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  These girls hadn’t reached that part of their lives yet, and as the nineteen-year-old I was supposed to be, I shouldn’t have either.

  “I’m not drunk like you guys. I can actually suffer in the weather,” I tried, gripping hard to my jacket.

  “Are you going to hold onto it the whole night?” Alex sneered.

  “Not sexy,” Steph added, clicking her tongue on the x.

  She was right. I wasn’t trying to be sexy, but I did want to fit in. I did not want to be the only girl at the party carrying her coat—the only girl carrying her coat because she was a grown-ass woman.

  I opened my door and threw my coat back inside.

  Pretty sad I could fall to peer pressure so easily. It didn’t bode well for the night to come. No matter what I’d said to Carter.

  I closed the door, but not before Dawn yelled that if I brought a guy home she wouldn’t be able to control what she drew on our faces in permanent marker while we were sleeping it off.

  I guessed penises, but it would probably be something a little more original and undead, perhaps severed demon penises.

  I joined Steph and Alex back in the hallway. Now it was me and my sweater against the twenty degree weather. Me and my new mantra against a house full of alcohol.

  “Much better,” Alex said.

  I nodded, even though I was pretty sure I was going to freeze my ass off to prove I was their age. Considering the other stuff I would probably have to do over the next three months, scratch that—three years, going coatless would definitely not be the worst or most embarrassing.

  We headed toward the elevator, dorm life existing all around us. A dorm was a lot like a zoo. Each room held a different species that with every open door you passed you could either study or ignore.

  The skinny, dorky guys at the end of the hall playing Wii Mario Kart in their boxers were an ignore.

  “What’s Twilight doing tonight?” Steph asked.

  “Reading,” I said, even though I had no clue.

  “About how to be a vampire?” Alex added, laughing and flipping her hair behind her. I smelled coconuts.

  “Dawn’s not so bad,” I admitted. I mean she kind of was, but I also was starting to understand her. She put up armor so she could make it through the crazy maze of college. Some people used vodka, some people used sex. People like Carter I guess used studying. Dawn used black hair dye and eyeliner and intimidation.

  Steph shrugged, her identical brown hair flowing down her shoulders. I smelled apples. “She seems nicer since you got here, anyway.”

  We stepped into the elevator and headed downstairs. I couldn’t imagine Dawn being pricklier than she already was. She must have really hated her last roommate. I wondered what she’d drawn on her and her sexual partners’ faces in permanent marker.

  “Hey,” Alex said, her laugh reverberating off the shiny metal elevator walls. “Maybe Kate’s the real witch.”

  “Yeah,” Steph added, with her own shrill, drunk laugh. “She put a spell on Twilight to take the cunt out of her.”

  “Abracadabra,” I said pointing at both of them and wiggling my fingers. They both tumbled in laughter. They didn’t get the joke.

  We moved through the lobby and headed out the glass front doors of the dorm. Before I could even take a breath, the arctic air outside hit me like a whale-sized fist made of ice. I almost doubled over. I prayed this night wouldn’t make it so I started college-take-two with a case of pneumonia. I might have been getting by looking like a nineteen year old, but I didn’t have the immune system of one.

  “So where’s the party?” I asked, trying to keep the chattering of my teeth in check.

  “Fraternity Row,” Steph said.

  “Or as we like to call it, ‘the salad bar’,” Alex added, with exaggerated quotation marks.

  “What? Cause of all the choices?” I asked, wrapping my arms around myself, focusing on the sound of our boots crunching over the snow and not on the freezing air shooting through my clothes.

  “Nah,” Steph said, her breathing shallow. “There are so many guys there it’s like all the ranch dressing you could want.”

  “Or creamy Italian, or poppy seed,” Alex continued, knocking into Steph with her hip. I was afraid it might shatter from the cold. Of course, girls their age didn’t have to worry about early onset osteoporosis.

  “Really any cream based sauce,” Steph replied with a lilt in her voice, making it clear if it wasn’t already, which it totally was, that they were talking about spooge.

  Was I this much of a pervert in college? I mean, sure I was, now. What twenty-nine-year-old who’d lived in the big apple and had been through the whole Sex and the City awakening wasn’t, but these girls were girls and they had basically told me they were on a search for cum.

  “Are you guys in a sorority?” I asked quickly, saying anything to get the image of buckets of semen with little brown ladles in them out of my head.

  They shook their heads. “We pledged, but there were too many rules,” Alex said.

  “We still get invited to frat parties, though,” Steph continued.

  Considering what they called Fraternity Row, I wasn’t surprised.

  “It was worth pledging to meet the guys,” Alex said.

  I didn’t respond, just readjusted myself even though my extremities were numb.

  “We say we have our own sorority, Alpha Sigma,” Steph said.

  “But now with you we can be Alpha Sigma Kappa,” Alex clapped.

  I smiled, even though the bitter air was converting my bones to powder. I, for one, did have to worry about early onset osteoporosis. I hoped walking to a party in sub-freezing temperatures was the only hazing I’d have to endure from Alpha Sigma Kappa.

  Luckily, fraternity row was just off campus and we were back inside and boiling in less than ten minutes. I’d forgotten how disgusting frat houses were. The whole place smelled like beer and feet, and I had to admit, semen. Maybe that was the real reason they called it “the salad bar.”

  The house was packed, the music was ear-splitting and the stench in the air seemed to fill the pockets where there weren’t people or music. Nobody cared. Everyone at this party was too drunk to notice, or working on getting too drunk to notice.

  “Let’s get a beer,” Steph screamed above the noise, fighting through the sweaty throngs toward the keg.

  “I’m going to sober up if I don’t get one soon,” Alex added.

  I followed the back of their heads like they were life rafts, because if I didn’t it was possible I was going to drown in the bodies around me. All of these kids had their whole lives ahead of them and the only thing they wanted was a beer in a plastic cup—something so simple, something so pure.

  All I’d wanted was another shot at the life they had ahead of them. It was romantic, really. Or maybe everything seems romantic when you have music blasting and shaking each red blood cell.

  The guy working the keg had adorably shaggy brown hair, thick football player arms, and was wearing a tight wife-beater, but in an undoubtedly ironic way.

  “Hey ladies,” he said, giving both Steph and Alex a sweaty hug, pulling them into his well-developed chest. “Who’s your friend?”

  “Kate,” Steph said.

  “She’s new,” Alex said.

  “Well, hello new Kate,” he said, handing me a beer of my own. The way his smile was as white and inviting as the foam head on the top of it made me forget I’d even taken it from him, or maybe it was the very long week I’d had, or that he believed new-Kate actually belonged here.

  The cup was cold, familiar, made me a little nostalgic for my own college-take-one days. All I’d wanted back then was something this simple and pure too—a way to fit in, to be normal. I didn’t know what truly needing alcohol would feel like.

  How it would take over everything in my life.

  Beer always made me philosophical, wine always made me poetic, and tequila, well, that made me hurl.

  I stared at the beer.
Holding it was a little like someone who’d been suffocated, being given an oxygen mask that might have carbon monoxide flowing through it. The craving chomped at the deepest part of my stomach, and saliva filled my mouth, begging to be washed away.

  Get a grip, Kate. I didn’t have to drink. I could hold onto it and at the first opportunity dump it in one of the big plastic buckets scattered against the wall.

  I hoped they were for spent cigarettes and not puke, but they had probably been used for both.

  “Let’s mingle,” Steph said.

  “’Cause I’m damn tired of being single,” Alex added with a giggle. The kind that at eighteen is still adorable.

  We moved back into the crowd. As we mingled, I couldn’t help taking a sip of beer. I mean, it was so hot in here, and it was spilling. But as I knew and didn’t want to know, one sip led to another, and another, and another until there was only the white bottom of the cup as I drank the last warm, flat drop.

  Oxygen vs. suffocation victim had nothing on beer vs. alcoholic.

  Before even having to tell them, Alex and Steph sent some guy everyone called Shifty to get us a refill.

  Someone who liked alcohol much as I did should not have decided hanging out with college kids at a party was the best place to start not liking it. I had been strong this past week because I’d been able to avoid this. Now that I was here and getting a buzz on there was no escaping. I wanted more of a buzz—craved the familiar warmth to float over my skin and insides like stepping into a bathtub.

  “You’re welcome,” Alex said, nodding her chin at Shifty by the keg.

  “You say no to Grey Goose, but crappy beer that tastes like my used panties makes you go crazy,” Steph said, laughing.

  The thing was, it wasn’t the beer that had finally broken me. It was me that had broken, finally.

  “She’s a cheap date,” Alex yelled, pointing at me, but it was so loud in there no one was listening anyway.

  “It was just one beer.” I bargained with myself as much as them.

  Shifty handed us our newly filled cups and gave Alex and Steph a sloppy kiss on their foreheads before he headed back to his friends.

  “Now it’s two,” Steph said.

  “Cheers,” Alex said, clinking with me.

  The beer spilled and slid down the side of the glass. I licked it clean out of instinct. “I haven’t finished it yet.”

  “No, you’re giving it a rim job first,” Steph howled.

  “You’re not even on a first name basis, Kappa.” Alex added.

  We were actually on a no name basis. It was like my own blood, and before I came here with Alex and Steph and tried to deny it, I needed it just as badly.

  As the party went on, two beers became three, then four, then five. The little voice in my head persuading me from one to the next; it was okay to keep going—there was no other choice but more.

  That easily, rule number one was forgotten like it was written on my brain in chalk being erased with each sip.

  We went out front for a cigarette and a breath of fresh air. The porch trembled below me, the stars above me spun. Nothing but beer was coursing through my veins as I listened to Alex and Steph rate the guys we’d met so far.

  “You like anyone, Kate?” Steph asked after she and Alex had made it through five specimens.

  “All of the above,” I said, unable to fight a fit of laughter.

  “Kappa loves salad dressing!” Alex spit.

  I guess for the purposes of the night right in front of me—reveling in the tunnel vision being drunk offered—I did.

  We stumbled back inside and I kept drinking. I reasoned that I had to otherwise I was going to crumble into a pile of guilt and shame. It was the reason I always kept drinking once I started. Why would that have changed just because I was pretending to be younger? Why would I have changed just because I was trying to start over and be a good girl?

  My cup bobbed as I worked on solidifying the Jell-O taking the place of my bones. It was okay, I argued. I could get buzzed. Drinking like this didn’t mean I couldn’t control myself, that I would flunk out again. I’d already finished my reading and homework and I didn’t have class until 10:00 a.m. on Monday. It was the weekend. I could have a few beers. I could keep myself in check. I mean, I was the adult here.

  That was what I told myself, but after beer number seven, I joined Alex and Steph and a few other girls who were Alex and Steph with blond hair or with red hair, on the dance floor. We jumped up and down, dancing wildly, hooting and screaming. When they threw their tops off and into the crowd forming around us, I did too.

  The room spun, a flutter filled my stomach as I danced in my bra and jeans. I was no longer even trying to control myself. I was not being the adult, but I was, I reasoned, acting like I was nineteen.

  I couldn’t remember exactly what I’d done at the Franklin Law Group holiday party to make David fire and dump me, but behavior like this would have more than taken care of it. Behavior like this might have gotten me arrested or committed as a twenty-nine-year old at a holiday work party. Here, though, people were clapping, laughing, and joining in. I was fun.

  The way I was acting made sense.

  Steph and Alex each took one of my hands, forming a circle and chanting Alpha, Sigma, Kappa, again and again as we jumped up and down. Maybe I belonged here, with them.

  Maybe my problem wasn’t flunking out of college, but that I’d ever left.

  I watched them bouncing to the music. In my drunk mind our bodies didn’t look so different. Soon the boys around us also started taking off their shirts and in my drunk mind their bodies looked pretty damn good too.

  The guy with the adorably shaggy brown hair and ironic wife-beater moved closer to me, his eyes undressing what was left of what I wore. I was about to cradle my arms around his neck when there was a tap on my shoulder.

  Maybe someone who wanted to cut in.

  Carter

  Kate turned to me and her crazy drunk smile suddenly clamped down.

  “Carter?” she asked, a surge of confusion settling over her. She covered herself with her arms. Apparently, she was fine with a room of strangers seeing her in her bra, but not me. She looked insanely awesome in her bra. It was translucent white lace, tracing the skin underneath. I wished she’d move her arms so I could see her perfect tits again, but I was glad she had finally covered up around everyone else.

  “Hey, Kate,” I replied, unsure what to say. It was one thing to want to make sure she was okay. It was another to be standing in front of her trying to explain it.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  I hadn’t thought about my answer to this question, I just needed to stop whatever was about to happen as soon as the guy in the wife-beater targeted in on her.

  I didn’t believe every situation in a frat house would turn out the way Jeanie’s did, but when Kate was about to put her arms around his neck there was a fire, a wrath coming from my core that hadn’t been there in years.

  Jealousy.

  I wanted her to put her arms around me, but I couldn’t explain that any better than why I was there.

  “Hanging out,” I said. Who was I kidding? I hadn’t hung out anywhere in three years.

  Honestly, I had been on my way home from the library when I saw Kate standing on the front porch of Delta Tau. She was so drunk she was swaying like seaweed under water. I was only planning on stopping in and checking on her.

  When she was about to dance with that sleazy asshole, I had to do more than watch. I had to do something.

  She tried to focus on me. Her legs were like empty skin blowing in the breeze beneath her. She was even drunker than I’d thought and I’d thought she was pretty drunk.

  Poor Kate, I guess some of the emptiness in her eyes was actually a cry for numbness. A need to make all the pain she’d ever been through float away.

  “You’re hanging out in your winter coat?” she asked, clearly not believing me. Her words came slow and slurred.<
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  I leaned back on my heels and put my hands in my pockets like I was trying to prove it. Even when I was in a frat I was uncomfortable at parties. I was thankful for alcohol then because at least it gave my hands and my mouth something to do.

  Without it I appeared as out of place as I felt.

  “You’re hanging out in your bra,” I replied, the word elusive like a secret on my tongue. I loved Kate in her bra. I just didn’t like sharing the moment with fifty other horny guys.

  I just didn’t like that her being drunk was the reason.

  As I continued to watch her, the blood rushing to my cheeks, to my dick, it was hard to deny I was a horny guy too. It was dizzying, especially considering she was the first live girl in front of me in years.

  “I was hot,” she said, her arms tight against her chest, making her cleavage more evident.

  “Are,” I said, glancing down without even meaning to.

  “I thought you were at the library.”

  “It closes at eleven,” I said. I needed to get her off of why I was there and try to figure out how I could get her to leave. There was no way I was walking out of here without her. That was the only sure part of my plan. I needed to get her back to the dorm safely. “Here,” I said, trying to give her my jacket.

  She shook her head. “You’re the only one in your coat,” she said. “I’m not the only one in my bra.”

  It was true, a lot of the girls were. “None of them look as good as you, though,” I said before I could stop myself, my dick clearly doing the talking. Not caring about my plan.

  She smiled—the kind that could blow someone’s hair back.

  “Maybe you should take off your jacket and stay a while,” she said, reaching for it.

  I considered her invitation. It would be nice to be normal for once. I deliberated getting wasted and then doing everything my brain had kept me from trying to do to Kate all week long, until I saw Alex and Steph.

  Something about the way they were dancing, the way they had themselves on display, like cheap jewelry spinning in a case, made me want more for Kate.

  She was valuable.

  I also had to get her out of there before they had a chance to say anything about my past. My at-the-moment, considering where we were standing, very relevant past. It was clear they hadn’t told Kate yet, if so, she would not still be talking to me.