Bad Girl House

Many colleges end their school year with a celebration called May Day. The University of Akron was no exception. After a week of final exams, students were ready to celebrate the end of another grueling semester. It was time for everyone to let off all of that pent-up steam. Right after my last final, I headed over to John’s apartment. He was living in an apartment complex fairly close to campus, and many of the people were already celebrating outside when I arrived. From the looks of them, they had apparently been done taking tests a bit earlier in the day. They all had a drink in hand as they talked and laughed loudly with each other. People were clumsily dancing to music coming from speakers set up in apartment windows. John and I only knew his roommates, so we tended to follow where they went, mainly walking along the backyards of the apartments. This was the first college party I had ever been to, and didn’t know what to expect. I supposed that I thought I’d see the stereotypical scene of people chugging beer, cheering, and eventually falling on their faces. There was already plenty of drinking going on, but everyone seemed to be pretty laid back. Since I wasn’t old enough to drink yet, it was John’s idea for me to carry around a cup anyway so that it looked like I already had a beer and no one would actually ask me if I wanted one. While we walked around, I did feel uncomfortable around the few people who had obviously had too much to drink. Although they were kind of entertaining, I didn’t understand it why they enjoyed drinking so much. As the evening went on, John would grab another beer each time the one he had was empty. This started to upset me, because I was currently dealing with the realization that what had always thought was casual drinking on my dad’s part in reality might be alcoholism. My dad usually stopped at a bar on the way home from work. I wouldn’t say that he ever came home stinking drunk, but I was beginning to notice that when did come home he was easily bothered and didn’t want to talk to anyone. Oftentimes, an argument would start between the two of us over something that wasn’t worth fighting over. It caused me to begin actively avoiding him. That was better than getting into yelling matches with him, and letting him make me feel like what I said or how I felt didn’t matter. At a certain point I wouldn’t even eat dinner in the same room as him. It was a rare moment when we enjoyed each other’s company.

I couldn’t make myself tell John that I was bothered by his drinking that night, but my teary eyes finally told him that something was wrong. As I tried to express what I was feeling, I started crying even more. I didn’t want to see John get drunk to the point of becoming out of control. He didn’t seem to know what to make of my problem. He told me that he was nowhere near being drunk, and that I was blowing things out of proportion. He looked at me like I had lost my mind. It wasn’t the first time in my life that my feelings had been dismissed, but it was the first time they had been dismissed by John. He told me that it was probably a good idea for me to head home instead of staying and getting even more upset. I felt that he just didn’t want to deal with what I was going through, or acknowledge what I was feeling.