14
Pomegranate juice Raphailia Paraschou It’s already 2 o'clock and the party's still going strong. Music, games, dancing, and drinking. Everybody is having a good time, even her. Even though, when she had received the invitation, her friend tried to prevent her from going by any means possible. “You know he is gonna be there! I have a bad feeling about this. I refuse to go and so should you!” She just smiled, “It’ll be fun.” “Have you forgotten what happened the last time he was there?” her friend snapped back. “How could I have forgotten? My best friend Lola was involved. But these are just rumours. Besides, Lola is a notorious liar,” she had insisted. So here she is, smiling, singing, and dancing to the beat of the music, seeming to have left everything, even her friend, who must have gone to sleep by now, in the past. The dance floor is coming alive. The lights have been turned down low and the volume of the music has reached its climax. The beat is pumping harder and faster and everyone around her has started dancing aggressively. When the biggest dance hit of the summer comes on, she suddenly feels like she is being drowned in the lake of bodies that has been formulated around her. She scans the place to find a quick way out but it's no use. So she chooses to swim. She starts dancing and manages to reach the back corner of the room where the table with the drinks stands. She decides to have a drink. She avoids alcohol, the only sign of her past self, the one that she maintained when Lola was around, and notices a bottle of pomegranate juice. Her favourite. She grabs a plastic cup and pours the red liquid into it. “It looks like blood,'' she thinks to herself and starts laughing, remembering Lola’s aversion to anything red.
