I pick the keys up by the main ring, careful not to let any of the teeth bite into my thin leather gloves. I could toss them into the woods, I guess, and hope it looks like they fell out of his pocket when he was attacked. The problem with that is making the location of the keys match up with the path of carnage. That means getting closer to the alligators and the gully than I’d like to be at the moment. The keys jingle as I bounce them in my hand, weighing my options.
After a moment I head back to the car and stand at the driver’s door as if I’ve just gotten out and locked it. The keys fall with a clink and a clatter to the asphalt, and with an almost accidental kick they’re half under the car. Drunk boy drops his keys. Perfect.
Resisting the urge to whistle, I walk along the far edge of the parking lot to the ramp that leads back to the interstate, keeping a safe distance from the cameras mounted on the main building. I wait for a lone car to pass, then sprint across all three lanes of highway to the median. Luck is with me, and there are no northbound cars, which means I can cross the rest of the way to the shoulder. Safely tucked away in the shadows of the opposite rest stop—and still out of range of the cameras—I crouch down and shrug out of the straps of my bag.
When I got accepted to college, my dad and I sat and went over the pros and cons of trying to get me a car. My scholarships would cover pretty much all of my actual school costs, but cars were expensive. Even a junker would add up with repairs, maintenance, and gas. Eventually we decided that Gainesville had a decent enough bus system that I could make it work, and I bought a bike instead. Not just any bike, though; this one is designed to get routinely folded down and stored, making it perfect for students with limited space. Two and a half years later, I can unfold it and set it to rights nearly in my sleep.
In less than five minutes I’m off, riding along the shoulder of the highway until I can get to the next exit and the back roads that will take me home, thunder shivering down my ribs with each new rumble. When I look behind me, back to the quiet rest stops, I can see lightning flash within a cloud, a brilliant glow of rose and lilac that’s almost more the memory of the colors than the colors themselves, fading away as quickly as sunspots through your eyelids.
Beautiful.
My grandmother always said the lightning bugs knew when it was going to storm. I know it isn’t true, but on a night like tonight, it’s easy to believe it anyway.
2
Fidgeting with the pair of thin coasters, Rebecca watches the bartender make her drinks. The woman who was there an hour ago didn’t give her any grief for getting virgins, and she actually gave Rebecca one of them for free when she saw the large purple DD written on the back of her hand. The current bartender leered at her when she walked up, mocked her for not getting boozy, and then tried to badger her into adding alcohol, as if she were somehow less of a person for not wanting to get plastered.
Sometimes she wonders if there are certain words men are genetically hardwired not to understand—no being the most significant of them.
So she watches his hands, and he scowls when he realizes it. “Relax, Princess,” he tells her, almost shouting over the music. “I’m not adding booze.”
“Less worried about the booze than the roofies,” she replies, “seeing as one of your coworkers drugged one of my classmates last week. And given that we have no word as yet that he’s been fired or arrested, I’m going to go ahead and watch.”
He blinks at her. Then, carefully keeping his hands and the glasses in her view the entire time, he finishes making the drinks. When he plunks the glasses on the bar, liquid slops up the sides, some of it splashing over. “He hasn’t been fired.”
“Shocking,” she says deadpan.
“There’s no proof.”
“Sure. Only witnesses who came forward to police and a picture of his stash behind the bar.” She balances the coasters on the rims to prevent both spilling and dosing as she walks. His scowl, she notices, has disappeared, leaving his furrowed brows as a mark of concern rather than anger. Did he really think stories wouldn’t spread across campus? Picking up the drinks, she eases back into the crowd.
People press in all around her, yelling and laughing—in a few cases crying—and while this is a bar, not a club, there are a handful trying to dance to the combination of pulsing music and shrieking televisions. Mostly college students, she thinks, or people still drinking like they’re college students. This close to campus, especially in a bar this cheap and this prone to skipping ID checks, the students have pushed out nearly everyone else who might come.
Rebecca weaves through the dancers and shifts around the knot of frat boys chanting and egging on two of their brothers competing to see who can chug a pitcher of beer the fastest. The corner she and her friends managed to stake out can’t really be called quiet, but it’s a bubble of something at least less chaotic. She slides into her chair near the walls and hands the second drink to her roommate.
“You were watching him pretty closely,” Hafsah notes. She pulls away the coaster lid and sniffs at the drink.
“It should be safe.” But it doesn’t stop her from studying the way the liquid moves against the glass and looking for any shifts in color or undissolved particles. Rebecca’s always careful about her drinks, but she can acknowledge that what happened to her classmate has her more paranoid than usual. She wishes they’d gone to a different bar, one without a recent history of roofies, but Ellie wanted this one.
Ellie, she thinks, eyeing her friend, wants a fight.
There are five of them around the table. Ellie’s two suitemates, Luz and Keiko, begged off in order to work on a group project. There should be a third suitemate—specifically Ellie’s roommate—but Kacey’s been in a coma since she was attacked the first week of fall semester. None of them want to replace her in their suite, but Ellie is the one to terrorize her newly assigned roommates until they run away and Housing surrenders. Rebecca mostly disapproves of bullying.
She’s never tried to stop Ellie from keeping Kacey’s space sacrosanct, though.
Susanna and Delia share a study space with Rebecca and Hafsah, and all seven of them share the bathroom, God help them all.
In fact, Susanna and Delia are the ones who wanted to come and drink, self-medicating after stressful presentations, but Ellie is the one who decided where. Ellie, who poured herself into leather pants and a clingy, plunging top, who slapped on makeup as bright as any mating call. Ellie, who’s already on her third drink because she threw the first one in the face of a man who grabbed her ass at the bar. Ellie, who’s glowering over the rim of her glass at a couple a few tables over, the man leaning too far into the space of a woman inching so far away from him she’s barely still in the chair.
“Ellie.”
“He’s harassing her,” her friend snaps.
“Yes,” agrees Rebecca.
“And you’re just going to watch?”
“I’m not going to go break his nose, if that’s what you mean,” she says evenly.
Delia props her chin up on her fist—or tries to. It takes her a second attempt before she manages it. She’s not always a lightweight, but when Delia gets stressed, she forgets to eat. “His nose could use breaking,” she announces a little too loudly. “It’s so thin and twitchy. It needs character.”