Alice was bouncing around the house, chatting and flirting with anyone she could nail down long enough to talk to. The funniest part was that she had turned up to the party with some metrosexual-type guy she had met earlier in the week. Even Dana had had enough drinks to let loose and flirt with a few girls, despite turning up to the party with Harrison in tow. Bette had gotten this performance artist to put an instillation up in the middle of the living room, which actually became the lifeline of the party. This woman was naked, in a box, writing all over the plexi-glass that encased her. There were markers lying around the room so guests could also write on the box. I had done a couple lines to get the night off right, and after seeing very few potential hook ups at the party, eventually climbed into the box myself and started going down on the artist, right in front of everyone… Not that the public aspect concerned me, if anything I found it to be a bit of a turn-on. And apparently from the way she reacted, so did the dark-skinned artist. I caught eyes with Dana at one point, looking shocked and yet intrigued at the same time. Everyone else, myself included, found Dana to be downright entertaining the whole night. Because there were people that she didn’t know, several straight couples that Bette had invited from the art world, and a few straight couples that Tina worked with all at the party, added to the fact that she had just won a pretty big tournament earlier in the month and was sort of in the spotlight at the time, she was deep back in the closet. Harrison eying every guy who walked past him, including Alice’s metro date, was just the icing on the cake. Dana had another fairly large game coming up in a few more weeks, so we were sure that she would have plenty to work off in training after this party.

The clock hit midnight, and everyone hugged and kissed everyone else, wishing them a Happy New Year. Alice grabbed me and pulled me out to the back deck. While she wasn’t wasted or even that drunk, she had had enough to be loose-lipped, which for Alice, wasn’t that hard to do.