It was 9 o' clock that same night when my phone buzzed. I was laying on my bed with my laptop, composing an email to my best friend back home.

The first text message was an address in downtown Helsinki. The second said '10:30 alright?'.

'Ya. See you then. :)'

I finished my email quickly, glad that I could finally tell Sasha that I was going to go out partying, instead of being a shut- in.

I stood up and stretched. I'd taken a shower when I got home, but I hadn't known how I was supposed to dress for the night. In fact, I still didn't know how to dress. I groaned.

After much searching through my clothes, I ended up in black leather pants and a black tank top with a long sleeved maroon lace shirt over it, so I could hopefully pass at most clubs. I left my hair down and yanked on my black ankle boots as I ran out the door, already running late.

I got lucky and the address wasn't far from my apartment, I wasn't quite farmiliar with all the Finnish streets yet.

The address ended up being for a hotel. Right about the time I got there my phone buzzed. I had a text from 'Beanie Guy' saying '204' so i set off to find room 204.

I didn't have to search very hard. As soon as I reached the second floor, I could hear the pounding bass from the room at the end of the hall. And sure enough, it was the right room.

A guy with crazy black hair opened the door. And then I realized that I still didn't know Beanie Guy's real name. I blushed.

"I'm, uh, looking for a guy. He's really tall. Like 6 foot something, and he has dark hair. Possibly wearing a beanie?" He blinked at me.

"He invite me, he just didn't tell me his name... Sorry..." The black haired guy was beginning to look highly amused.

He started to play along. "Deep voice, maybe? Green eyes?"

I grinned. "Yeah! That's the one! Seen him around?"

He laughed and nodded, holding the door open for me, and beckoning me inside. "Come on in. He said he'd invited a cute broad and you're behind on the drinking already."

There were about six or seven people in the hotel room, all in various states of drunkeness. I followed the dark haired man out onto the balcony of the hotel, where there were four more people standing around and drinking. Beanie Guy was leaning against the railing, smoking a cigarette and drinking a Jaegarmeister.

My guide turned back to me and gestured at Beanie Guy. "Is this the tall, dark, and handsome you were looking for?" I nodded and walked to Beanie Guy, taking a spot against the railing next to him.

He smirked at me. "Handsome, huh?"

"Shut up. You should have heard me trying to describe you to him," I nodded towards the other guy, "when he answered the door and I realized I still didn't know your name."

"Ville." His Finnish accent was very strong when he said his name. "Yours?"

"I'm Claire."

He smiled at me. "Pretty name. Now that we've gotten the pesky introductions out of the way, how about a beer, Claire?"

I laughed. "Would love one, thanks." I followed him into the house. There was a table piled high of beer, and a few other alcohols. He handed me a bottle from the stack, after opening it.

"We like to get a little buzzed before we actually go out clubbing. Makes the whole experience more enjoyable."

I raised an eyebrow at the pile of beer bottles. "A little buzzed?"

He laughed and shrugged. "Okay, moderately buzzed." I rolled my eyes.

I glanced around the room, noticing that most of the people there were wearing lots of black clothing, so the outfit I picked fit right in. "So, who are all these people?"

"Most of them I don't know, actually." He pointed to a guy in the corner. "That's Mige. He's a good friend of mine. I've known him since we were practically in diapers."

He pointed out two other guys in a corner. "That's Linde and Burton. Also good friends. The guy that let you in was Jussi. There's another guy named Jyrki floating around here somewhere, and that's everyone I know in this group."

He grabbed a couple more beers from the table and I followed him out to a table on the balcony.

"So, Claire, where are you from?" He opened anothe beer for himself.

"Oklahoma. A town called Tulsa. What about you?"

"Right here in Helsinki. Why'd you move to Finland?"

"I'm going to be attending the University of Helsinki in the fall." I noticed that he'd almost downed his beer already and I was only halfway through mine.

"What are you studying?" I laughed.

"What is this, like twenty questions or something?" He chuckled.

"I guess so. Do you mind?"

"Not really. I've got a Bachelor's in Psychology, and now I'm going for my Master's. If we're playing twenty questions, does that mean I get to ask you questions, too?"

He laughed. "Ask away."

I nodded towards the beer he'd just opened, the third since we'd sat down at the table. "Big drinker?"

"I guess so. I go on binges, a lot. For a while I just won't drink at all, and then all of a sudden I'm drinking every day and night, in an endless cycle. I have a bit of an addictive personality, I guess." He shrugged. "Does drinking bother you?"

I shook my head. "My best friend back home, Sasha, is a huge party girl, and she's always dragged me along with her." I finally finished my first beer, and Ville handed me a second.

"So what's with the drinking BEFORE going out to get drunk?"

Ville shrugged. "We tend to run up quite a tab at bars. Plus, we find that bartenders like to cut us off way too early." He winked at me.

A yell came from inside the house, followed by several cheers. I looked at Ville questioningly.

He stood up. "Looks like it's time to head out." He tossed our empties in a trash bag hanging from the balcony door.

I followed him through the hotel room. We joined a group of about ten others to hike down the stairs. Most of them were already very drunk, and there were a few incidents of people stumbing on the stairs.

Despite the cool night air, the group of us that trekked down the street were in high spirits. The group laughed and supported each other down the street. Ville was holding up the man he'd told me to be Mige, who had one arm around Ville's torso, and was animating his off-key singing with the other. Ville put his other arm around my waist and pulled me closer to the two of them, and then joined in Mige's horrible singing.

A bottle of flavored Vodka appeared out of somebody's coat pocket, and was passed around the group. I took a swig from the bottle, hoping no one in the group was diseased.

We stumbled down a couple of blocks, the group leaning on each other, and still ceaselessly laughing. We stopped at a grey brick building. The group walked around the side, and we crawled through a basement door in the ground, and then walked single-filed through a dark corridor. If it weren't for the vibrations of the bass in the stone floor, I would have wondered where I was being taken.

The club was dark and smoky, with flashing strobe lights and neon backlighting the bar, where the group I was with immediately headed. The mass of writhing bodies on the dancefloor was where I headed. The patrons were cloaked in black with the occasional metallic flash. The music they were grinding to seemed to be a mix of techno and heavy metal.

I pushed my way into the dance floor, squeezing in between a purple- haired girl and a a bald guy. The girl turned and started dancing with me.

I danced with the girl until my leather pants were starting to stick unpleasantly, so I pushed back towards the bar. I spotted Ville and Jyrki sitting at a table off to the side of the dancefloor, and joined them.

Ville passed me a flask of something when I sat down. "Enjoying yourself?"

I stuck my tongue out at him. "Immensely. You don't dance?"

He shrugged. "Not drunk enough yet." I laughed and took another swig from the flask, which I'd decided was Whiskey.

"So what is this place?"

Ville shrugged. "I'm not sure it actually has a name. It's not a well-known place."

After several shots of Vodka each, courtesy of Jyrki, I dragged Ville onto the dancefloor. Despite being quite drunk, he was a pretty good dancer, to my immense surprise.