“What about your husbands?” I asked, reaching for some legitimate reason to block them from coming with me. “Surely they don’t want you two mingling with a bunch of eligible bachelors.”
“While you’re correct in your assessment that I’ve still ‘got it’,” Kinsley said with a gesture at her bright red tracksuit. “I’ll have you know Liam trusts me and made me promise I wouldn’t let you go alone.”
I groaned. Liam too?! How many parents did I have on this trip? I tried to walk faster, hoping that if I took four steps for every one of theirs, I’d eventually lose them. No such luck. They picked up the pace and linked their arms with me, successfully shackling me to my embarrassment.
“This will be fun!” Becca said with a little skip in her step. “Girls night!”
Kinsley nodded. “We don’t have practice until noon tomorrow so we should be able to let loose.”
Kinsley and Becca were only four years older than me, but when we arrived outside the party, it felt like I was walking in with my parents.
“Whoa, a disco ball!” Becca said, pulling us through the door. “Who packs a friggin’ disco ball for the Olympics?”
The Brazilian swimmers ushered us inside with big smiles.
“Good evening, ladies,” one of them said with practiced English and a heavy accent.
“Sorry! Liam Wilder already put a ring on it,” Kinsley said, waving her left hand in the air like Beyoncé. Becca did the same, and since they had death grips on my arms, I couldn’t slink away. Their wedding rings formed a veritable force field of chastity around us that no one seemed to notice but me.
“Should we get some punch?” Becca asked.
“We should really only be drinking water this close to competing,” Kinsley said.
Dear god, I needed to get away from them.
“Guys, I’m going to head to the bathroom,” I said, sliding out of their grips.
Becca looked alarmed, as if needing to pee was an admission of some untold guilt. “Oh, should we all go?”
“NO!” I shouted, then lowered my voice to a whisper. “I, uh…I need to poop.”
“Oh, someone’s neerrrvvouuuusss,” Kinsley said with a knowing smirk.
“It’s her first Olympic party, of course her bowels are moving Kins!” Becca laughed.
I closed my eyes, took two deep breaths, and then slapped on a fake smile. “Honestly, I’m so glad you guys came with me. I’m just going to head over to the restroom and when I get back, we can party together the rest of the night.”
My fake speech threw them off, so much so that they let me go to the restroom all by myself; as a twenty-one-year-old, I never thought that would be an issue. Fortunately, the second I was out of their sight, I finally saw the party for what it really was: a playground.
The Brazilian guys had a condo that was at least twice the size of ours. The living room was packed from wall to wall with a multinational bevy of Aphrodites and Adonises. Kinsley and Becca were holed up in the foyer, and as I wove through the party trying to find a restroom I didn’t actually need, I realized it wouldn’t be hard to steer clear of them for the rest of the night.
Everyone was shouting over the music, and I couldn’t distinguish one accent from another. I caught passing words in English, but by the time I turned, I couldn’t tell who’d said what. I made it past a rowdy group of guys who were blocking my path to the drinks table, but I weaseled my way through, mostly unnoticed thanks to their gargantuan stature.
“Oy! Where you going?” one of them asked with a heavy accent as I pulled a beer from the table and tried to slink back into the madness.
“Oh.” I laughed. “Just grabbing a drink.”
I wiggled the can back and forth and they all broke out into smiles. Clearly, they approved of alcohol. Between their stature and thick beards, they looked like a group of Vikings who’d accidentally time traveled to 2016. One of them had on a rugby shirt that looked big enough to cover my whole body, which made perfect sense. They were definitely part of a rugby team.
“All right, well you guys have fun,” I said, trying to shimmy past them.
The one who was closest to me—a giant with a red beard that stretched down past his chin—clapped me on the shoulder. My knees buckled under the weight. “Stay! Drink!” he bellowed.
I thought it over for a second. Drinking with a bunch of rowdy rugby players hadn’t really been in my vision for the night, but if I stuck with the Vikings, Kinsley and Becca would never be able to find me. I scanned across them again, and wide cheeky smiles flashed back at me. Crooked or missing teeth were par for the course, but they seemed fairly harmless—so long as none of them thunder-clapped me on the shoulder again. It literally felt like getting hit by car.
Ten minutes later—the details were fuzzy—Gareth (bearded dude) had hoisted me up onto his shoulders and was parading me around the party like a pi?ata. His teammates formed a scrum around him, and they all taught me a drinking song, one that sounded like a sea shanty borrowed from pirates in the Victorian era.