Toby passed me a whiskey on the rocks, and I tasted it cautiously. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but there was good music playing, and a baguette on the ironing board, and Cassidy sitting cross-legged on the duvet in a schoolgirl outfit, so I tossed it back, because I was sick of being cautious.
Sam refilled it instantly and I downed the second glass as an afterthought, not realizing what I had done until my head began to spin from the combination of pain medicine and liquor, a combination the little prescription labels had warned against. I sat down next to Cassidy, who was talking with a cute blonde girl from Wentworth.
“But you’re here.” The girl frowned, and I got the impression that they were talking about Cassidy’s old school.
“Haven’t you heard?” Cassidy smiled tightly. “I go to Eastwood now.”
The girl laughed, skeptical.
“I’m serious,” Cassidy insisted. “We have pep rallies and everything. It’s adorable.”
“Yeah, adorable.” The girl glanced at me for a second, her lips twisting into a knowing smile.
“Have you met my baby brother Cassius?” Cassidy asked, slinging her arm around my shoulder like we were actually related. “Hard to believe he’s only fourteen.”
For a second the girl believed her.
“I thought—” the girl began, frowning.
“I was kidding,” Cassidy interrupted coldly. “God.”
“I’m Ezra,” I said, offering a handshake since it seemed to go with the suit.
“Blair,” the girl said with a toss of her hair. She glanced up at me through her eyelashes, and I realized that she was the kind of girl who enjoyed competing for a boy’s attention. “God, you’re charming. Come on, charming, let’s dance.”
I couldn’t dance. Not before, and certainly not then, with two tumblers of whiskey warming my veins and a decided lack of balance.
“Honestly, I can’t,” I protested as she pulled me up.
And then the lights went off, plunging us into darkness.
“Hey, I’m uncorkin’ a bottle of wine here,” Sam complained, his accent even thicker after a few drinks, like a parody of itself.
“Shh!” someone said.
The door to the adjoining room opened, and Toby stood there holding a candle.
“All rise for the team captains,” someone said.
Austin cut the music, and everyone stood.
The candlelight flickered as Toby and the other team captain, this preppy-looking guy in his grandfather’s old Rolex who’d introduced himself as Peter, made their way to the two chairs in the corner. Peter was carrying a gavel (of course he had a gavel), which he banged against the padded armrest, I suppose for the ceremony of it.
“A toast,” he cried, raising his drink. “To the virgins, to make much of time!”
Everyone laughed and drank, whether or not the term applied to us personally, although I rather thought it applied to the vast majority, considering we were in a room filled with high-school debaters. I could feel Cassidy standing at my side, and when I glanced at her, a bit unsteady on my feet from the liquor, I sensed an unsteadiness inside of her, a different kind.
Luke turned the lights back on, leaving them dimmed, and Sam shut the door to the balcony. And thus began the meeting.
It was the most bizarre meeting I’d ever been to, like some sort of sarcastic secret society. Toby and Peter took turns choosing different members of their teams to debate each other on ridiculous subjects, like whether the president of the United States should be chosen by lottery ticket, or if the Pope could defeat a bear in a fistfight. We all voted on who had won each debate, and the loser had to take a shot of gin.
Essentially, the whole thing was one elaborate drinking game.
To my surprise, I won my debate, on whether Truth or Dare was an effective alternative to a criminal trial. But my victory was short-lived, since they made me drink anyway, because I was new.
Cassidy’s debate was after mine, and when she flounced to the front of the room to face off against Blair, everyone got quiet. For a moment, I thought Cassidy was going to refuse, or be terrible on purpose, but she didn’t do either of those things.
Instead, she stood there calmly sipping her drink while Blair argued that vampires shouldn’t have voting rights and then she straightened her tie, grinning.
“My admirable opponent argues that vampires do not deserve suffrage, as many great yet misinformed politicians have done before her while calling for the continued marginalization of women, or other minorities,” Cassidy began. “Yet vampires were, at some point, human. At what point can a man’s voting rights be revoked, if he is proven to be of rational mind? And who here would agree to such an egregious breach of liberty? No, the real threat to our electoral system is the werewolf! Can the werewolf cast a vote in wolf form, or only when he appears to be a man? And can we ensure that he is not merely casting the vote of his pack’s alpha wolf, rather than his own?”
It was both hilarious and intelligent. And it was completely Cassidy. I wouldn’t want to follow that, and apparently neither did Blair, because, when it was time for her rebuttal, she shook her head and drank from the gin bottle, conceding defeat.
Cassidy took a shot as well. She wobbled over to the bed and sat back down next to me, putting her head on my shoulder.
“Werewolf suffrage?” I asked.
“I’m tired,” Cassidy mumbled. “I don’t even remember what I was talking about.”
Toby and Peter shook hands, calling the debate to an end, and Austin turned the music back up.
Someone pulled the blankets off one of the beds and turned the balcony into a fort. Couples ducked in and out for snatches of privacy, and I wondered if Cassidy would suggest we go inside, but she didn’t.
Austin broke the baguette in half and dueled Toby, sloppy drunk and laughing, until Phoebe crawled out of the blanket fort and yelled at them.
“Do you have any idea,” she fumed, “how difficult it is to keep a baguette from going stale in a suitcase overnight?”
This set everyone into hysterics.
I was decently buzzed by that point, the room spinning gently as I sat on one of the beds with Cassidy curled against my shoulder like a cat. We were playing Fruit Assassin on Austin’s iPad, trying to sabotage each other with renegade swipes. The music was still on, quieter stuff now.
“Hey,” Cassidy said, putting down the iPad. “Hi.”
“Hi back,” I said. Yep, definitely drunk.
“I think Blair likes you,” Cassidy said, biting her lip to keep from giggling. “I’ve talked with her approximately twice ever, so I am an expert in this and trust me, she is probably even in love with you.”
“Well, of course she is,” I teased. “I’m irresistibly charming.”
“Oh, you are?” Cassidy grinned. Her face was inches from mine. Her braid had come undone, and her hair tumbled over her shoulders, smelling of mint shampoo.
And then Toby bellowed, “Fine! You guys can all be beautiful snowflakes! I’m gonna go over here and be an awkward snowflake!”
Cassidy glanced at me and started to laugh while Toby spluttered indignantly at Sam and Austin, not truly angry. And I felt the almostness of our moment drift away, over the railing of the hotel balcony, and into the shopping center where we’d all pretended to celebrate Cassidy’s birthday dinner. And maybe it was just as well, after all, since I wanted our first kiss to be more than some drunken thing at a debate tournament.
The party ended around two, everyone making a halfhearted attempt to clean up the evidence before the Wentworth team went back to their own hotel rooms to catch a couple hours’ sleep. Cassidy brewed coffee for everyone in the little coffeemaker, and we drank it out of plastic champagne flutes.
“Okay, time to figure this out,” Toby said, swaggering out of the bathroom in a hotel robe, his hair wet and his contacts swapped for glasses. “Who’s bunking with whom?”
Phoebe appeared in the doorway to the other room wearing a towel and flip-flops long enough to announce that she and Luke were sharing a bed in there.
Sam and Austin looked at each other and shrugged.
“I don’t mind if you don’t snore,” Sam said.
“Yeah, same.” Austin shuffled past Toby and disappeared into the bathroom.
“Either of you want a bed to yourself?” Toby asked Cassidy and me.