Editor’s Note: The following article includes profane language and the consumption of alcohol. The names of individuals involved have been changed.

Alex is the kind of friend you want around on Unofficial. Sitting on an office chair on Friday afternoon in his dorm room, he takes another long pull of whiskey from a stainless steel flask before handing it to Claire, the petite girl in army boots and black tights sitting on Alex’s bottom bunk bed.

Alex and Claire are 19 years old. Also 19 is Dan, who sits near the window with a PBR in his hand. Toby, a 20-year-old with a mop of blond hair, lounges on the futon waiting for the flask to make its way to him. Soon they will be joined by Hazel and Kenny, both 20.

A $140 receipt from a local liquor store barely tells the story of how much booze is in this room: bottles of vodka, tequila, gin and liqueur make up most of the bill, and it’s rounded out by a 12-pack of Blue Moon, a case of PBR and a box of Franzia wine. However, the receipt doesn’t include the alcohol the group already stockpiled: 20 more bottles of Blue Moon, 30 more cans of PBR, mint schnapps and Everclear. All in all, Alex estimates there’s around $200 worth of alcohol at their disposal today.

The booze wasn’t that difficult to acquire. Everyone knows somebody over 21. Alex’s girlfriend is over 21, as are her friends. For an underage party animal like Alex, acquiring alcohol isn’t about loitering in front of a liquor store and hoping a kindly stranger or homeless person will buy you a six-pack; it’s about using your personal social network of friends and relationships to get your hands on the good stuff.

Alex is the kind of friend you want in a jam. The kind of friend who immediately knows that the soft knocking on the door is somehow wrong, very wrong, and although that knocking doesn’t sound like the sharp rap of police knuckles, he doesn’t hesitate to flip off the booming stereo and stare the room into silence.

Everyone goes quiet. The soft, almost listless knocking continues. There are no more jokes, no more loud, braying laughs from Alex; no, now there is just the work of secrecy and disposal. This is something Alex is good at, and he gingerly tiptoes a bottle of vodka to a backpack in the corner of room, trying to minimize noise.

Cans of beer are shoved back into the fridge or behind furniture, and Alex secures two bottles of Blue Moon, his flask and a bottle of gin inside his leather jacket.

After a white-knuckled 90 seconds, Alex cracks open his door about eight inches.

“Hey, are you guys doing anything?” says the RA. He has a soft voice that matches his knock. He says he heard bottles clinking and conversation coming from inside the room about drinking and drug use.

“It sure did take you guys a long time to open the door,” he says.

Alex replies that no, there’s nothing going on in here. As for talk of drinking and drugs? Those were just jokes. The RA doesn’t seem convinced. He tells Alex that he will have to inform his boss about this anyway and that Alex should be careful.

The RA leaves, and Alex closes the door.

Hazel and Claire escape the room immediately, leaving Alex, Toby, Dan and Kenny to start shoveling cans of beer into a number of backpacks and duffel bags.

“This is a fuck-ton of booze,” grunts Alex as he lifts a bulging, lumpy duffel bag filled with cans of PBR. Everything must be transferred to other rooms just in case the RA decides to come back and search his dorm in their absence.

Taking turns, Alex, Dan, Toby and Kenny slide into the hallway to smuggle the booze into other rooms on the floor. As they scamper, they see two other RAs down an adjacent hallway standing expectantly at the door of another unlucky dorm room.

Right now, the immediate problem posed to Alex and company involves not just hiding what alcohol they have left, a significant amount, but also disposing of the many empty cans and bottles that accumulated over the past hour.

Toby stashes an empty bottle of vodka in a used cardboard shipping envelope and throws the package in the trash in the hallway. Cans and bottles are hidden in coats or just carried by hand with utmost haste to the bathroom trash. Everyone’s face is grim. They double- and triple-check Alex’s room.

With everything newly secreted away, the group reconvenes outside the entrance of the dorm. Alex and Dan are wearing backpacks containing a number of bottles of vodka and gin as well as the box of Franzia wine.

“That was handled magnificently,” Alex says. “I don’t care. I give zero fucks. This is my last semester in the dorm.”

Dan is similarly unfazed.

“This is probably the third time this has happened to me,” he says. “It’s scary the first time, but you learn.”

The group walks away from the dormitory. The guys stay mostly clumped together, while Hazel and Claire skip and giggle, happily buzzed, a half a dozen or so yards ahead.

The worst that could happen, Alex says, is that the RA goes and searches the room, and that doesn’t matter because they’ve already made sure there’s nothing to find there.

For Alex, the best the RAs could throw at him would basically be a slap on the wrist; by now, after almost two full in years living in a dormitory, his wrists are positively calloused. He laughs the whole event off as they begin walking toward a residential area, a cloud of pot smoke mingling with the cold March air and the group’s collective whiskey breath.

Alex is the kind of friend who is loud, especially when intoxicated. He shouts a toast to Mitt Romney before taking swig of whiskey from the flask inside his jacket. Alex is a Republican, though only because libertarians are so insufferable, he explains. He toasts Marco Rubio and drinks again.

He yells up to two green-shirted students drinking on a third-floor balcony: “We have a handle, two fifths and Franzia. God bless this country!”

Dan leaves the group at this point to go to class. In terms of how drunk he feels, Dan estimates he’s at a six out of 10. He says it won’t be a problem, and when he returns later, he reports that class was uneventful as always.

By 3 p.m., Alex and his friends are nicely sloshed, and after about 20 minutes of walking, they enter a small apartment with a half-dozen other students drinking. With a flourish, Alex reveals the Franzia from a backpack and removes the red bladder of wine from the box.

The game they began to play is called “Slap Bag,” and the rules are simple: You clamp your mouth around the spigot on the bag of Franzia wine, and those around you chant each second that you drink. When you can imbibe no more, you must spin in a circle one time for each second of your drinking time, and when you finish, you slap the bag of wine in celebration.

Claire holds the bag up, and the Franzia glows orange in the early afternoon light pouring through the bare upstairs window. She manages to hold on for 13 seconds. (Later, after Alex takes his turn and finishes spinning around 24 times, he’ll have to sit down for a bit to gather himself.)

The party settles downstairs, situated on two brown couches opposite an entertainment center. Claire quickly becomes something of a Franzia waitress, offering everyone, one by one, a chance to drink deep from the seemingly inexhaustible bag of sweet red wine.

Claire giggles. “I got the Franz,” she says

Alex’s group and a number of the students in the apartment leave to get food at 4 p.m. Kenny and Claire pry gritty snow into passable snowballs and hurl them at each other, laughing. But by the time the group gets to a nearby University dining hall, it is apparent that Alex is approaching a very messy stage of drunkenness.

Before waiting for the dining room to open, Alex sings “The Star-Spangled Banner” loudly from the bathroom. He reaches into his jacket and cracks open a new Blue Moon while he’s waiting in line to scan his i-Card, and, once inside the dining hall, the bottle tips inside his jacket as he tries to sit down. Beer streams out the bottom of his shirt and onto his pants.

On Alex’s plate is a volcanic eruption, a three-burrito mutant food monster made of lettuce, beans, guacamole, three tortillas, cheese, steak, chicken, sour cream and peppers. He finishes most of it, and it is not an easy thing to watch.

The day of Unofficial gives way into evening, and the group makes its way back to the dorm. They’re drunk, they’re fed, and they’re happy. They joke and talk about girls, sex, classes and who pooped in the tub last time they were drunk. They tell their favorite stories.

Alex says there’s nothing really special about Unofficial for he and his friends. They may not spend $150 on alcohol for a party, but they will spend $85. And instead of starting the drinking at 2 p.m., as they did today, they would probably start around 9 p.m. on a normal day or weekend.

At 6 p.m., Alex returns to his dorm room and passes out almost immediately. He curls his lanky body around a long, black body pillow. His pants are still wet. He snores loudly.

In the dorm, Kenny, Claire and Hazel all enter into the boys bathroom for “shower beers.” Only Toby takes a real, naked shower. Fully clothed one stall over, Hazel and Claire drink PBRs together, while on the other side of Toby’s stall is Kenny, also fully clothed, who drinks and belches over and over again. After they finish beers, everyone leaves, smirking.

At 7 p.m., the remainder of Alex’s group rides the 22 Illini with other students wearing green tank-tops and neon orange trucker hats with the word “RAGE” printed on the front.

Hazel talks to two girls who drove in from Illinois State University. At a later party in a different but still small apartment, Toby lets his friends draw penises on his arm in permanent marker.

There are more tense moments, vomit, makeouts, a fire alarm and cops, but it’s all the same to Alex and his friends; it’s really kind of normal. And on Unofficial, amid a campus bleary and heaving from a day’s worth of drinking, Alex and his friends are completely right: All this behavior is normal — accepted, even traditional.

That’s the magic of Unofficial: It’s a day when every student, just like Alex and his friends, can rest easy knowing they truly have no more fucks to give.

Danny can be reached at [email protected].