“Uh—” Kate said.
“Duncan Treadwell. I roomed with your cousin Trevor at Milton, until he got kicked out. We met at a tailgate your freshman year at Odell.”
“Ri-ight,” Kate said, though it was obvious she didn’t remember.
“Trev, what a wild man. I was sure he’d get into Carlisle, but I guess that little mishap with the DUI nixed it.”
“Dead bodies are never a good thing on a college application,” Kate said drolly. She held out her hand for a stamp, clearly uninterested in continuing the conversation.
“I assume you are of drinking age?” Duncan asked.
“Since I was twelve.”
He laughed, and stamped her hand.
“My friends, too,” she said.
Aubrey and Jenny got their hands stamped, and the foursome made its way slowly down the stairs. The basement was low-ceilinged and dimly lit. Hip-hop music blasted from speakers as people crowded around a keg.
“This way!”
Griff led them through a warren of rooms, all jam-packed with students standing around, or dancing, or making out on the ratty old couches. The floors were slick with spilled beer. The smell of it reminded her of her childhood: her father had been a drinker. Aubrey picked her way carefully to avoid slipping. Finally they reached a room that ran the length of the back of the house with French doors that opened out onto a stone patio. It was packed, too, but the air was less putrid. A card table in the corner held several large bowls of bright orange punch. Griff ladled drinks into plastic cups and handed them to the girls. The punch was sickeningly sweet, but had the virtue of being cold. Aubrey’s raging headache disappeared with the first gulp, and she drained her cup quickly. A guy stepped up and refilled it for her.
“Thanks!” she said, glancing wistfully after Kate and Griff as they moved toward the French doors.
“You a frosh? Or as we prefer to say, fresh meat?”
“Yeah, I live in Whipple,” she shouted. And just like that, she was talking to a cute boy. Not Griff-level cute, but cute enough.
She didn’t quite catch his name—Brian? Ryan? He was a junior, from Tennessee, majoring in business administration, and played lacrosse. He had a nice body, a boyish grin, and reddish-brown hair. They shouted questions back and forth for a while, and by the time she looked up, Aubrey realized that her cozy little group was nowhere in sight.
“I should probably find my friends,” she shouted over the music.
“Forget them.”
“They’ll be worried.”
“They’re too drunk to remember your name.”
“No, really.” The punch on top of the tequila was going to her head. The room had started to spin some time ago, but she was just noticing it.
“Fine, they’re over this way,” Brian/Ryan yelled, and took her hand. She let him pull her along even though she suspected he didn’t actually know where they were, or even which friends she was talking about.
He led her into the darkest of the rooms. The couches and floor and pool table were covered with writhing bodies. Brian/Ryan shoved a couple of people aside and pushed Aubrey down into the corner of a creaky old sofa. Then he straddled her, pinning her to the sofa, and took her face in his hands.
“You’re not half-bad-looking, you know,” he said.
She couldn’t help laughing. “Thanks.”
He leaned down and pushed his tongue into her mouth. Aubrey thought about resisting, but at that same instant she was overcome with a wave of nausea, and had to concentrate completely to stop herself from hurling all over him. Unleashing a stream of vomit onto a frat boy would render her a social pariah from the start of her Carlisle career, so better to not make any sudden moves. The room went momentarily black, and Aubrey’s head lolled back, which Brian/Ryan took as an invitation to yank her tank top aside and squeeze her boobs. The sharp pinch brought her to her senses, and she sat up fast, smashing her forehead into his nose. He yelped in pain. Aubrey seized the moment and shoved him off her, running for the patio with her hand over her mouth. The next thing she knew, she was on her knees in the dirt, spewing orange Kool-Aid vomit into a bush, hunkering down behind its branches to hide herself from view. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a figure detach from the crowd on the patio. Aubrey’s vision went blurry, and when it cleared a moment later, Jenny stood over her, holding her hair back.
“It’s okay, let it out,” Jenny said. “You’ll feel better.”
“Everybody saw,” she said, her face wet with tears and snot.
“Nobody saw, I promise.”
“There must be fifty people standing there.”
“Every one of them’s blind drunk.”
“You’re not.”
“I’m the exception. Don’t worry. Nobody cares.” She stroked Aubrey’s hair.
“I must smell like puke.”
“It’s a frat party. Everyone smells like puke. Here.”
Jenny handed her a Kleenex, and Aubrey wiped her mouth.
“Still, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to be more careful in the future,” Jenny said. “Didn’t your mom ever tell you, don’t drink anything a boy gives you in a red plastic cup?”
Aubrey laughed weakly. “My mom isn’t much for giving advice.”
“Well, you have me now,” Jenny said.
It was true. Aubrey couldn’t believe her luck. Through a stroke of good fortune, she’d found the perfect roommate combination—Kate to get her into trouble, and Jenny to get her out.
4
That fall, Kate frequently mentioned the idea that the other two girls should visit her in New York. Whenever Jenny tried to follow up and set a specific date (she liked to keep an orderly calendar), Kate would get all vague and wave her off. Vagueness—a Kate specialty when confronted with anything she didn’t feel like dealing with at that moment. After a while, Jenny figured the invitation was BS, like a lot of stuff Kate said, and let the subject drop. She was busy with classes, and chorus, and had been elected freshman rep to the student council from Whipple. She worked at the hardware store every Saturday, and had taken a second part-time job, typing and filing in the provost’s office, because she wanted to learn how the college ran. (She was the first freshman ever hired by the provost, in fact.) It would have been a struggle to fit a trip to New York into her crazy schedule anyway.
Late one night a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving break, Jenny switched off her desk lamp and got into bed. The lavender comforter cover was freshly laundered, and she snuggled down under it, curling and uncurling her toes and trying to unwind from the difficult econ problem set she’d been working on. Aubrey had gone to bed an hour earlier, and Jenny assumed she was long asleep.
After a few minutes in the dark, however, Jenny became aware of quiet sniffling emanating from Aubrey’s bed.
“Aubrey?” she whispered.
The sniffling stopped.