I wake up from my tequila-induced coma and smell the liquor on my body. It must be oozing out of my pores. I can’t believe I do this to myself every weekend.
It’s Sunday. The day I am no longer able to ignore the amount of school work I always say I will get a head start on and never do.
I sit up, feeling top heavy, and squint to see the clock. Fuck. It’s already 3 p.m.
As I do a 360 around the room, I try to remember my night. Soiled shot glasses, empty beer cans, loose tobacco and a half-massacred mushroom pizza pie are strewn across my desk.
The room reeks of stale liquor and puke.
I look at my roommate who is sitting up in her bed, clearly in the same amount of pain I am. “Did I puke?” I ask.
“No, I did. Sorry,” she moans.
As I hunch toward the bathroom in our dorm room, I pass Kaity’s room and knock obnoxiously to wake her up. She throws the door open. Her eyes are bloodshot, makeup smeared down her cheeks.
“I looove the bar,” she chuckles.
We slide our bodies down the walls in the hall and stretch out as we try to piece together our night.
Shots in the room. Stumbling to another friend’s apartment. Shots. Oasis. Shots. P&G’s. Then it gets foggy.
Soon we give up, but make a pact to stop swigging cheap tequila from a plastic bottle at 3 in the morning.
Every weekend we bring ourselves past the brink of incoherence and then recover just enough to pull our shit together to do it all over again. The true life of a college student.
“Hey,” Kaity says with a glimmer in her eye. “Wanna smoke a j?”
The perfect cure for our hangover.