In my freshman year, it snowed on New Year's Eve. My friend and I spent the early evening taking turns building worlds in the Sims. We tried to make our characters befriend each other in-game until we got so fed up, we let the characters burn to death in a kitchen fire. We bundled up to take a walk in the snow. It was just flurries, but living in a place with no snow meant this was enough for us. We wrote the names of our favorite bands on the windshields of parked cars.
In sophomore year, our friend group had expanded. There were four of us who liked to drink every Friday night, and this was no exception. Two older male cousins offered us their warm beers. Lucy paired off with one before the night was done. I got tired and laid down on the floor, the images on the TV dizzying me. The other cousin was next to me; I don't know how much time had passed when his mother opened the door and saw us. She screamed at me more than him, as if I had begged her college-dropout son to put his fingers inside of me.
New Year's Eve during my junior year saw me celebrating two months with my first official boyfriend. We were still shy around each other. The friend group had grown to include boyfriends, friends-of-boyfriends, girls who went to other schools but knew someone because of a tenuous connection. No one liked my boyfriend, so at one part of the evening, I found myself crying under the hotel sink. When my boyfriend reached to help me out, I hit my head on a pipe that burst. We left.
Senior year was hard. Every day felt like I was on the verge of becoming an adult, on the verge of being on my own, on the verge of making it. New Year's Eve felt almost as important as I hoped graduation would be. The true transformation of old me to New Me. I was going to become something. I wanted to run away, if only for a weekend. Drive to New York City and wander the streets until I found what I didn't know I was looking for. Without my own car, it would be impossible. I pretended that was the only reason, not that I was too tethered to my responsibilities. I could never change.
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