The Party

After a certain amount of time, authorities could not help but forget the pariculars of my crimes. So it was without too much trouble that I gained permission to go to a party at someone's house. This party was different from the others that I had been to. No one drank, everyone was fairly calm, a low-key affair. Several others from the dorm were there too, so the dorm parents figured I could not get myself into too much trouble.

I spent a great deal of my time outside with Paul, Steve, and Jeff. Jeff had never been a big member of our group but we had began to hang out a little bit after he was suspended from the school. As my dad was on the school board, and Jeff's ex had been in my dorm I had a handle on what he had done. After his girlfriend dumped him, Jeff called her and threatened to kill himself. I had been in the kitchen at the time and I remember her running around trying to get a hold of some authority to prevent him from following through. My dad claimed that the board had no choice but to suspend him for the rest of the school year and he added that they had considered suspending the girl too because of the suggestions that the two were physically intimate. Jeff considered the punishment a terrible overreaction to simple miscommunication.

Oh well.

After a while, a girl named Ashley came out and began talking to us, the self-styled outcasts of the gathering. We stepped outside the property walls to smoke a couple cigarettes (which I had begun abusing on the roof of Steve's house a few weeks earlier). Ashley asked turned down the cigarrettes but seemed to revel in being around people who so clearly cared so little for the strict limits of school policy. She asked us what we believed in.

-Not Christianity. Someone intoned.

-Probably something like deism. Someone else helpfully added.

Ashley bathed in the novelty of vicarious unbelief.

I felt a strange sense of belonging.