Little Black Dresses, Little White Lies

Little Black Dresses, Little White Lies 1
I'M SWAYING BY MYSELF AT Bobby McKittrick's summer kickoff party-surrounded by couples whose Dance Floor Make-Outs are so intense, so ravenous, I'm kind of worried someone's going to drop down dead due to suffocation-when I get what might be the most important phone call of my life.

Of course, I don't realize the magnitude of this moment when I see the unfamiliar number flash on my phone. I don't even recognize the area code. To be honest, I'm just excited to answer a real call instead of a fake one, the kind I usually pretend to get during awkward party lulls. So I don't think twice when I answer it on the dance floor, loudly shouting "Hello?" over an even louder "Keg stand! Keg stand!" chant crescendoing from the corner of Bobby's backyard. (As a graduation treat, Bobby's older brother is giving the departing seniors a tutorial in college-party etiquette, which apparently involves kegs and then dangling people by their feet above said kegs as they chug beer upside down.)

My hello is answered by an indecipherable garble.

"Sorry, I can't hear you!" I shout again.

("Keg stand! KEG STAND!")

Still gibberish.

"Wait, wait, stop! Just hold on one sec!"

I try not to spill my one-third beer, two-thirds foam-filled red party cup as I maneuver around the blindly gyrating Dance Floor Make-Outers to a less populated part of the yard and sit on the outdoor swingy-bench next to a passed-out dude whose face is decorated with a drawn-on, very accurate portrayal of male anatomy. Real classy, guys.

Rule number one for aspiring writers is to steer clear of clichés, which makes living in Castalia, California-where every social gathering feels like it was ripped from a bad teen movie-less than ideal.

"Okay," I say into the phone. The bench swings as I sit. "Try again."

I hear a loud sigh on the other end of the line, followed by an exasperated and syncopated, "I said is this Har-per An-der-son?"

Stampler, Laura Laura Stampler is a Californian turned New Yorker. After graduating from Stanford University, she became a journalist, interning-and then worked on staff-at various newspapers and magazines. Laura has written about everything from dating to social media stars to social justice issues at Time magazine, Business Insider, Huffington Post, The Nation, The New Republic, and The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. When she isn't writing, she's probably looking at pug gifs on the Internet.