This is the last time we're letting Megan choose the party game.
Last summer, my college roommate, Dave, thought it would be fun to get together for a week's vacation. He rented a big cabin in the mountains, located on a lake about three hours drive from Santa Clara, where I was working.
I was "in between" girlfriends and working a hundred hours a week: I could use the break but wasn't sure I could make it. We had a release date just before and it was already looking bad. The team was a combination of recent parolees from IIT and some overconfident managers. It was a death march that made Bataan look like a run to Pizza Hut.
Dave reassured me there would be "adequate female company", as his girlfriend, Megan, had invited three other girls. In return, Dave got two other "eligible dudes" to come. He wheedled with me until I agreed to try to make it. I paid my share of the rental and food budget, pretty sure I was wasting the money.
And then a miracle happened. There was another journeyman engineer on the team, some French guy named Arnaud who both smoked and coded like he was on fire. We dragged his four-monitor setup and my pair of scruffy old Linux boxes into a windowless conference room, tore down the seriously broken parts of the application and, borrowing heavily from open source, rebuilt the mess at breakneck speed. We demoed it for leadership Friday afternoon, and I was on the road by 4 p.m. If I never taste Red Bull again in my life it will be too soon. I smelled like French cigarettes for days after.
Arriving around 10:30, I found a spacious cabin up a long dirt driveway. It stood at the crest of a hill with a view over the lake, rather than standing right on the shore. The interior was modern and clean, if a bit overstuffed with knotty pine and décor of the "cuckoo clock chic" variety. The satellite TV got many channels of static. The internet was glacial. Cellular service was one bar--if you went outside and stood near the road. In other words, it was heaven.
Dave came out to welcome me and help me lug my stuff up to the cabin. Everyone was in the living room, overlooking the lake. There wasn't much moonlight, but it was pretty. It was time for introductions.
"This is Henry" ("call me Buehler" "Bueller...? Bueller...?" "Sure. Funny. Also, mine's spelled with an 'H'." "That makes all the difference.")
Henry, er, Buehler was a Greek god, and he knew it. He filled his clothes perfectly without looking musclebound. He had an easy camaraderie that spoke of self-confidence. His hair was perfect. Basically, here was the love child of Tom Cruise and Robert Redford. The only blemish on him was having a name like "Henry Buehler".
The other guy was Gerald ("call me Gerald"). He seemed more like my kind of guy than Dave's. A little bit soft spoken. I think he might have been Filipino? Dark hair kind of tousled into place and horned rim glasses completed the look. We fist bumped. Then I greeted Megan, and she proceeded to introduce the ladies.
Megan is the same six feet in height as Dave. Behind her back Dave calls her "the Saluki" because she embodies that breed's narrow athletic look. It doesn't help that she wears her blonde hair in frizzy pig tails on either side of her head. That makes her look just like a saluki, right down to her brown, doe-like eyes.
Her sister, Julia ("call me Julia"), was more mastiff than saluki. She was every bit as tall as Megan, but she was massive. There was a family resemblance in her narrow face, but her honey-brown hair was short and straight. Her neck was thick, and she had stupendous jugs. Even her wrists looked powerful. Her legs were like tree trunks. If Megan looked like she was ready to go fetch tennis balls on the beach, Julia looked ready for the pie eating contest, maybe to be followed by some axe throwing?
Samantha ("call me Sam") was a friend of Megan's and she had recruited a friend, Cassie ("Cassie is short for don't call me"). From what I could see, Megan must be keeping a stable of super models just to invite to cabins in the woods. Sam bumped out her sweatpants with a curvy caboose and her top with a balancing rack. She had lovely strawberry blonde hair and seemed to glow with the inner something beautiful people have. And she was casting that glow at Buehler every other second to see if he'd noticed her yet.
Cassie was the shortest of the four, but still plenty stacked, with dark hair hanging to her shoulders. She wore a baggy black hoodie, black cargo pants, and the ensemble was finished off with black biker boots. She was the 'yang' to Sam's 'yin', but still a striking looking woman.
Speaking of striking, you've heard of love at first sight? It has an evil twin: Cassie took one look at me and was struck with the thought that she wouldn't condescend to scrape me off her boot.
The cabin had four bedrooms, which meant two to a room. Since they hadn't been sure I was coming, everyone was already situated. Buehler and Gerald shared a room with two twin beds. Julia and Sam were sharing a queen size. The fourth bedroom had bunk beds and was decorated for five-year-old boys. I always wanted a bed shaped like a race car.
Cassie had already taken possession, so she was miffed at having to share and more so because it was a guy and then some because it was me. And I disgusted her because I was still breathing.
I apologized for that and, after some nosing around, settled for the couch instead. No race car for me! I was so tired, having barely survived the drive, that I was insensible to the world until the morning.
It was great that Megan was there. If left up to Dave, provisions would have consisted of two enormous coolers filled with the cheapest beer on the planet, with maybe a package of luncheon meat for variety. There was still one such cooler, but the other was arrayed with actual food. Megan was up at an unfortunately early hour, but given that there were pancakes, it could be forgiven.
I won't bore you with the hiking and the rock skipping and such. Suffice it to say, it was nice out and most of us took advantage of it. Me? I was so flattened that I basically power napped, had some beer, power napped, and then strolled down to the lake for a few minutes.
The problem was that there were three girls and only one Buehler. There's only so much Ferris Bueller schtick you can do before it gets boring, especially since he's had a lifetime of practice alternately absorbing and crushing it. I don't think any of the girls could have picked Gerald or I out of a lineup. They spent all of their time trying to get his attention. He had mastered not giving that attention, which drove them insane. Gerald, by contrast, was going down in flames trying to get any reaction. I don't think he waved his arms over his head, but he might have.
There was some frustration building as a result.
After dinner, we switched from beer to vodka. There was the usual chatter, but the main thing was trying to find some sort of game we could all play. Eight is a big number for a lot of party games. As the vodka took hold, good-natured ribbing was starting to verge on naked aggression. And that's when Megan suggested her game: she had an app on her phone for musical chairs. You could program it for how long between music and what songs to play.
