed different, even from the start, and though he participated and escalated, procured and pontificated, there was an itch deep inside him that he fought at first, buried deep inside of him underneath a pile of unfinished projects and unmet dreams. This was why, after 20 years, he had moved 300 miles north to take a stab at something new, if transient. He worked as a seasonal fisherman for somebody’s brother’s cousin; the work was hard but it paid the bills, or bought the beer. And though he was 300 miles away, he felt like he was back in Lotophagi again, except working this time, and around people he did not know, doing something he could not stand. And so he had returned, knowing that it was probably the last time, and fell quickly into the routine of sleeping through the day so as to stay awake all night.

They say war is an experience of great intensity, consisting of long bouts of boredom punctuated by short episodes of extreme fear. But when the Lotophagi were high, they ran through conversation topics and cigarettes like air, and everything had a shiny resin to it. And this held true for Chris for a very long time, during which he would do things like write song lyrics, draw up business plans, or offer to clean somebody’s mother’s stove. He was in love with the vitality of it all, maybe because he knew that every time he did it he moved that much closer to the end. Until one night, two or three hits too far into it, when Chris felt his heart beating out of his chest, sweat dripping off his brow, and the world stopped turning for a few seconds as he tried to catch his breath. And when he woke up he reached for a yellow notepad that somebody had left next to him, and on it he scribbled a note before running out the door for the very last time.

When the other Lotophagians awoke, they could not find Chris, but they did find a note that said, “Life is Elsewhere.” And though they thought it self-important and pretentious, they had no words for this in their language, and so rolled back over and went back to sleep.

"Dim Bulbs, Bedroom Community" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT and was originally posted on May 01, 2009. Copyright ®2009 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

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Though she had never been into dolls, in most ways, Charlotte Sometimes could pass for an ordinary girl of six. She did not like them–not baby dolls, not princess dolls, not even the politically incorrect Barbie, or her dowdy friend, Skipper–not the dolls that ate and peed, sat and cried, smiled and cooed. It wasn’t political–dolls just weren’t her thing. And though she did think of herself, even then, as a very small forty-year-old, it would be decades before it would occur to her to pathologize her disinterest in dolls and other things pink and girly. For now, she busied herself by arranging the stuffed animals she had always preferred into an elaborate arrangement on her pale yellow bed, a furry contrast to the canary flower print of a wallpaper she did not choose, inventing different games to play that didn’t reflect on anything essential about her, at least so far as she knew.

It would be said that she was an agreeable child, and this is unsurprising, since she sought to do what was expected of her whenever possible. Though she could not yet articulate the thought, she believed that, perhaps, always doing things exactly right would be what led to her ultimate salvation. And so, when Charlotte Sometimes was presented with the rare occasion of a play date at the home of one of her contemporaries, she would agreeably (as ever) play with the dolls that she didn’t understand, dressing them in their outfits, acting out their elaborate imagined courtship scenarios, always agreeably taking on the less coveted of roles, until it was time for her to go home. And though the dolls would not have been her own choice, she learned to adapt, and so was able to make just enough friends to appear to be a normal little girl, if not the social butterfly of her class, then at least a friend of one of her friends.

Though she had forged a mission statement for herself to be agreeable, there were still those times when Charlotte Sometimes felt compelled to assert herself, to let her true thoughts out into the light, however dangerous it might be. Not, perhaps, on the topic of the dolls–because what harm could come from her indulging people by agreeing to play with them? Nor did she feel obligated to discuss the other trappings of girlhood that confused her, the pink, princessy, sparkly things that all of her friends seemed to love but which left her cold–because even if she was missing something, she reasoned that she was also good at pretending, and at convincing the others that she was just like them: she could see that people saw what they wanted to see. Nevertheless, there were times when something would come up that compelled her to say something–directly–which exposed the thoughts and feelings she sensed were not so plainly agreeable.

There was once a boy who had liked her, and in fourth grade, after they had grown up away from each other (as kids often do), he walked around the soccer field at lunch–a little figure in the distance followed by several other little figures, wearing his pathos like a badge of honor, claiming that he was going to kill himself. He told everyone (except Charlotte, the supposed object of his misery) of his intent. He would do himself in at the age of 9, and this prompted a parade of little children to approach Charlotte Sometimes, begging her to save a young boy’s life simply by agreeing to return his affection. It was a small act, they thought, and what decision was there to be made? And the drama of it all was too much for Charlotte Sometimes: she had not yet seen much of the world, but knew enough of storylines to know that the fourth grader never actually kills himself after these kinds of stunts. She knew he was doing it for attention, and she resented him for it, for involving her in his childish game. And she told these silly children so. “He’s not going to kill himself,” she said, callously. “He’s just saying that,” put out by the fact that she even had to point this out in the first place, but understanding that if she did not do it, nobody would.

But then the children looked at her with confusion and horror. And after they had recovered from the sting of her cruelty, they told her to “be nice.” They said, “You think you are so smart, Charlotte Sometimes, but you should really just be nice.”

And it confused her, because why were they clouding the issue? What did any of this have to do with her being nice or not being nice? Did they not see that she was trying to help them–to assuage the needless fears the boy had placed in them, all for the gratification of his own vanity? Because what Charlotte Sometimes had said was the truth: it was never her intention to be mean. She only exposed herself because it had been necessary, and in the absence of adults, felt it was her duty. Truthfully, she would have rather been agreeable, if it had been possible.

As the years went by, the admonishment to “be nice” would serve as an informal Chorus common to all of the performances of her life. When she was in middle school, and found one of her friends to have betrayed her trust, she would say so, and they would command her to “be nice!” even whilst laughing at her satirical remarks on the girl’s loyalty. Because even if she had always sought to be agreeable, once she had been crossed–once she had seen the true character of a person and found it lacking–she could be cruel. And she knew it, so she used it responsibly, to the extent that her age and experience allowed. Still, the incidents piled up–in the school elections (Be nice!), after winning a debate (Be nice!), after writing a column in the university paper (Be nice!), every four years when there was an election (Be nice!), whenever there was a controversy afoot and an opinion to be expressed (Be nice!).

It became the one constant in a lifetime of small changes, and at some point she would decide that perhaps she had missed something along the way, to still always be met with this reaction. But it was no matter, because it was too late now: whatever it was that could allow her to “be nice” out of habit, as a matter of course, must have been misplaced back in the days of the dolls, transmitted through sparkly tiaras and glittering wands, or hidden in the pages of the fairy tales that she had only ever seen through. And though she would continue to pretend into middle age, there were darker days on which she yearned to go back and give the dolls another shot, because she could not help but believe that their way would have been so much easier.

"Be Nice" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT and was originally posted on April 29, 2009. Copyright ®2009 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

Colby Barnett was a Delta Kap, and by the Fall of your Senior year, his signature crazy printed aloha shirts had become so reliable as party fixtures that you had taken to greet-hugging him in your insipidly sochie way at the first sight of an errant palm tree. This practice was just one of several somatic symptoms of your unconscious need to demonstrate just how much you belonged wherever you were, and at Delta Kap, Colby was the easiest target. Though you hardly knew Colby, and in spite of the fact that he likely couldn’t stand you, Colby tolerated you because he was a nice guy. And if he despised you, at least he never let on, and was always willing to shepherd you through the masses of drunken humanity who crowded the floors of his frat house on weekend nights, making you feel special, if only temporarily, and if only in the service of a desire to get himself closer to Tanya.

Colby and Tanya could not be said to have a relationship in the most traditional sense of the word, but what they shared was certainly closer to intimacy than anything you had seen Tanya engage since she had put that hex on Matt during Sophomore year. It was clear that Tanya was amused by Colby and his goofy, affably drug-addicted ways: perhaps their common thread was that of being oddballs among a mass of privileged children growing up in coastal resort towns–she from Monte Carlo and he from Laguna–a gap of tens of thousands of miles that was bridged inch by inch, late at night, after everyone else had gone home.

You didn’t ask questions. You liked Colby, but your enjoyment of the stories Tanya would come back with from her evenings with Colby were appealing only for the way that they made you feel like you were in on the joke, in the proximity of some kind of greatness, even if it was a shallow and absurd, beer-soaked greatness of the type that only is convincing when one is under 25. It really didn’t take that much to impress you then, and everything this group of boys did seemed to have some kind of special appeal for you, a cool, love-the-skin-you’re-in-ness that eluded you. And if it was only through the stories of others that you could reach into this, that was how it would have to be.

One of these stories involved the ceiling above Colby’s lofted bed in his frat house, a wall that was soft with years of neglect and abuse. The surface was porous enough, in fact, for Colby to impale it with a dozen white paper lollipop sticks of the sort with which Tootsie Pops made; Colby had apparently arranged the sticks in a haphazard pattern directly above his pillow. Tanya, confused by this odd practice of confectionary stick disposal, asked him why he would want candy sticks stuck into his ceiling, since it seemed like a strange choice of medium and location for before-bed self-soothing art. Colby explained that the sticks in fact had a useful purpose there–that, rather than being an artful display of trash, they functioned together as his “early warning system,” and had saved him from bumping his head countless times. It was a strange solution, and raised more questions than it answered, since the size of the loft might be adjusted to account for a low ceiling, but it was a uniquely Colby solution, and like him, it was heartwarming in its functional brilliance and simplicity.

There was to be a winter formal, and as usual you had nobody of note to take. Tanya would not be going to the formal, though she was still officially a part of the sorority, because she had vampire theories to test out. You were unsure of when or why the thought of taking Colby occurred to you, and perhaps it had never been the greatest of ideas, even if you would be attending the formal only as friends and drinking buddies, and even if Tanya and Colby had not seen each other in months. Still, there was a slight feeling that a code had been violated, and perhaps that night with Colby was the beginning of the end for you and Tanya, when she started to view you with a suspicion that only articulated itself in an exaggerated worry about Colby seeing the Lover’s Lane sign.

After you had assured Tanya that there would be no opportunity to see the Lovers Lane sign, since Colby would not–WOULD NOT–be accompanying you home, under any circumstances, you thought that perhaps then she could trust you. But you should have known that the breach of trust was still there, even before she demonstrated how little she trusted you by scaling the third story outside of Kingscote Gardens from the window of the apartment you still shared with her to the window of Cate and Linda’s apartment, in a grand show of not-caring, shortly after Colby arrived with his friend to pick you and Linda up for the formal. The pretense for the stunt was the need for something from Linda and Cate’s kitchen, and the desire to not walk into the apartment through the front door, where Colby et al. might see her without her makeup. But really, was scaling the side of the building the solution? When Colby learned of this, hearing Linda banging around with something by the bedroom window and the faint sound of Tanya’s voice, he chuckled and shook his head, in a she’s-crazy-but-that’s-why-we-love-her kind of way. And though it worried you, you had to agree, she was crazy, and that was why you loved her, and perhaps climbing on the outside of the building was a solution in the same manner of the lollipop sticks, and maybe that was what gave it its charm.

The formal itself was uneventful, and though the night itself was enjoyable it was not remarkable after Tanya’s stunt except for later, when you and Colby stopped by another party, at another fraternity where neither of you knew many people, and where you were dead set on mischief. Together, you went around the house looking for things to destroy, in the mood for mayhem, and perhaps united in your worry for Tanya, until Colby spied the fire extinguisher. Together, you pulled it from the wall, you in your long black dress, and he in his ultra casual suit, and when he sprayed the fire extinguisher down the back hallway you remembered being shocked by how much smoke it created. All of a sudden it was a serious prank, and though it would be hilariously funny when you both stumbled out of the party and went your separate ways, done with the night, for that moment it was almost frightening the way the smoke cleared the crowds from the hallway, and confusing that nobody seemed to understand that it was you who set the alarms off.

"Tanya: Early Warning Systems" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT and was originally posted on January 23, 2009. Copyright ®2009 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.