Chloe shrugged. “They apparently have a keg and loud music. That’s all I need tonight.”
Zee looked at Greer. Did she want to go to an actual frat party? She wanted it less than most things; but she also didn’t want to be alone, so maybe she did want it. She thought of Cory leaning against a wall at a party right this minute, laughing at something. She saw an array of people looking up at him—he was the tallest person in any room—and laughing back.
Greer, Zee, and Chloe were an unlikely trio, but she had heard this was typical of social life in the first weeks of college. People who had nothing in common were briefly and emotionally joined, like the members of a jury or the survivors of a plane crash. Chloe took them across West Quad, and then they looped around behind the fortress of the Metzger Library, which was all lit up and poignantly empty, like a 24-hour supermarket in the middle of the night.
The Ryland website showed a few nominal photos of students in goggles doing something with a torch in a laboratory, or squinting over a whiteboard jammed with calculations, but the rest of the photos were social, cornball: an afternoon of ice skating on a frozen pond, a classic “three in a tree” shot of students chatting beneath a spreading oak. In fact, the campus only had one such tree, which had been over-photographed into exhaustion. In daylight, students straggled to class along the paths of the inelegant campus, occasionally even wearing pajamas, like the members of a good-natured bear family in a children’s book.
When nighttime fell, though, the college came into its own. Their destination tonight was a large, corroding frat house thundering with sound. Greek life, the college catalogues had called this. Greer imagined IMing Cory later, writing, “greek life: wtf? where is aristotle? where is baklava?” But suddenly their usual kind of shared, arch commentary that kept them both entertained was irrelevant, for he wasn’t here, not even close, and now she was inside a wide doorway with these two randomly chosen girls, heading toward the noxious smells and the inviting ones, and, indirectly and eventually, toward Faith Frank.
The house drink that night was called the Ryland Fling, and it was the pastel pink of bug juice but immediately had a muscular, slugging effect on Greer, who weighed 110 pounds and had eaten only a few small, sad anthills of food from the salad bar at dinner. Usually she liked the pleasing snap of clarity, but now she knew clarity would just lead her back to unhappiness, so she drained her first hyper-sweet Ryland Fling from a plastic cup with a sharp nub on the bottom, then stood waiting in line for a second one. The drinks, plus what she’d already drunk at Spanish House, were effective.
Soon she and the two other girls were dancing in a circle, as if for the pleasure of a sheikh. Zee was an excellent dancer, her hips sliding and her shoulders working, yet the rest of her moving with studied minimalism. Chloe, beside her, drew shapes with her hands, her many bracelets chiming. Greer was free-form and unusually unguarded. When they were all exhausted, they plopped onto a bulbous black leather couch that smelled vaguely of fried flounder. Greer closed her eyes while an annoying hip-hop song by Pugnayshus began to swell:
“Tell me why you wanna rag on me
When I’m in a state of perpetual agony . . .”
“I love this song,” Chloe said, just as Greer started to say, “I hate this song.” She stopped herself, not wanting to impugn Chloe’s taste. Then Chloe began to sing along: “. . . perpetual a-go-ny . . . ,” she enunciated, as sweet and reassuring as someone in a cherub choir.
Above them, Darren Tinzler strode down the wide, majestic stairway. He hadn’t been identified as Darren Tinzler yet, hadn’t been given significance, but was still just another frat brother standing in front of the amethyst stained glass on the landing, thick-chested and with an overhang of hair and wide-set eyes beneath a backward baseball cap. He surveyed the room, then after consideration he headed for the three of them and their concentration of femaleness. Chloe tried to rise to the occasion like a little mermaid lifting toward the ocean surface, but she couldn’t entirely sit up. Zee, when he dubiously turned his attention to her next, closed her eyes and held up a hand, as if quietly shutting a door in his face.
Which left Greer, who of course wasn’t available either. She and Cory were sealed together, and even if they hadn’t been, she knew she was too mild and focused for someone like this bro, though she still looked appealing in a very specific way, small and compact and determined, like a flying squirrel. She had straight, shining dark hair; the shot of color had been added at home with a drugstore kit in eleventh grade. She’d stood over the sink in the upstairs bathroom, getting blue all over the basin and the rug and the shower curtain, until in the end the room looked like the set of a slasher film on another planet.
She had imagined that the streak in her hair would be a temporary novelty. But when she and Cory suddenly became involved senior year, he’d liked touching that unexpected swatch of color, so she’d kept it. In the beginning with him, when he sat looking at her for an extended moment, she often instinctively dipped her head down and glanced off to the side. Finally he would say, “Don’t look away. Come back to me. Come back.”
Now Darren Tinzler turned his cap around and tipped it to her as if it were a top hat. And because of those powerful Ryland Flings, which had seriously loosened Greer, she stood and reached her hands out on either side of her waist, as if lifting a skirt in an air-curtsy, and bobbed her head. “Such a fancy occasion,” she murmured to herself.
“What’s that?” Darren said. “Blue Streak, you are shit-faced.”
“Actually, not true. I am only pee-faced.”
He regarded her curiously, then led her into a corner, where they rested their drinks on top of a careless pile of warped and long-ignored board games—Battleship, Risk, Star Wars Trivial Pursuit, Full House Trivial Pursuit. “Were these rescued from the Great Frat House Flood of 1987?” she asked.
He looked at her. “What?” he finally said, as if he was annoyed.
“Nothing.”
She told him she lived in Woolley, and he said, “You have my sympathy. It’s so depressing there.”
“It really is,” she said. “And the walls are the color of hearing aids, am I right?” Cory, she remembered, had laughed when she’d said that, and told her, “I love you.” But Darren just looked at her again in that irritated way. She thought that she even saw disgust in his expression. But then he was smiling again, so maybe she had seen nothing. The human face had too many possibilities, and they just kept coming in a fast-moving slide show, one after another.
“It’s been kind of not so great,” she confided. “I wasn’t supposed to be here at Ryland, actually. It was all a big mistake, but it happened, and it isn’t fixable.”
“Is that right?” he asked. “You were supposed to be at another college?”
“Yes. Somewhere much better.”
“Oh yeah? Where is that?”
“Yale.”
He laughed. “That’s a good one.”
“I was,” she said. Then, more indignantly, “I got in.”
“Sure you did.”
“I did. But it didn’t work out, and it’s too complicated to go into. So here I be.”
“Here you be,” Darren Tinzler said. He reached out in a proprietary way and rubbed the collar of her shirt between his fingers, and she was startled and didn’t know what to do, because this wasn’t right. His other hand ran experimentally up her shirt, and Greer stood in shocked suspension for a moment as he found the convexity of her breast and encircled it, all the while looking her in the eye, not blinking, just looking.
She jerked back from him and said, “What are you doing?”