This isn’t the post I should be writing.

I should be telling you that I went home this weekend. That my baby sister had the lead in her school’s production of Cabaret and I was so blown away that I cried from the second her big final number began.

I should be telling you that I got to go back to Fenway Park, a place I practically lived at in college, for the first time in two years. That it was chilly and windy, but we sat in the grandstands and cheered Buchholz as he took a no-hitter into the 8th. And that I remember the delightful peace that comes from watching a baseball game in Boston, especially with your whole family.

I should be telling you that even though the weekend was short, and I lost more than my share of sleep in the transition, being home filled the empty spot in my heart so perfectly that I forgot it was even there in the first place.

And I almost did. My father dropped me off at Logan Monday morning and headed off to the 11:00am Red Sox game and a day of celebrating in the city. I had made cracks all week about the sad irony that I was leaving Boston on its greatest holiday, Marathon Monday, but when I boarded the flight I was full and happy. Once we cleared altitude I opened my laptop to start typing, but was so tired that I fell asleep watching Criminal Minds instead. When the plane landed 6 hours later, and I turned my phone on to text my father, it only took minutes for the air to fill with every worry, thought and prayer that could be found.

I can’t bring myself to terms with the idea that the city I left less than 48 hours ago won’t be the same city I return to, whether it be weeks or months from now. I can’t believe it because every time I see the video footage and the photos, the people I see in them are the same as I have always remembered. The young 20 and 30-something guys with Red Sox hats turned backwards ripping their shirts off to use as tourniquets and bandages? Those are the same guys I meet with my dad to grab a few beers at the local bar. The girls with their leggings and college t-shirts, neon sneakers gleaming as they rushed to grab their friends? Those are the same girls I spent four years slinging drinks with, sharing gummy bears in the wait station and horror stories during pre-shift. While something so purely evil happened on a day that is a celebration of determination, fight, and the city itself, what has come of it so far is a testament to the very spirit that has always, in triumph and now in tragedy, made Boston so uniquely special.

It seems impossible that things could ever be the same, could ever return to normal, but any Boston sports fan will tell you that believing in the impossible is part of their DNA. So while I find it hard to put words to what will happen now to the home that I left behind yesterday morning, I do not worry. Who or whatever did this should know by now that they have sadly underestimated the city they are dealing with.

I walked into work this morning wearing my favorite locket and my BU t-shirt, silent gestures that I knew wouldn’t change anything but that I felt I had to make anyways. My co-worker, also from MA, met me at my desk in a Red Sox hat with a Dunkin’ Donuts K-Cup in hand. We agreed that there was only one place in the world that we wanted to be right now.

This isn’t the post I should be writing, but here we are. The words still won’t quite come out right, but they are ones I will repeat over and over, just as loud as I can.

I have never loved that dirty water more.

I loved the neighborhood I grew up in. It was small for the city that held it – blocks of city streets on the side of a hill,  lined with three-decker apartment buildings boasting their matchbox backyards and clotheslines dangling off the front porch. We had a brick elementary school with a fenced-in asphalt playground three houses down. If you didn’t know everyone, you knew their aunt from high school or their second cousin from church. People didn’t grow up and leave my neighborhood – they passed their tiny two-bedroom apartments down from parents to children, to grandchildren, once they had done their time at the public high school. College was still totally an option, just not a foregone conclusion. I found it hard to believe you could ever need anything else.

Though none of that really mattered when I was six, because all I REALLY wanted was to play Spice Girls with my friends in the schoolyard. The rest was just an essay our teachers would always ask us to write about. “What I Want To Be When I Grow Up”, by Nicole Collette, Grade 2 – two pages, handwritten in cursive on every other line.

I wanted to be just like my mom. My parents got married when they were 21, three years out of high school, and my mom had me one month before her 24th birthday. So by 23, I imagined, I would have already fallen in love in high school, gotten married, and moved into my own three-decker apartment – probably close to my parents, because my sister Danielle liked to knock things over and sometimes forgot to get on the elevator before the doors closed, so someone would have to keep an eye on her. We would have dogs, and a little baby girl with blonde curls that I would sing lullabies to at night. I would have won at least one Olympic medal in gymnastics by then, but I would still get to come back home and sit on the couch eating Honey Nut Cheerios with my new husband and a pair of slippers. I would be really tall, and I would have a Harley just like my dad’s and I would get to wear hot pink glitter nail polish ALL the time.

I was a real looker. So was little Jessi.

I think a lot, especially lately, about what it would be like if my life had turned out that way. Because a few years after that, my dad sold his Harley to help move us out of our little city neighborhood to a small town where everybody’s everyone was a doctor, or a lawyer, or class valedictorian and on their way to Brown. My new friends had college funds, and my teachers gave me brand new books to carefully pencil my name into. Nikki Collette, Grade 6. They all used the word “potential” a lot. Everybody knew everybody, but only because you heard about them at lunch or in whispers down the hallway. Your job was to grow up, to go to college, and to make sure your parents didn’t have to dodge conversations about you at local soccer games. I hated every ounce of it, so suddenly all I wanted was out. All those years of wanting to grow up and settle down, nice and easy, flew out the window as soon as I realized that my parents life wasn’t always going to be my own. My teachers were right to expect it, I suppose – I learned to want so much more than a husband and a kid and house. So I went and I found it.

There are days, more often now than ever before, that I look around at 23 and worry that that little six-year-old would be disappointed in me. I never fell in love in high school. I don’t know if I’ll get married, or have a dog, or a little baby girl to sing lullabies to because I’m so wary to want anything from the future that I’ve just stopped trying. I have a job, I want to tell her, even if I’ve made my entire life about it. I went to Boston and learned all kinds of things, and then I went to Australia and pet kangaroos for a while. I live in California, now, all by myself and by all adult standards, I’m making it by.

But in my imagination, she looks up at me from her giant coke-bottle glasses and asks me who makes sure Mom and Dad and Danielle and baby Jessi are okay, and don’t I get lonely all by myself so far away? Don’t I still want all those things? And my heart breaks into a million pieces, because I don’t know the answers anymore.

So, on the days when those worries shout the loudest, when the only voices I can hear are the ones telling me that I am crazy to want all of this and to think that I am anywhere good enough to handle this life all on my own, I imagine taking her by the hand. I take her for a walk up the canyon and show her what a Pacific sunset looks like from just above the Hollywood sign, and then I let her dip her toes into the Pacific Ocean. I sit her in front of my laptop for a Sunday night Skype date, so she can see that Danielle doesn’t walk into walls anymore, she knocks them DOWN by sheer force of talent, and baby Jessi got to be the really tall and really smart one and that I have a brother now too who worries enough for the four of us combined. So she can see that I do still do my best to take care of them, but they help take care of me too. I lead her with me behind the black curtain backstage so she can watch rock stars joke and laugh during commercial breaks, and I let her watch her very own name flash across the television screen once a week.

And when the cameras start rolling, I press her little hand up against the wall of the stage so she can feel the rumble of a live band mixed with the sound of an audience and a buzzing in the pit of her little stomach that only live television can create.

And when I get to that part of the daydream, every time, I glance down at her big eyes behind those wire frames and the look on her face tells me that the two of us, we’re going to be just fine.

And also, that I still really want that Harley.

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Part of The Scintilla Project – two weeks of a little storytelling cardio, and one of my favorite times of the year.
Check out more info on the project here. 

Day 16 : What would it have been like if your life had turned out the way you wanted when you were a kid?

I can’t believe we’re at the end!! I still have plenty to catch up on, and will here and there as we go forward, but for now a huge, magnificent standing ovation for the three beautiful ladies who make up Scintilla HQ for another inspiring fortnight. To next year!

I’ve written a few times (even as they were happening) about moment-of-no-return horizons. But here’s a different (literal) one: in many ways, the moment from which the rest were born.

At 17, beaches in February make the world feel infinite.

You remember the drive like it was yesterday. Warm bodies perched behind the dashboard of your first car, paint peeling at the edges, flying down I-495 faster than you would ever dare to drive during the day. Nobody heads east at midnight. Not in February.

Growing up there, you never really noticed the distinct feel of a New England winter beyond slushy sidewalks and an ice scraper in the trunk. But here you can remember the way that everything about a midnight drive in February reeks of Massachusetts, the same way all of the tour guides and travel essays promise that it will. The trees stretch on in a straight line, flat, endless, shoulder to shoulder. The cold air buzzes in your nose, but the way your shoulders instinctively curl into your body and your hands stretch your coat pockets into your stomach makes you feel a kind of comforting warmth one would never associate with an often brutal winter. It’s the kind of cold that makes you blast the heat and crack a window.

At 17, beaches in February are a choice without reason, yet there you were barreling towards the state line. It wasn’t running away, you just wanted to see how far you could fly before you hit the ground again. It’s not leaving, it’s just the next best thing.

…It’s also the only beach you could remember how to drive to.

You hummed along to Aqualung, because it was brooding and you wouldn’t hear it on the radio. You wanted to get the soundtrack right. It’s high school, it’s desperation, it’s a steady, rhythmic longing for something bigger than homecoming and midterms and even the sound of your two best friends calling up to you from the backseat of this ’95 Cutlass your dad bought off the side of the road.

Today, you remember that he found that car in the middle of a hailstorm, dented in a few places but still in working order. It makes so much more sense now (but you, to this day, still only know that one Aqualung song.)

The boardwalk you’d always seen stacked 4 deep with yelping children, young lovers, and tattooed bikers on their way back from Laconia was barren. The lights were out, the concrete sidewalks quiet, and it seemed the life of a beach town you knew like a second home had disappeared with the sun.

You cruised into the parking lot, and left the meter empty. Nobody would question another blinking red light along the fence. Besides, your favorite fried dough stand was, miraculously, still open. And even midnight rebels get hungry.

Its neon orange lights bounced through the sky for what seemed like miles, but the old man behind the counter still looked startled when you jogged up to the window. A band of hooligans in mittens and plaid pea coats, hurried along by the wind. What a sight you must have been as he fired up the fryer and made the same pizza fried dough you’ve been trying to convince your parents for years actually counts as dinner. When he handed them through the window, the hot steam filled the still winter air around you until it was almost impossible to see, and you laughed.

Turns out that sometimes, on beaches in February, you can breathe life into the night.

As you ate, you kicked off your shoes by instinct, leaving heavy socks tucked neatly into your high tops by the car. The sand was almost as cold as the air, and once you hit it, you broke into a sprint by necessity. Frostbite on a beach – an oxymoron made even more peculiar by the fact that you didn’t stop until you were in the water.

First your ankles, then your shins, and by the time it reached your knees, your squeals were mixed with the squawking of the errant seagulls fleeing the scene. Your toes had gone numb pretty much instantly, but by way of some weird phenomenon (one you now assume you would have understood more thoroughly if you’d actually paid attention in science class) that absence of feeling had awakened something else. The wind bit a little harder at your noses. Your hands dug a little deeper into your pockets. And as you looked out into the waves, the dark blue skies blending seamlessly into the winter sea, your eyes could suddenly see so much farther into the darkness.

That’s all there was, you had realized, just forever and ever into the night sky until you reach land again somewhere new. The same ocean, different shores. You imagined it must have been England, or Ireland, where at the moment, the sun has already risen. If you drifted far enough, it could have been the same grey shores of Northern France that hosted the tales of history long before you were even a hope or a prayer. Talk about a midnight drive.

Beaches in February are a choice without reason, but that same icy Atlantic water slowing the circulation in your legs to a crawl had traveled thousands and thousands of miles from every corner of the Earth to be there anyway. With you.

The girl, you had said to yourself, who can’t manage to get out of bed in time to beat first bell in the morning, and who trades in parties and boyfriends for chalk dust and taped ankles. Even your parents, God bless them, couldn’t understand you, and you wondered more often than not if there was anything still left to you that was worth understanding. You were scared, you were pissed, you were dying to get out, and you swore there wasn’t a pair of jeans in the goddamn world that would ever fit your abnormally short legs.

But there you were, at 17, on a beach in February with the entire world dancing in circles around your feet.

…

Here, now, the empty sand ahead is comforting. You’ve been living in California for two years, just long enough to know that 75 degrees on a Saturday morning will soon bring with it the bustling crowds – families with their yelping children, bands of 20 and 30 somethings with their surfboards and volleyballs, and a steady stream of bicycles and rollerblades. Even in February.

You wanted to see the world back then, to run and never look back, but now you’re just waiting for a few seconds to catch your bearings again. It’s harder, here – you don’t remember ever having to take so many deep breaths in a day. But the sight of the Santa Monica Mountains stretching up and down along the water in the distance makes you chuckle and chalk that one up to the LA smog.

Flip flops dangling from your fingers, you keep walking. Slow, long enough to let the sand cover your feet with each step. You know now that the trick is to burrow your feet just deep enough to hit the sand underneath, because it’s still holding it’s warmth from the sun. You take your time.

It’s hard to remember exactly how you got here, or at what moment you finally tired enough of the sunrises to leave them for the sunsets. But here, suddenly, it isn’t hard to remember pizza fried dough and I-495, and that your old ’95 Cutlass never made that trip again once you left for college. You stop once your toes hit the chilly Pacific water and you glance up to try and find where it ends and the cloudless sky begins.

At 17, beaches in February make the world feel infinite. At 23, they make the infinite feel just like home.

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Part of The Scintilla Project – two weeks of a little storytelling cardio, and one of my favorite times of the year.
Check out more info on the project here. 

Day 7: What have been the event horizons of your life–the moments from which there was no turning back?

I’m obviously jumping around a bit, and will be catching up for a while longer. Blame the real world. We’ll get there.

(Also, to confess – I’ve been working on this post for a while, but it fit nicely into this prompt, and I actually kind of like it)

To the man next to me at the red light on Pico and Barrington, I really, really apologize. The town I lived in was small.

You see, in 2007, she was a scared freshman with brand new shoes and a little eyeliner, and I was an apathetic senior with my brand new parking pass for the high school lot slapped on the windshield. She had stars in her eyes, I had a bag packed at the foot of my bed. We stood firmly on either side of the big High School Experience, neither sure of exactly how sibling instigators would handle the front lines of the same battle.

Then dad asked “You’re not going to make your sister take the bus, right?” and all but decreed, as fathers do, that 180 days together in the front seat would be a good start.

The only CD I had in my glove compartment was a cracked-plastic copy of the Rent soundtrack. Hers, in fact – I’m pretty sure I had stolen it from her room. Show tunes are a universal language. La Vie Boheme became our favorite song. Even as we wiped the sleep from our eyes, we couldn’t help but sing along.

Sisters? We’re close.

By October, we knew all the words. By November, we had even picked harmonies. By December, we could have identified which trees we would pass when we sang a certain line. If you stood out front of the Sunnyside Ford on Main St around 7:50am, you would just catch a teal Oldsmobile zipping through the green light, two girls screaming TO MARIJUANA into the winter air. On days that we were busy, or arguing about weekend plans, they would be the only words we would say to each other all day.

Our town was small, and the drive was short, but when you rolled down the windows, your singing could echo for miles.

We had other favorites after a while, sure – Boston and Tim McGraw, an entire playlist that remained solely ours. We drove to gymnastics meets with a specific order of songs that we will both swear, to this day, won us every meet. But those early weekday mornings were always built from the same song.

To days of inspiration, playing hooky, making something out of nothing, the need to express, to communicate. To going against the grain, going insane, going maaaaaaaaaaaddddddddd…

When I left and went to college, she kept the car, and I filled my iPod with playlists better suited to solo missions. The torch had been passed.

So, again, sir, I’m sorry to have frightened you on your early morning commute. It’s pretty early, and I had just found this old playlist buried in my computer, so I was trying it on for size. You see, the town I lived in was small, but together our voices were pretty big and some mornings, if I roll down the windows and sing loud enough, I can almost hear them echo back.

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Part of The Scintilla Project – two weeks of a little storytelling cardio, and one of my favorite times of the year.
Check out more info on the project here. 

Day 3: Talk about a time when you were driving and you sang in the car, all alone. Why do you remember this song and that stretch of road?

That sister, by the way? Is Danielle – who you can find over here.

Step 1: Don’t. Scoff at the thought as you’re driving home from work. The best way, you think, to ruin this night is to try to tell the kind of story you know nothing about. Love stories are best left to a pint of ice cream and a Jennifer Aniston movie.

Unfortunately, by the time your car pulls into an empty spot in front of your apartment, that stupid boy with the stupid brown eyes will be stuck in your stupid head and you will kick yourself the entire way upstairs and though the front door.

Step 2: Pour a glass of wine. Coffee mugs, pint glasses, and a glass measuring cup from the dishwasher will also suffice. The important part is the wine.

Step 3: Open your laptop and resist the urge to slam your head against the keys. This is stupid. It’s okay.

Step 4: Start at the part where you met at orientation. Talk about how he was shy, but your new roommate brought him over to meet you because they had just had a great conversation about movies and this was the time to make friends. It’s also probably worth it to point out that you were a mess of anxiety and nerves at this point, partially from the fact that you were in a foreign country and partially because you were on the downside of your brain’s favorite cycle. You won’t remember at first, but this is relevant because quiet and shy people made you even more nervous for some reason.

Step 5: Remember that time you went with a group of friends to see Up in 3D and when you started crying behind your glasses, he nudged your arm just softly enough that you could feel it, but nobody else would call attention to your tears. Laugh because after this, you would make him watch Marley and Me with you because you knew he wouldn’t laugh at you when you sobbed through the end. In fact, he let you hide under the blanket.

Step 6: This will be where you remember the couch in your living room. You’re probably going to have some trouble deciding which memories to use here.

Step 6b: Think about that all-night conversation, sitting indian-style on either end of the old couch until 4 in the morning talking about your entire lives up until that point. It’s the first time you’ll tell him how amazed you are by the way he stops at every swing set he comes across, and the way every sentence that leaves his lips sounds like the most genuine truth you have ever heard. You told him how hard it is sometimes to be happy, and he smiled at your demons, offering to compare scars anytime you needed to. From that point on, with him, you wouldn’t feel like you needed to ever again.

Step 6c: Sigh as you remember the STUPIDLY perfect way your head fit on his chest, just between his neck and collarbone, when you would fall asleep on movie nights. You were usually the only one to fall asleep during the movie, but he wouldn’t move an inch no matter how late it or how absurdly uncomfortable that couch was. Sometimes, you would wake up but keep your eyes closed just so you wouldn’t have to leave. Neither of you ever mentioned it, no matter how inevitable it became.

Step 6d: Use both.

Step 7: Go ahead and skip over the semester ending, and you both flying back to the States, and going back to school together. IMPORTANT, however: This is where you want to point out the part about the continents. How you both managed to meet on one side of the world and make it back to the other still holding the ends of the ties that bound you. And how, by a stroke of coincidence and opportunity, you followed each other across THAT continent to land in California together.

Step 8: Throw your hands up in the air and let out an exasperated sigh because holy FUCK if that’s not the stuff Jennifer Aniston movies are made of then you are so, so screwed. Then drink more of the wine. The wine is your friend.

Step 9: Talk about the birthdays, and how he insisted on taking you to Disneyland on your birthday because you both shared such a love for anything nostalgic and young, it could literally move mountains. And how he made you an adorable hand-drawn birthday card and didn’t even try to force you to ride the Tower of Terror but sprinted across the park to grab the perfect seats for Fantasmic.

And then, talk about how you took him dancing for his birthday a week later – downtown, at a club that transformed into a 30′s swing joint on Sunday nights, costumes mandatory. You’re going to want to shake your head as you remember how you had to drag him on to the dance floor, him gingerly holding your hand and shoulder as if you had never fallen asleep on his, but that will go away as soon as you picture the way he breathed the word “Wow” when he met you at your apartment earlier that night. It’ll still make your heart stop. Wine, go for the wine.

Step 10: This is where the wheels fall off. Rub your hands over your face as you’re struck with the realization that only the crappiest stories have no logical end.

Step 11: Kill the rest of the wine.

Step 12: Try to come up with a way to explain how you went from Chinese food dates on the beach to radio silence for months at a time. How there were no signs, hell there was no acknowledged relationship for 3 years so why would there be, and how everything just ended. He stopped answering your text messages, cancelled your lunches. Popped up again every few months to apologize and invite you to the beach, only to cancel the morning of and disappear again, so you stopped calling.

Try to come up with a way to make a satisfying ending out of that. Realize you can’t. Swallow the lump in your throat already and type the words, girl.

Maybe it was all in my head.

Step 13: Shut your laptop and call it a night. You will be drunk and you will feel lighter. You will also want to run as far as possible from the words on that screen. That’s because it was an awful story.

But your chest will burn a little as you turn out the lights and crawl under the blankets, and you’ll realize that it was, in fact, a love story.

Step 14: Go to sleep. Maybe, just maybe, you told it right this time.

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Part of The Scintilla Project – two weeks of a little storytelling cardio, and one of my favorite times of the year.
Check out more info on the project here. Check out my baby sister Danielle’s responses here.

Day 2: Tell the story about something interesting (anything!) that happened to you, but tell it in the form of an instruction manual (Step 1, Step 2, Step 3….)

“Go, have fun. Just don’t mix.”

I was 19 at the time, a college sophomore splitting nearly all of my time between classes and 10 hour shifts at the sports bar, tapping my feet and waiting for baseball season to return. We were halfway through a Tuesday night shift when a friend, L, invited me and two of my close friends to a house party being thrown by one of the local college soccer teams. This wasn’t the first time, I was in college after all, and besides, my father started letting me tag along for football on Sundays when I was 17, where the bartenders slipped me beers and shots at halftime (there are not many beautiful things about Worcester, Massachusetts, but this was one of them – any native was bound to have grown up with at least half of the city’s bartenders.)

I had a midterm the next morning that I had been cramming for for three days, but I had also worked the last 6 out of 7 days and people kept trying to tell me that you’re only young once. So, I turned to my boss for advice. I still had yet to achieve fluency in the language of poor decisions.

“Go, have fun. Just don’t mix.” That was all the fake permission I needed.

We hopped in a cab once our shift was over – the party was in Mission Hill, just far enough that it wasn’t worth the walk from the bar, and we let L lead the way. The details of where we were going were inconsequential – we were off work, ready to unwind, and pumped to feel less like overworked bar staff and more like 4 girls dancing in the back of a cab.

The rest of the night is a little less story and a little more random snapshots. The only four girls at the party, we ripped through game after game of flip cup and beer pong, determined to prove that spending 40 hours a week surrounded by drunk Boston sports fans was worth more than just a paycheck. There was a darts tournament, too, I think, and at one point I looked up and all the other girls had disappeared. The only one I managed to find was K, who was down for the count in the bathroom, so the rest of my night bounced back and forth between taking care of her and and taking care of Jack Daniels shots at the makeshift bar in the basement while arguing over the Sox offseason moves (the phrase “don’t mix” had long disappeared from my thought process – referring of course, to beer and liquor, which I had consumed in every possible form by that point.)

As it turns out, drunk me, while dumb, is still pretty good at playing both mom and dad at the same time.

As the night wound down, one of the boys carried K upstairs to the living room couch, and I, in my best “I may be 5′ 2” but don’t you dare fuck with me” voice, told them that I would stay with her and they would all go upstairs, go to bed, and stay there, thanks.

I found out later that both of our friends had eventually reappeared, found a random limousine passing by the house, and somehow convinced the driver to give them a free ride home. This would have been a good thing to know about as it was happening, because after the boys went upstairs, I remember sitting down on the other couch and then waking up an hour later to K whisper-shouting “SHIT!” from under her blanket.

It was 5 am, the clock on the wall told us, and not only did we both have a 12pm shift to work, I still had that pesky 9am calculus midterm. Also, we were both still drunk, we had no idea how to get home, and our cell phones were dead. Whatever brain cells still remained told us the best course of action was to wrap ourselves in all the blankets on the couch, sneak out the front door, and start walking. So we did.

I don’t remember how we got home. I do remember that we stopped at a gas station somewhere and I ended up buying a loaf of bread that we ate by the handful as we tried our best to drunk-navigate our way back to the bar. I can only assume I walked back to my dorm from there, because the next memory I have is getting back to my dorm, kicking off my flats and sitting down on my bed to crack a book for some last minute studying. In retrospect, I guess sitting down was the real bad decision here, because much as the first time, the next thing I remember after that was waking up at 11:30a – this time to a text from K, making sure I wasn’t dead, and I didn’t miss my shift.

I sat up, horrified. I willed my brain to imagine how I was going to retake Calc now that I had gone and slept through 30% of my grade. Maybe I could cry to my professor. Maybe a hasty emergency e-mail about a crippling stomach flu. Maybe I could just go sit in a lawn chair on the B Line tracks and call it a day. I threw back the blanket and swung my feet over the side of the bed.

My sneakers were on. And my clothes were different. My backpack was leaning against my closet by the door, and I opened it to find my study materials tucked neatly inside, calculator poking haphazardly out of the front pocket. My horror turned to confusion, which quickly turned to the nauseous hum of an early hangover. I wiped the remaining eyeliner from under my eyes, grabbed two industrial-sized Gatorades from the fridge, and headed to work, hoping retracing my steps would bring back the last 4 hours. It didn’t.

I was greeted with an “Oh, hon…” as my boss approached the hostess stand shortly thereafter, slowly surveying the sad, sloppy after-effects of her harmless advice. She shook her head and handed me a stack of menus to clean.

“How did the midterm go?”

The answer to that question would come a week later, when I dragged my jaw through the front door of the restaurant, holding above my head a blue test booklet with a red “92″ circled on the front.

“Maybe I should mix more often.”

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Part of The Scintilla Project – two weeks of a little storytelling cardio, and one of my favorite times of the year.
Check out more info on the project here.

Day 1: Tell a story about a time you got drunk before you were legally old enough to do so.

It should be noted, this is one of my all-time favorite stories. I’m glad I finally have it written down.