Je ne regrette rien.

Maggie was walking home from Russell's, tired and sober and sad, muttering to herself about nervous breakdowns and creative license. She saw two figures stumble out of a cab up the hill. The cab drove off as one of the figures fell right down into the grass. As she got closer, Maggie realized the person who had fallen wasn�t moving; the other one, a short girl, came up to Maggie and got right in her face, but wasn�t really being hostile, just confrontational, saying hey, hey. She went over to the other figure and saw that he was lying in the grass, his head almost in the street. Maggie asked if the boy was okay. His companion, the girl, bent over and tried to move him, pull him by his legs. She couldn�t do much. It was then that Maggie realized the boy on the ground was actually a girl with short hair. And her shirt was being lifted up by her friend, her breasts fondled by the other girl.

Oh, I get it.

They didn�t seem to notice Maggie was there, but she felt compelled to help because the girl on the ground wasn�t really moving. Her name was Sarah. Maggie helped Sarah's friend get her into the house, a basement apartment. Sarah asked Maggie if she had a cigarette; having quit almost two months ago to the day, Maggie said unfortunately she didn�t. Sarah's friend said hey, come smoke pot with us. As if they were old friends. Maggie wanted to introduce herself but she couldn�t quite find a window for it. She figured the priority was to get Sarah inside where she would stop falling down with her head in the street.

The apartment was decked out in almost stereotypical decor: tapestries, pottery, incense, posters. Lots of posters. But also more classically girly stuff, like photocollages and stuffed animals. And a cat, a beautiful black cat with blonde highlights. Maggie didn�t catch the cat�s name. The place adhered to a dictum she'd observed in most annoyingly stereotypical hippie pads: it may have been reeking of incense and tye-dye, but it was cozy as hell.

Sarah was being extremely uncooperative. When she wasn�t acting almost comatose, she was freaking out and running around, falling down, hitting her head on things. Her friend, whose name Maggie still didn�t know, started dragging her into the bedroom, through the kitchen. Sarah�s shirt and bra were now up around her head. As she was being dragged through the kitchen, her head hit the leg of a flimsy plastic shelf and everything on it came crashing down around her. Maggie was able to catch the microwave before it landed on Sarah, but everything else fell to the floor. Shards of glass were everywhere.

Sarah passed out in the bedroom for a few minutes, so Maggie helped her (girl)friend clean up the mess in the kitchen. Maggie was wondering if this was some kind of sign, if perhaps she had been chosen to act as a good samaritan, to stumble upon these hapless drunken girls at just the right moment, so she could help them, make sure they didn�t throw up on themselves and die. Maybe this was intended to lift her out of the doldrums she'd been having of late.

Or maybe it was just bad luck, and now she was going to lose many hours of sleep because she suddenly had a case of alcohol poisoning on her hands. Kids really still do this, don�t they? Maggie was starting to feel her age, and she wasn't even out of college yet. She learned that the other girl�s name was Lindsay. Lindsay was drunk too, but lucid and in full possession of her faculties. Or at least, as full as she probably ever got. She still seemed a little spacey, like she occasionally forgot Maggie was there, a stranger in her house looking around helplessly while she wrestled with her drunk girlfriend.

Sarah woke up, freaked out, ran back up the stairs and outside, fell down on the driveway. Maggie and Lindsay tried to drag her back inside, she wriggled free and fell down the stairs headfirst. This happened two or three times. She was on the floor, looking up at Maggie and scowling, schizo and drunk. She asked Lindsay what Belgium was doing here, nodding at Maggie scornfully. Belgium? Apparently she had decided Maggie's name was Belgium. Whatever.

She got up and ran away again, and this time made it out the door. Maggie and Lindsay chased her outside but she was nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, some Delta Gammas were arriving home to their palace next door. Lindsay momentarily seemed to forget about her girlfriend�s predicament and said hey, let�s make fun of them!, meaning the DGs. She ran along the fence separating the yards, yelling, Hey, retards!

When she got tired of that, Lindsay set about looking for Sarah again, who was suddenly nowhere to be found. Maggie helped her scour the yard, the parking lot with the sorority girls� Volkswagons, the neighbor�s yards. Maggie at this point was seriously considering calling the ambulance or the police; she'd never seen a drunk person behave this way. She suddenly felt very na�ve, very sheltered for being so worried. Had she not lived as free, as dangerously as these two twenty-year-olds? Was she a good samaritan or an old crone, a puritan?

Maggie had barely begun contemplating the philosophical ramifications of this strange incident at the same time she was considering its immediate circumstances. Lindsay borrowed Maggie's phone and eventually got ahold of Sarah; she was wandering around somewhere down the block. And so Maggie set off with Lindsay in the direction that Sarah was describing, though she couldn�t identify streets. Lindsay kept her on the phone, a primitive GPS of sorts. She looped her arm through Maggie's as the two girls walked back west along Franklin. They finally found Sarah staggering around on Cornelia, just around the corner. She was crying and freaked out because she couldn�t figure who Maggie was or where she'd come from. Maggie didn�t blame her, really.

She ran off again, Sarah did, and Maggie was going to chase her, except she (Maggie) was feeling suddenly tired and selfish. And Lindsay didn�t seem terribly alarmed. She was very calm, as if this was a nightly occurance. Maybe it was. Maggie asked her if she wanted her to stick around. She said she probably didn�t need to; she could do what she wanted. Maggie told her she was going home and that she hoped everything turned out okay, etc etc. Lindsay hugged Maggie for a long time at this point, longer than hugging ettiquette would deem customary under the circumstances, but then, she was a hippie lesbian hugging a stranger at two-thirty in the morning while her girlfriend ran amok through the yards of sorority houses. So who knows.

Lindsay said �peace,� performing an elaborate peace salute that all hippies probably learn upon their induction. Maggie said goodnight and scurried in the opposite direction towards home, feeling old and tired, but momentarily jarred out of her usual roles and routines. She had felt necessary and custodial again, for the first time in a while. Even if the scenario had been absurd and a little aggravating ... still.

Still.

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