Re: 9pm Oliver and OPEN
Avram had never been huge on parties in college, but then to be fair, MIT was a pretty intense party environment. Adulthood was nice in that respect; the parties had got lame enough to match his tempo. Of course, this was the first time in years that he'd had the time and opportunity for socialising.
He'd spent the day Beautiful Mind-ing it up, rigging a sheet over the desk like a mosquito net so that he could have some working space. The first few hours had been amazing—God, he was a genius, everything was fitting together so well—and then he'd crashed into complete despair. By late afternoon he'd cycled back around to manic confidence in his work (so he'd discarded all his earlier attempts and started over with an even better idea), and a few hours later a swell of general euphoria. Life was amazing. Even at Zenith. Everything was amazing. The universe was amazing.
That was a pretty uncharacteristic mood for Avram, and it made him stop and wonder if They were messing with his meds at all. He'd had a hypomanic episode once while being treated by an incompetent psychiatrist in Boston, and this feeling was not dissimilar.
But it was a nice change, at least. And it was great for a party.
He'd gone down to see Kate a little later than he should have, considering that his lanky frame was kind of odd and hard to dress, but she'd had him covered. He made it downstairs on the late-ish side, after nine. He didn't go near the booze, because he didn't want to end up in Lennon's position from the other day if tomorrow was another tough one. And if They had indeed been tinkering with his meds...alcohol was just a bad idea in general. Though tempting. But he served himself as much of the ratatouille as he felt he could take within the bounds of politeness—he didn't care if it was cold, still awesome—and a glass of water. Daphne had gone to some trouble to suggest wines, and he didn't want to feel like George Costanza pairing nice French cooking with Pepsi.
Either Evie had kept firm on avoiding the party, or else she'd put in a brief appearance and left already, he figured. Understandable. The big quiet guy, Oliver, was hanging out on the edge of things, so Avram wandered over to say hi. He was usually the one doing the wallflower thing, but tonight he was feeling gregarious and expansive. "How's it going, man?" he said. "This is actually really nice, I thought Jack was the only one here who could cook on this level. I don't even know what the gimmick was for today, everything seemed so...not normal, exactly. Unless the party's the test—did anything go horribly wrong here that I missed?"