Two teenage boys were sprawled out over a large, yellow sofa. The less ragged looking one of them sat slumped, his legs spread and one arm over the side of the sofa. His eyes kept darting impatiently between his watch and the other boy who obviously took the phrase "make yourself at home," a little too seriously. His fingers kept pulling at his dress shirt and straightening it out by force of a nervous habit. However, he was secretly taking pride in himself for being the one who was coping best with the current situation.

The other boy's appearance just screamed "I had a rough night,"--one arm lay over his stomach while the other hung over the side of the sofa, his fingers just a centimeter away from touching the hardwood floor. His legs were haphazardly thrown over the top of the sofa, and his wavy, brown hair looked like it had seen eons of better days, and his clothes were crumpled. His eyes were closed, but his eyelids kept twitching every few seconds or so, as if he wanted to keep his eyes closed, but his body just wanted to see what was going on around him.

The first boy's name was Darrell Huntsman, and the one spread over the sofa was Ike Dohman. The two were good friends, and were there for the same reason. They had been waiting for about 10 minutes, and the throbbing in Ike's brain felt like someone was bulldozing his skull. He hadn't even noticed that he had groaned until Darrell chuckled.

"How do you feel?" Darrell asked, but despite his mocking tone, it was a legitimate question. He hadn't asked Ike how he was feeling.

"Like I've been hit by a truck," Ike whined, lifting his eyelids ever so slightly. His voice made Darrell cringe inadvertently. "No, worse. Like country music manifested itself into a physical form and beat the shit out of me. Then ran me over with its tractor."

Darrell's lips curled downwards and he patted Ike's thigh reassuringly. "You've had hangovers before. Don’t exaggerate."

Ike's eyes twinkled as one corner of his mouth weakly turned up. "You're right. At least I'm not the lightweight. "

Ike had just closed his eyes again when a door in the corner of the room, facing the sofa, lazily flung inward. Darrell and Ike simultaneously became more alert as a brunette with messy hair down to just past her shoulders stumbled into the room. Darrell was unfazed by her tank top and shorts, which clung to her like a second skin. Ike was too hungover to care, but not too hungover to realize that the green and grey hoodie she was also wearing was a size too big for her.

"There's the lightweight," Darrell remarked with a smile.

"Speak of the devil," Ike mumbled, but loud enough for the two of them to hear. The girl ran her fingers through her hair, and unsteadily walked over to the boys, looking down as she took step after step. This care, however, was quickly thrown down the drain when she flopped on top of Ike. He groaned in pain, and she snaked her arms around his waist.

"You're a cunt," she yawned, then snuggled closer to him, leaving her legs on the floor. Ike chuckled painfully, and ruffled her hair.

"How are you feeling, Nikki?" Ike asked the girl, absentmindedly curling strands of her hair around his fingers. She didn't respond other than tightening her hold for a moment and sighing heavily.

"That bad, huh?" Darrell asked. His lips twitched as he held back a smile. His eyes widened for a split second when he remembered why they came to Nikki's house and he reached into the backpack on the floor, beside his feet. He pulled out a small locked notebook and a string with three small identical keys on it. Ike just barely heard the soft ringing of the keys jangling against each other.

"I feel worse than I did the first time I got drunk with you guys, and instead of Darrell staying relatively sober like he promised, you both got shitfaced and nobody told me when to stop so I ended up almost blacking out and waking up feeling like I had descended into the twelfth plane of hell by breaking the earth with my head," Nikki snapped, half-angrily and half-playfully pinching Ike in the side to see him squirm.

"Dammit, Nikki!" Ike shouted out in surprise, causing the throbbing in her skull to come back. She groaned and pulled her arms out from under Ike to prop herself up from his chest. She used that to sit up, and Ike followed suit. The two noticed the notebook in Darrell's hands and tried to get a closer look.

"What’s that?" they both asked at the same time. Darrell handed the notebook to Nikki, and Ike's eyes examined it from her hands. It was a black notebook with the words 'we are the kids our parents warned us about' written on it in a fancy silver font. There was a lock, like any typical diary, and that's when the reality that Darrell had just handed them a diary with a cliché quote on it hit them harder that country music and its tractor.

"Darrell," Nikki mumbled with obvious disappointment in her voice.

"What the fuck is this, Darrell?" Ike snapped, cutting straight to the chase. "Did you seriously just bring us here to give us a diary? What’s this about?"

Darrell couldn't help but feel more like the odd one out than he usually did. Ike was white, and Nikki was a really light-skinned mixed kid. Darrell, being black, was the darkest of them. He held his alcohol better than the other two and now he was the only one who could see the logic in the diary.

"Look," Darrell started, getting Ike and Nikki's attention. "How much do you remember from last night, if anything?"

It took a moment, but it clicked in their heads and they understood. "You mean, this is to..?" Ike spoke, but cut himself off.

"Exactly. This diary, I have three keys for it. One for each of us," Darrell explained, a spark of life appearing in his eyes as his idea unfolded. "We’re going to share this diary. and every time we get drunk together, be it the three of us or only two, we're going to pass this notebook between us and write whatever we remember from last night, and maybe what other, reliable people tell us we did."

Nikki squealed when she felt Ike's elbow in her side. "Hear that, lightweight?" Ike taunted, sticking his tongue out at her. "Now your care when drinking can actually be put to use!"

"No more blanks in the night and not being sure if someone can fill them," Nikki said quietly, her head bobbing up and down in absent agreement. "Genius."

Darrell's face lit up and his smile almost reached his eyes as he untied the knot in the string with the keys and handed two of them to the two horribly hungover teens on the sofa. Nikki wore a necklace with a key on it, so she untied it and pulled off the key pendant. In its place she put the key to the diary, and not-so-discreetly slipped the key pendant in one of the back pockets of Ike's jeans. Ike put his key in his jeans pocket, making a mental note to put it on his keychain later.

Nikki handed the diary back to Darrell, who put it back in his backpack. Nikki reached into her hoodie and from it procured a gold scrunchie to tie her hair into a ponytail with. Ike fingered the soft fabric of the large hoodie and bit his lip in his thought. He asked her whose it was, and Nikki explained that it was one of the few bits of clothing that her older brother left behind three years ago when he moved overseas for his studies. Ike nodded his head in acknowledgement before stretching out into a yawn and lying back down on the sofa.

Darrell turned on the TV and relaxed along with the other two, propping his feet on the glass coffee table in front of the sofa. The three teenagers hung out often, and the only channel they ever watched was fox, so that was what channel the TV was turned to when the screen flashed into color. Remembering that Ike and Nikki were taking their hangovers much worse that he was, he turned the volume down low, so it was audible but not too loud. Nikki pulled her legs up and wrapped her arms around her knees. Ike had no intention whatsoever to watch whichever series was on at the moment, so he made himself as comfortable as he could on an ugly yellow sofa with his legs over the top and behind Nikki's head. Nikki's shoulders slumped with a deep sigh and her eyelids drooped.

For a few moments, there was no sound except for the soft dialogues and screams of one of the first episodes of wayward pines. The group of friends had already seen that specific episode of wayward pines, hell, they were all caught up on Wayward Pines, Da Vinci’s demons, castle and Steven Universe--which they watched whenever the boys let Nikki and the charm of her ukulele choose a non-fox TV series to watch. Darrell pretended not to like it, but he secretly loved the characters and the plot, and his favorite gem was Lapis Lazuli.

"But in all seriousness," Darrell said out of nowhere. Ike cracked open one eye and Nikki turned her head towards him. "What happened last night?"

may 30, 2015

IKE: so, this is our diary thing? i'm not sure how darrell expects this thing to function, but i guess we just pass it between us during the day after the night in question? that seems like a valid plan. since i'm the first one to write, you guys will notice i wrote the date as the night in question? it's the 31st today, but if we're writing about the night before then i think we should have that as the date.
it wasn't overly eventful, but i think the three of us drank two entire bottles of smirnoff. we stayed over at darrell's house because his stepdad is a rich motherfucker and just chilled on his bed. i remember nikki bringing her ukulele with her, so that meant that we watched steven univese on darrell's badass 70-inch hdtv ;) she might've played a few songs and done some karaoke with us and her best friend. (i mean her precious finnegan. nikki loves the uke more than us.) i remember darrell safely getting it out of her hands and putting it up in a safe place out of all of our drunk reaches as soon as the alcohol started to really hit her. we tried to play hide and seek, then truth or dare, but ultimately ended up passing out together. which leads us to right now,  and it's about 1.12 pm and you two are both asleep so i thought i'd write what i remembered before my memories started fading... also, nikki, if you forget finnegan when you go home you can come over to mine and get him. what would you do without me?

DARRELL: gj ike, you've set it up just fine.
there's not much to add. i remember everything ike mentioned and just some less important details, like which episodes we watched, some of the songs nikki played, how badly ike stumbled on the lyrics to songs he pretended he knew but actually didn't... :P

NIKKI: well you two are getting along just fine. i don't fuckin remember anything other than what you guys mentioned. i don't even remember drinking, much less watching su and playing hide and seek... i hate being the lightweight :c

june 5th, 2015

NIKKI: last night wasn't a heavy drinking night, so i'll be worried if darrell can't remember what happened. we had a triple date in the park with mason, kayla, the asian new kid (his name was shen, i think) and a liter and a half of ouzo. we waited for the new kid to come for like half an hour and almost gave up when he showed up at ~9.30pm. shen brought the alcohol which was surprising bc none of us have hung out with him before, but it's alright because we got pretty drunk. fortunately you're supposed to drink ouzo watered down, so we didn't get as fucked up as we would've with vodka in the picture. mason shared a pack of fags with everyone and i'm pretty sure we created enough smoke to equate a bonfire. around midnight, mason and kayla were pretty hammered so they slipped away and started getting down in one of those empty gazebos. not the one by the lake that's almost always occupied, one of the ones on the outskirts of the park that's almost always empty. shen started telling us stories about girls he's been with, and then about his experiences with valium and ecstasy, and let me tell you, the guy is fun as fuck. 10/10 would chill with him again
it's a shame you weren't there, ike :P

DARRELL: shen also got really drunk too, turns out he has a flask filled with this stuff that's like 90% alcohol. he stripped to his boxers and walked in on mason and kayla with a flashlight to freak them out, then jumped into the lake and kept inviting us in. we needed to help him get out anyways because he was about to drown.

IKE: nikki you cunt, just called them cigarettes like normal people do. & that's not nice, making fun of the kid who couldn't go drinking because he had to watch his cousin's elementary school performance...