“Fill ’er up!” Ryan grabs my empty cup, fills it up from the tap and hands it back to me. “You’re my kind of girl after all!”

Thirty minutes later, I’ve had another tequila shot and another beer, and I can’t see straight anymore. I’ve almost lost my glasses three times because I keep forgetting that they’re perched on my nose. I’m having trouble focusing, and suddenly, even though I’m mad at him, I wish I could find Nick in the crowd, just because he’d be a familiar face, and I’m feeling a little lost.

But he’s nowhere to be seen. I’m crushed that not only does he have a girlfriend, but he’s also apparently abandoned me at this party, which has swelled even bigger. There must be a hundred people in the yard, all of them jostling, most of them drunk, some of them yelling.

“Hey, new girl!” says a deep voice. I feel an arm around my shoulder, and as I turn, it takes me about thirty seconds to register that it’s Nick’s friend Todd.

“Where’s Nick?” I yell over the din of the crowd.

“I think he’s with Kallie!” he shouts back.

“His girlfriend?” I ask, trying not to sound bitter.

“Huh? Yeah!” Todd yells. “They’ve been going out for like six months. Hey, let’s play a drinking game!”

I allow myself to be led, stumbling over plastic cups and empty bottles, toward the house. I follow Todd into the living room, where a group of twenty or so people is gathered around a big-screen TV.

“Karaoke?” I say as Todd leads me through the crowd.

“Drunk karaoke!” Todd clarifies. There’s a girl singing “Like a Virgin” off-key and attempting a little drunken dance near the TV. “Every time she messes up a word, everyone has to take a sip of their beer,” Todd explains. “Let’s play!”

I watch for a minute, and as the girl flubs a line and giggles, everyone laughs, raises their glasses and takes a big gulp of their beer.

“C’mon!” Todd urges. “Drink!” So I do.

I watch as “Like a Virgin” ends and another girl stands up.

“I’ll sing!” she slurs.

The guy in the backward blue baseball cap running the karaoke machine punches in a few buttons, loads a new CD and yells out, “Oops! . . . I Did It Again!”

“You don’t get to choose your own song?” I ask Todd as the music starts up again.

“No,” he responds. “It’s more fun when it’s randomly chosen for you. That way, you screw up the lines more. And everyone gets wasted.”

The girl messes up on the intro, and we all take big gulps of our beers. I’m feeling even woozier.

“I’ll go get us some more beer!” Todd yells over the music. “Don’t move!”