Landscaping

Here's (yet another) beginning to a story, but unlike the other ones, I actually know where this one is going now, so the rest should be up sometime in the near future.

=====I unsuccessfully tried to hide a wince as I gulped down another mouthful of cheap red wine from a tiny clear plastic cup. Two bottles for ten—sometimes quantity beats quality, fuck what they tell you in school. I was pulling up blades of grass one by one as my friends talked to the two French girls, pulling gently and gradually adding more and more pressure, trying to pull up the whitish bottom part—someone showed me how you could do that back in elementary school, ever since whenever I’m sitting on grass I find myself doing it; just another one of my endless nervous habits.
=====We were sitting on one of the long lawns that stretch out from the base of the Eiffel tower in a line, like the red carpet of a movie premiere, but green, and not continuous, but broken into segments. The last electric blue twinges of twilight had long since faded into a deep midnight blue bordering on black. Streetlamps lined the sides of the green, splashing us with just enough pale orange light to see pretty clearly.
=====I drifted back into the conversation. My friends—Aaron, Ivan, and Peter—were asking the French girls—Marin and Alyssa were the first names that came to mind, but I wasn’t sure whether I was remembering them correctly or just making those up—about Paris. The conversation was fairly amusing to watch, it’s always funny seeing awkward teenage boys trying to spit game at girls; not that I was any less awkward, I just didn’t even put in the effort to try most the time.
=====A sparkling light in my peripheral vision made me turn my head to the tower. Various lights were flashing on and off in a coordinated sequence all over it, a dizzying pattern of light dancing up and down the metal mesh frame.
=====“Does it just come on randomly?” I asked. It was the first thing I’d said in minutes.
=====“No, it, uh…” Marin (or whatever her name actually was) said. Her head tilted slightly and her eyes searched the top of the insides of her eyelids for the words. Her eyes re-descended. “It comes on every hour.”
=====I looked down at my watch: 12:00. “That makes sense.” I said, and then settled back into silence.
=====“I’m gonna go take a piss,” Ivan said as he stood up.
=====“Yeah, same here,” Peter seconded, and followed Ivan as he headed off in the direction of the bushes off to the side of the green.
=====“Where did they go?” Alyssa asked Aaron. We discovered early on in the conversation that if we said anything idiomatic, quickly, or softly (or better yet, some combination of the three), they had no idea what we were saying, since their English was pretty rudimentary (our French was non-existent, and neither of them spoke Spanish, so English it was). We took advantage of it a little, slipping fast-paced slang to each other when we didn’t want them to here something.
=====“They went to the bathroom,” Aaron replied.
=====“Oh, okay.”