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Andrea Bartz
She didn’t ask me what I did for work; instead we gushed about our close-at-hand dreams, her imminent enrollment at Parsons, my plans to write narrative nonfiction so finely crafted it’d make readers’ chests ache. We talked about men and Bowie, how we’d both read an article revealing we’re about 40 percent stardust and 60 percent hydrogen, or Big Bang dust, and isn’t it wild our atoms are as old as life itself. We had such great energy. Even Sarah noticed it and politely faded into herself. After a final round of shots, the girls led me to an apartment on another floor—another huge rectangular canvas, now decked out with a stage along the far windows, a bar/merch table off to its right, and an especially bizarre construction of living quarters: Over a thicket of four-by-fours, they’d built a cluster of elevated bedrooms, each claustrophobic and squat and opening into an elf-size catwalk, which lipped out into an overhang from which to watch the stage. (A resident I bumped into that night told me that during a brief run of Romeo and Juliet, they’d made literal use of it for the balcony scene.) Our drunkenness swelled, not just from the shots but also from the frenzy: strobe lights, spilled drinks, gyrating masses, a pounding band sporting silver and gold jackets and sequins on their eyebrows. We allowed the surf to sweep us up, dancing along, a pleasant tornado. The night faded to black afterward, like so many after it, when the light of my consciousness would blink back on hours later in my own bed or on SAKE’s couch or sometimes atop the small, sweaty mattress of a male Calhoun resident. Periods snipped from my timeline, blacked out, right in the middle of the best days of my life. That’s my lingering impression of our year as a gang: such potent, intoxicating fun, a billowing glee I hadn’t experienced before and certainly haven’t since. A montage of drunken nights spent wandering from floor to floor searching for the source of a pounding bassline, or setting off fireworks from the roof, or drifting around phoneless, unable to find one another in separate sets of staircases. We weren’t yet glued to our devices: There was
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– The Lost Night: A Novel by Andrea Bartz –