Chemistry Night: Part 1

As my ninth grade dragged on, I began to convort more often with those people who were a grade ahead: namely, Paul, Daniel, Steve, and sometimes Derek Anderson, rather than Marc, James, and Derek Brown with whom I shared a good rapport but who were drifting into flirtation with narcotics and obsession with pornography (neither of which I found to be socially stimulating). Late that year, the grade ahead found themselves on the eve an important Chemistry test from a notoriously difficult teacher (whose name I forget [Kryslo, Kristoff, Krysl]). A group of peers gathered on that Thursday night in what was intended to be a night of heavy studying and I came along because I knew that bottles were also making their ways there. Paul, Daniel, my brother (still not drinking), and I were the first to gather. They began discussing covalent bonds and I sat silently. We had decided to hold off on the brandy until Steve arrived from his house. At some moment, someone entered and said that Steve might not be coming after all.

So we opened the Brandy and had a round. And then another. And then quickly a third.

Steve arrived five minutes later.

-Assholes started without me?

-We thought you were not coming. We couldn't wait all night.

-I was only fifteen minutes late.

-Shut the fuck up. Just catch up.

So Steve had his drinks in succession. We all stood equal now.

-We should go to Derek's house.

Walking into hostile terrain was one of our forte's (especially mine and Paul's. We had re-entered the campus under the influence several times and talked cheerfully to many of my dormmates, we even played baskteball against some of the team [and held our own]. Nobody ever saw our stumbles and slurred speech; sometimes people just don't want to know. [Like in health class when Ashley posited that no-one at the school did any of that bad stuff to audible laughs from our little corner].

So Paul, Steve, and I went to Derek's house. His sister answered the door. The family was having spaggetti for dinner and Derek could not go to 'study chemistry' for at least another hour. We wandered listlessly until we decided to go to the park at the top of his street. We pissed on the trees of that park, surrounded though it was by all those members of the school's establishment. We wandered listlessly. We began to head back to Paul's house.

Then Steve renounced Christ.