Chapter 11
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By six-thirty, the others had arrived. Marlene had ordered pizzas for dinner, and when Tara wandered into the kitchen to eat, she found everyone out on the deck, paper plates in one hand, booze in the other. The kitchen table and counters looked like they belonged in a frat house—pizza boxes open, cheese pulled and dangling, and scattered everywhere, the empty alcohol bottles. Beer, wine coolers, frozen pouches of cocktail mixes squeezed and tossed aside. Harder stuff, too, like Jack Daniels, Captain Morgan, Absolut, and something an unearthly shade of teal marked MD 20/20 that looked like Kool-Aid and was probably not.
With a weary sigh, Tara found the pepperoni pizza and a bottle of water in the fridge, then retreated to the relative quiet of the front porch to wait until the realfestivities began. If the evening didn’t end with one of the girls in the emergency room with alcohol poisoning, she’d be surprised.