Underage

[29] Back to the Beginning

Instead of a bunch of teenagers sitting in a room with an empty beer bottle, this place could barely fit anymore people. Bodies were pressed together. The smell of alcohol was the only thing in the air, besides the smoke clouding above my head. Boys and girls were making out wherever they could find, sometimes switching partners half way through. I kept Evan's hand in mine as he led me through the bodies.

Evan pressed my beer up to my lips, tilted the cup, and poured the entire contents of the cup inside my mouth. It tasted awful, like watered down ginger ale. It must have shown, because Evan's eyes look from my face, to the empty cup, to my face again.

"Are you not having fun?"

"I'm having fun."

His green eyes narrowed. He almost had the same eyes as Ethan. Evan's were the color of dewy grass in the morning. Ethan's were lighter, almost pastel.

"I've never been good at detecting emotion, so you'll tell me when you're not having fun anymore, right?"

I smiled at him, a forced upturn of my lips that he didn't catch. "Right."

He smiled widely at me before leading me back into the kitchen. Shot after shot was placed in my hand, an expectant look on his face. They were better than the beer. Some went down smoothly, with some I was instructed to lick salt and then bite on a lime, and some burnt the back of my throat and threatened to sprout hair on my chest. All part of the high school fun, I was told.

I wasn't having fun.

Parties weren't my thing, and sure I went to a lot of them throughout my high school career. But my favorite parties weren't the ones where the entire house was a mosh pit. I didn't care for having shots shoved down my throat, usually followed by the throwing-up of said shot and anything else in my stomach. I didn't care for dancing, or having to shout into someone's ear just to tell them hello. But there were nights where Grace and I, sometimes accompanied by dates, would sit under the night sky and sip at our hard lemonades or cheap wine, and we would just talk. We'd go out to the lake and we would enjoy the slight buzz and the calm of the night. We didn't have to dress up—we usually came in our pajamas or bikinis—and we didn't have to pretend to be so drunk we couldn't drink anymore.

Ethan liked to take me to the lookout. Not on dates, or for a long night of sloppy sex on the grass. This was our place. The one place he vowed to never bring another girl. There are only a few places in Florida where hills overtake the land. It takes twenty-five minutes to get to, but it's worth it. A large hill sits above a lake. On one side, it looks over the miles of grassland and orange groves. The other looks to downtown, where the lights flicker out at ten o'clock and douse the lookout in complete darkness.

It was November. The air started to cool off, at least into the high fifties. The air was crisp and burnt the inside of my nose and lungs with every breath. To born and raised Floridians, it felt cold enough to snow.

The snow birds shook their head at us. You could always tell who they were. They were the idiots in shorts and t-shirts like they weren't cold.

It was closing in on the beginning of December, the beginning of the Christmas season. So, of course, it was Ethan's bright idea to bring me here. Ethan's always had this look he gave me when he wanted something. He raised his eyebrows, his head tilted slightly to the left, and he stuck his bottom lip out. When his green eyes locked on mine and I was gone.

It was that look which got me here. It was that look that got me into this barely-there bikini, and standing on the edge of a dock. I stuck my foot into the water and immediately pulled it out. The sky was dark, the water was cold, and I wanted nothing to do with this.