The orange sun dipped behind the hotel monoliths along Ocean Boulevard. It was nearing 7pm in Myrtle Beach and a gloom was settling. Warm air stirred stray feathers, plastic caps, and empty shooter bottles in lazy swirls at the feet of evening perambulators. Helmetless bikers and black-windowed sports cars with no mufflers furied back and forth along the boulevard. The revelers of Oceanside Villa 102B did not register the change in light nor the noise of vehicles from outside. 

It was spring break and RIT’s frisbee team Hightail had arrived yesterday in Myrtle Beach for a tournament called High Tide. The living area of 102B was lit by harsh neon overhead lights that flickered almost imperceptibly to the drunken eye, illuminating the beer cans that proliferated like metallic fungus on every surface. The decor of the apartment was a confused cross between seaside cottage and villain lair. Kitschy sailboat paintings hung askew on the off-white walls while an iridescent obsidian marble countertop theme ran throughout the kitchen. The space was riddled with 20-something-year-olds gripping beer cans milling around two marble tables set up for a variety of games involving beer and ping pong balls. Hightail’s captain Pitt had invited over their next door neighbors, the girls from a midwestern college and the phi delts from USC, to compete in a game he had titled Beer Olympics. 

On the balcony outside overlooking the opaque water that flowed lazily in the pool one story below stood co-captains Pitt and Mouse and their lowerclassmen protégé Newt. Newt, new to the frisbee, had originally asked if he should bid in tomorrow’s tournament. Mouse had answered judiciously that he should only risk bidding if he was sure he could get the disc and if Hightail hadn’t scored in a while. Pitt, per usual, disagreed with Mouse’s “play smart” approach, he believed one should play every point like it was their last, a belief that extended into all arenas of Pitt’s life. 

“The real question is are you going to be remembered as the smart player or the legendary player? It goes back to my whole life philosophy, you’ve really got to make the most out of life. You’ve really got to take the leap sometimes.” Pitt took a meditative puff from his cigarette and Mouse scrunched up her nose as the smoke floated past her. Pitt received his nickname for no other reason than having excessively smelly pits. He owned this characteristic as much as he owned other unsavory characteristics about himself, his oral fixations, his nicotine addiction, his patchy facial hair, and his untidy living habits. “Now, on the other hand you have Mouse telling you a dislocated elbow or a broken leg is probably not worth it. She’s going to tell you there are better ways to play well and win a point that don’t involve as much risk as bidding. But what does Mouse know about winning? She gets good grades, hell, she probably goes to bed at 10pm every night, but would you call that winning? Would you even call that living?”

“Beer Olympics is Pitt’s idea of getting the most out of life. Follow his example and you’ll be wasted five days a week,” Mouse pronounced with a saccharine smile. Mouse received her nickname because she was small, no more than 5’2, and nimble on the field. Everyday she wore a baseball cap backwards around her cranium, a look that she thought made her look tough. She was one of the only three girls on Hightail and even though she was a captain, she struggled to be heard above the unruly boys. 

“I don’t profess to be a great mastermind in the business of fun,” a wry smile played on Pitt’s lips because truthfully he thought of himself as just that, “but Beer Olympics sure beats sitting around all day looking at diagrams of field movement and getting a head start on break homework.” 

“If Pitt worked as hard as he did on his homework as he does planning for Beer Olympics, he’d be an A student, but alas, he’s too good for school,” Mouse remarked.

“Do you think we can win the tournament?” Newt interjected in his prepubescent chirp. Mush, one of Pitt’s most loyal followers, had bestowed the nickname of Newt on him for having a skin condition that made him sweat excessively giving his skin a perpetual slimy and cold quality. Newt was an ungainly 18 year old ginger from Massachusetts who had gone to a catholic all-boys school. Experiencing his first year away from home, Newt was like a puppy dog excited to be around so many other puppy dogs his age. As a freshman, he tried desperately to appeal to the older boys. 

“We could win the tournament if we had practiced hard every day of practice this semester, had people not goofed around, showing up in altered mental states…” Mouse trailed off, ashamed of her own bitterness, she usually tried to avoid voicing her negative feelings. She grimaced and looked past Pitt’s grinning face towards the darkening boulevard where soulless beings traded shadows.

“Don’t mind Mouse, she’s a little bummed out these days. She got dumped by her girlfriend the other week,” he flashed a white fang at Mouse, “I wanna win the tournament, of course, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun too. You want to have fun don’t you Newt?” 

“Yeah, duh, fun’s, like, my middle name. Newt Fun McCrenly,” Newt replied. Pitt slung an arm around Newt. 

“Here, have a puff,” Pitt offered his cigarette, “we need you holding your weight. I’m trying to crush those phi delts. If they win I’ll throw ‘em out.” 

Mouse took a couple more deep breaths. She knew Pitt’s tactics well; he was provoking her, trying to get her mad so that she would make a fool of herself in front of the team. What angered her most was that Newt was her responsibility, her younger buddy whose impressionable brain she was supposed to be molding. One of the few things Pitt and Mouse had agreed on early in the year was a system of pairing an upperclassmen to a lowerclassmen to facilitate a tighter knit group. Newt had been her assignment, not Pitt’s. 

They left Mouse alone on the dark balcony. Pitt swaggered through the sliding door and Newt followed, mimicking his walk. Mouse rubbed the pressure point on her wrist that was said to ease headaches. In a couple minutes she would return indoors too. She would not participate in Beer Olympics neither could she derail its progress but the least she could do was make sure nothing got out of hand. 

Back inside 102B, the members of Hightail’s Blood Alcohol Concentration had risen exponentially. Pitt presided at the head of the more populated pong table, his ill-shaven oblong face smug as he prepared to fire a ping pong ball into the red cups across the table. On the left of Pitt, a hirsute and stocky Mush leaned over the table in greedy anticipation for his teammate to score. 

“I’m sweating. I’m literally sweating!” Mush cried in torment.

“I hate you Pitt, I hate everything you stand for!” Flipper, named for his predisposition for table-flipping, screamed with passion. Pitt smirked. The ball landed 

 in the other team’s red cup and the crowd went wild. Pitt crossed his arms and maintaining the smug expression on his face he leaned back on his heels and let his roaring teammates catch him.  

Meanwhile, Mouse had taken up residence in an uninhabited corner of the room and was twisting off pull tabs from the empty beer cans she had collected with surgical precision. She had cleared off the coffee table in front of her so that she could create a diagram of field movement that she hoped she could show Pitt before the night was over. She looked up every now and then to track Newt.

Newt crept up behind Mush and one swift tug brought Mush’s khaki shorts down to below his knees. A wave of hilarity rippled through the crowd until Mush wrapped a beefy bicep around Newt’s frail feminine neck and began to lower him to the ground. Flipper and Dogtooth jumped into action to free Newt. He emerged red-faced and rubbing his neck. Mouse waved to him from across the room, but he just grinned sheepishly and gave a half-hearted thumbs up. 

“I’m sorry about Newt, he’s a good kid.” Flipper’s voice rose above the clamor. 

“I’m sorry about Mush, he’s an asshole” Dogtooth volleyed back and the girls from the midwestern school kneeled over in overripe laughter. 

Pitt was petting his scrappy mustache with pride at the results of the pong game. As he was not visually disapproving, Mouse assumed that he was mildly amused by the demonstrations of male force occurring around him. Mouse knew that Newt’s show of monkey business and Mush’s roughhousing came from the same place, an exclusively male obsession with asserting themselves as troublemakers, pot-stirrers, keeping things interesting for the rest of them. It was all a competition to appeal to Pitt, the ringleader. 

Mouse resisted the temptation to forsake her responsibility and flee to the comfort of her chemistry textbook of numbers and symbols that followed set rules, but the overhead neon lights pulsed with a premonitory energy and dread scooped hollows into her stomach. 

“Newt, reach into that drawer there and get me a pong ball,” Pitt’s booming voice rose above the din like it was reverberating from the depths of a chasmic swimming pool.

“At your service, Captain Pitt.” Newt almost swallowed his tongue in eagerness. Newt jerked open the drawer and the white, red, and silver label of a Smirnoff Ice glinted out from the utensils. 

“You got iced!” The group shouted. 

Obediently Newt got down on one knee as the crowd began to chant, “we like to drink with Newt because Newt is our man, 1, 2, 3, 4…” Mouse tracked the progress of the opaque contents of the bottle diminish from the bottle like sand leaving a sand timer, gushing into Newt’s mouth. Then, the bottle was no longer suctioned to Newt’s mouth and liquid was gushing out of Newt’s mouth, gurgling like a clogged sink drain. Mouse stood up, gripping the pull tab in her hand fiercely, a pink outline imprinting on her fingertips. Pitt and his entourage had lost interest in watching Newt chug and had turned to challenging the phi delts to arm-wrestling matches. 

Mouse dropped the pull tab she had been gripping onto the coffee table, upsetting the other tabs, hypothetical players skittering off into an abyss of linoleum and jogged over to Newt.

“Hey,” Mouse kneeled next to him. She laid a hand tentatively on his shoulder.
“Are you okay?” Newt’s face was greening like a plant with chlorophyll. 

“How much have you drunk?” She asked. He shook his head sluggishly. 

She watched in horror as his face graduated from sickly green to pearl white. Then, as if some invisible timer had hit zero, Newt’s body went rigid and his eyes goggled out from their sockets. 

The scream that emanated from Newt’s mouth snapped everyone’s attention into focus. Newt’s body that had previously been crumpled on the floor had taken on another shape; if before he had appeared puny and awkward limbed to everybody, transformed by some unarticulated agony, he had become superhuman. Standing upright without his typical self-effacing hunch he must have been the tallest person in the room. His skin glistened like that of a salamander newly surfaced from a pond. 

Pitt lurched forward from the crowd, his hands shaking as he combed back his greasy hair. “Hey Newt, do you hear me? It’s okay. It’s Pitt, your captain.”

Mouse turned to Pitt angrily, “you gave him too much to drink.” She took a deep breath, “Oh my god, this is what happens when you let things get out of control. I knew this stupid Beer Olympics was a bad idea.” 

Pitt shot back, “if you were so opposed to Beer Olympics, you could have said so, you just sulk in the corner giving me the evil eye.” 

“You know I wanted to prepare for the tournament tomorrow!” 

“No one wants to do that!”

“It doesn’t matter what they want! It’s what we need to do!”

“It does matter what they want! Beer Olympics is what they want!”

“Beer Olympics is what you want. They’re too afraid of you to disagree.”

“They're not afraid of me! You’re afraid of me!” 

“I’m not afraid of you. I'm disgusted by you! You have no real ambition in life, you just fuck around and think no one will get hurt.” 

“You think doing fun things is fucking around? It’s called team bonding. I care about them as people, not just as players–” 

“I care about them. What do you mean I don’t care about them!” Mouse shouted back. 

Mouse and Pitt were reaching the crescendo of their argument. Euphoric at finally having it out, they could not respond fast enough to Newt’s slick body slipping through their grasps. He sprinted from their spot in the kitchen, through the living room, and through the open balcony. A sickening pang dropped like an errant elevator in Mouse’s stomach as she watched Newt’s lithe body scale the railing with surprising agility. Then, he flopped over the edge, white belly flashing in the darkness like a sunfish unwillingly brought to land intent on returning to water. The pool below accepted the contribution with a sharp, fresh slap.  

The mass of people dashed to the balcony to peer over, but Mouse and Pitt were nailed to their spots, staring at each other as they had never looked at each other before. They bolted for the door of 102B. 

“It’s ten feet deep in the middle,” Pitt yelled as they ran to the door. 

Spit from the rancid indoors into the outdoor hallway, they gasped in the fresh sea breeze in surprise, swallowing oxygen wholesale. They raced along the hallway, down the stairs, through the parking lot and hopped over the fence to the pool where Newt splashed and sputtered. Mouse dove into the middle of the pool and soon enough had posited the squirming Newt on the pool deck who slapped the floor with his hands as if verifying the reality of land.  

“What the fuck was that, dude?” Pitt yelled. 

“You could have ended up in the hospital for days,” Mouse added soberly, her eyes scanning his body for open wounds.

“What was that for, huh?” Pitt huffed.

Newt was silent for a while longer until a cherubic smile crept across his face. The spell had broken and the Newt they knew had returned; he began to laugh, the kind of laughter that follows near-disaster: quick, rushed, and half-delirious, tumbling out like pillows from a child's fortress. “I had to practice my bid,” he tittered.

“If that’s your bid, you’ve got a lot to learn,” Pitt reached out a hand and pulled Newt up from the floor. 

“No, Pitt, you’ve got a lot to learn,” Newt replied breathless and to Mouse’s relief, Pitt tossed his head back and laughed heartily. 

“We’ve all got a lot to learn,” Mouse declared. 

Along the boulevard, an occasional car zipped through, no doubt a non-Myrtle Beach resident speeding up to expedite the trip through town. The wind had picked up and was threatening to uproot the three joined figures, two steady bodies supporting a lolling one in the middle, as they trooped through the parking lot. Until they reached their door, they did not speak. They were straining to hear some guidance from the wind.