We made plans to get together on New Year's Eve, to see in the beginning of 1984 together. Tracy would be going to a party with some friends (and borrowing my car to do it so she wouldn't risk riding with a drunk driver) and my parents would be at a New Year's Eve party of their own. I had a twelve pack of beer that Tracy had scored for me and a joint of some good greenbud that Mike had scored for me. We planned to sit and watch all of the stupid shows that were on, smoke grass, drink beer, and maybe make out a little. Though it may sound unimaginably dull to some, I was looking forward to it greatly.
About six o'clock that evening, as Tracy and my parents were frantically scrambling around the house trying to get ready to go, Nina called me.
"Bill," She told me sadly, getting right to the point. "I can't come over tonight."
"You can't?" I asked, disappointed, feeling almost betrayed in fact.
"I'm sorry." She said. "My parents told me I couldn't go out tonight. They were very firm about it too." She sighed. "I don't know what's gotten into them. They've never treated me like this before. Never!"
I was silent for a moment. I knew what was happening and I had known that it was coming eventually. As I said before, you simply cannot hide your activities from those that you lived with. Especially not when you had been in the habit of staying home all of the time and then you suddenly developed the urge to go out for hours at a time every day. I'd tried to bring this up to her on a few occasions but her reaction each time quickly taught me that it was a taboo subject. I knew I was simply going to have to wait until the subject came to a head. Well now it seemed as if that had happened.
"Nina." I told her. "Did your parents ask you where you wanted to go tonight before they said no?"
"Yes." She told me.
"And what did you tell them?"
"That some friends from school were having a party that I wanted to go to. I told them I wouldn't drink and everything and they still said no. No matter how much I…"
"Nina." I interrupted.
"What?"
"They know about us." I told her.
There was silence on the line for a moment. Finally, "No Bill, they can't. How could they know? I never tell them where I'm REALLY going when I come over to your house."
"Do you think your parents are stupid Nina?" I asked, trying to keep my voice gentle, but wanting to get this point across.
"No!" She said sharply, "But I don't see how…"
"Think about it." I told her. "You're a shy girl all of your life until you meet me. Suddenly you start going out and doing thing all of the time. They like me at first so they allow it. But then we have a falling out because of, well, you know. Anyway, you stop seeing me and go back to staying in the house all of the time. They tell you that you are never to see me again. For a while you don't. And then all of a sudden you start having things to do once more. You want to borrow their car all the time so you can go visit someone. No matter what you are telling them when you come over here, I doubt if they bought it more than twice. They have common sense Nina. They know about us."
"They DO NOT!" She yelled angrily. "They're just afraid of me being out on a night when everyone's drinking. I was careful Bill. They don't know about us and they won't find out!"
"Nina…"
"I'm sorry I can't come over." She said shortly. "If you'd like me too, I'll try and come over tomorrow."
"Of course I do Nina," I said. "But you're going to have to face…"
"There's nothing to face!" She insisted. "Do you want me to come over tomorrow or not?"
I sighed, shaking my head. "Yes Nina," I said, more gently. "I'll see you tomorrow."
"I'll give you a call." She said. A second later the phone clicked in my ear. Before I'd even had a chance to tell her I loved her.
And so it came to pass that I spent New Year's Eve alone in my parent's house. The beer did not get drank, the pot did not get smoked. I went to bed around ten o'clock. I was too miserable to even masturbate.
When I woke up the next morning I was not surprised to find my parent's car missing from the garage. It was a New Year's eve tradition with them. They would get totally trashed at the school faculty party and take a cab home. The next morning they would not get out of bed until at least noon, at which point they would spend the rest of the afternoon bitching about their hangovers and swearing they were never going to drink again. In the early evening they would pile into Mom's car and drive to wherever Dad's car had been left the night before to retrieve it. Let me tell you, anyone who thinks of teachers as stoic, sober, square people never grew up with one in the house. In my experience Dad was more the rule than the exception. He was by no means an alcoholic but he sure liked to party on special occasions.
Tracy was already up when I went down to the kitchen. She was drinking a cup of coffee and flipping through the newspaper. She was not hung over since she had not had anything to drink the night before. Nothing like having a death sentence from fate hanging over you to keep you from driving a car while intoxicated. Too bad there wasn't some way we could do that to those that were arrested for drunk driving. It would probably drastically cut down on the repeat offender rate.
She asked how my night had gone and I told her about my conversation with Nina. She listened with concern.
"A classic case of denial." She told me when I'd finished. "But understandable. Remember Bill, she's still, for all of her maturity and sophistication, a seventeen-year-old. Seventeen year olds are always right."
"I know." I said. "I'm sure that deep down she knows that I'm right. She just doesn't want to face it, doesn't want to confront it because she'll then be forced into a confrontation with her parents. She's very untypical of a seventeen-year-old in that regard. She worships her parents and she still thinks they're smarter than she is."
"In all except for this." Tracy agreed. "If I was you I'd brace myself. I think this thing might be about to explode."
"I think you're probably right." I agreed.
Tracy then turned the conversation around to her REAL goal of the morning. She wanted to borrow my car again to go to a football party. I had nowhere to go so I told her she knew where the keys were. Less than twenty minutes later she was out the door.
Nina called a few minutes later and told me happily that her parents had raised no objections to her going out today. She almost gloated as she told me this. When I hung up from her my mood was improved greatly. I would get to see her today. That always made me happy. And maybe I was the one who was wrong about her parents. Maybe they really HAD been concerned about her being out on New Year's Eve. After all, Nina knew her parents better than I did, didn't she?
I was about to head upstairs to shower when Dad came staggering into the kitchen. He was wearing his robe tied loosely around him. His hair was a tangled mess and his face was unshaven with eyes that looked downright painful.
"Ohhh God." He moaned, heading for the cabinet. As he passed I could smell the odor of stale booze around him; a smell my paramedicine career had made me intimately familiar with. "Never again."
"Little too much to drink last night?" I asked him as he fumbled a large tumbler out of the cabinet and almost dropped it.
"Uhhh!" He groaned, turning on the sink and filling the glass. "Don't ever drink Bill." He advised me. "Ever."
"I'll take that under consideration." I told him, watching as he downed the glass of water in three gulps. He refilled it and then went to another cabinet for some aspirin.
When I finished my shower and came back downstairs he was lying on the couch, a blanket wrapped around him, watching the first of many football games. He seemed semi-catatonic and I could not imagine that he was actually seeing anything on the screen. I smiled in amusement, reflecting that if I'd been a normal teenager I would have been struck with the screaming horrors at the idea of my girlfriend coming over while my Dad was in his bathrobe on the couch.