In Rome we celebrated our bus driver’s birthday at a pub down the street. By “down the street” I really mean a good twenty-minute walk down a steep suburban hill. This wasn’t Rome, but it was, the pub could have been in my own backyard, but it wasn’t. We drank beer and ate snack food, were there nachos? I can’t remember. It was the first time all of us had really gone out as a group; we were closer now. We bought shots for Albie, but he wouldn’t accept them, so we drank them ourselves. I swapped my favorite necklace for Damian’s silk tie. My favorite necklace was made of lime green beads, like a Wilma Flintstone sort of thing, a choker. We were dancing, and Damian grabbed it, he pulled too hard on it and it broke, lime green spheres flew everywhere and we couldn’t collect them all to salvage the piece. I went to get more drinks, found myself being pulled into Jared, Jared who could have been a model, who had a swarthy accent because he was from South Africa. We began to tango. It was silly. Everyone was dancing silly.
