“If you order one more round of those, we are actually going to have to carry you home in a laundry basket,” I shouted over the bass.
Emma didn’t even look at me; she just flashed a manic grin at the bartender and pointed insistently at the empty glasses. I’ve known her since the first week of uni, when we both moved into a drafty shared house that smelled perpetually of damp carpets and cheap incense. At the time, I considered myself a party animal, the one who knew which pubs did the cheap shots and how to keep a conversation going with a stranger for three hours. But as the weeks went by, it became clear that Emma existed on an entirely different planet of endurance. While I had a ‘limit’ where the room started to spin and it was time to find a kebab, Emma seemed to possess a biological immunity to exhaustion, treating a night out like a professional sport.
The house had essentially become a revolving door for the local male population, a silent agreement that Saturday and Sunday mornings were for the Great Exodus. It had devolved into a casual, unspoken competition between Emma and me, a tally of who could successfully shepherd a stranger out the front door before the noon sunlight hit the hallway carpet. If you woke up and the bed was empty, or if you were the one walking a guy to the pavement while the other was still nursing a hangover in pajamas, you won the weekend. It was a game of attrition, a quest for a specific kind of validation that only makes sense when you’re eighteen and convinced that your social life is the only metric of success.
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