I played Twister with a dead girl once. She wasn't dead at the time, obviously. That would have given me more of an advantage than her drunkenness did. Neither of us knew that she had one foot on green and the other one in the grave.

Her name was Marcia, I think. I didn't know her very well, certainly not well enough for the intimate positions that the game forced us into. But it was a party at the Playground, and such things as drunken Twister weren't all that uncommon.

I had lived at the Playground for less than a month at that time. Long enough to have met a lot of new people, but not long enough to have really developed any real friendships with them. Definitely not long enough to be over the serious relationship that had ended a month before. I was lonely, longing for someone new, yet still wanting the ex. I was surrounded by college students, all younger than I was by at least four or five years, all hipper than me by a decade or more. At least that's how it felt.

Centrally located, our apartment had already become a center for hanging out. In addition to the six of us who lived there, there were guests twenty-four-seven. On any given morning I would exit my room to encounter strangers asleep on our couch, or the miscellaneous girlfriend of a roommate coming out of the bathroom, or someone passed out on the kitchen floor. Once I came back from a weekend at my parents' to find twin girls asleep in my bedroom. I knew one of them.

It was the first of the legendary parties at the Playground that year. Smaller events had erupted spontaneously, as will happen when there are that many college students around, but this one was a planned event. We told people when to show up. We bought a keg of cheap beer and accepted contributions of a dollar at the door. By nine PM the apartment was full. There were people there that none of us knew, or would ever see again.

Compared to some of my roommates, I never drank much. There were occasions when that rule didn't apply, but that night wasn't one of them. I had a beer or two and mingled, trying to meet people and make new friends.

And trying to get laid, of course.

I don't know when Marcia arrived. I'm not even sure I had met her before that night. She came with Anne and Carrie who lived across the street in an apartment that you could see into from John's room if the light was just right. In the next six months there would a number of parties there as well, at least before it burned and Anne and Carrie lost everything they owned.

Marcia was already dead by the time that happened.

I heard a commotion in my room, lots of laughing and giggling, so I left the keg in the kitchen and went to investigate. Marcia was standing on a chair, long legs in tight faded denim, reaching into a crawl space above the door that I didn't know existed. As Marcia stood on tiptoe, Anne reached out and braced her legs.

© 2004 Wayne Wise