Wicked Games

by Wood, Vivian

  I was so excited to get it that I actually cried. I’ve never had new stuff, period.

  Putting a hand to my forehead, I try to convince myself that the sheets are just sheets. I just need to breathe and not get hung up on appearances.

  Besides, I have more stuff in boxes that should be waiting for me at the student post office. It took a lot of convincing to talk someone in the residence life department into letting me mail my boxes ahead of my arrival. It was practically miraculous that they sent me my mailbox keys and dorm keys ahead of time.

  Fishing the keys out of my purse, I check the time on my phone. I am due at the school’s orientation event in a hour, but I think I have enough time to head down to the student center and check my mail.

  You can do this. You got yourself into Campbell college by working your ass off. Now is the easy part. These pep talks are sort of embarrassing, but they are what is getting me through the day.

  I turn to head out of the room and almost smash headlong into a giant canvas frame with a painting of pale pink and gold stripes on it. The frame keeps moving forward, forcing me backward into the room. It’s not until the frame shifts that I see the tiny Asian girl holding it and looking oblivious.

  Clearing my throat, I speak up. “Excuse me?”

  She just at the sound of my voice and drops the painting. When she turns her dark eyes toward me, she is clearly already aggravated. “What are you doing here?”

  Her tone is sharp, but her voice is high and melodic. She narrows her eyes at me, dusting her hands off.

  “I live here.” Both my cheeks blaze bright red as I reach my hand out to her. “I’m Emily Danes.”

  She takes my hand, gripping it for as little time as possible before releasing it again. As she does, I feel her gaze on my pink dress and grungy shoes. For the second time in a handful of minutes, I feel as if someone is totaling my value and finding me lacking.

  “Lily Mizundo,” she replies, looking as though she has a bitter taste in her mouth.

  Say something to ease the tension, I implore myself. Anything, anything at all.

  “I’m going down to the student center,” I blurt out. “Do you… need anything?”

  She looks offended. “No. What would I need?”

  The from you bit seems implied.

  My face begins to burn. Mortified, I clutch at my purse. “Okay! I’ll catch you… around.”

  Then I turn and flee out the door, heading down the hall. God, this day isn’t going as I had planned at all.

  3

  Wolf

  I wanted the summer to burn away the last year at Campbell.

  By the time the spring semester ended I was half-sick with the living, rotting stench of spring. When had the grass ever smelled like that—like it was clinging to the snow? It was like the drag of Ash’s body over the stone steps stuck a pin through my body. Part of me is still standing there by that oak tree, stuck forever like an insect mounted in a frame.

  An actual living fly buzzes by my ear and I swat it away.

  I spent all summer in the sun, hoping the heat would erase what happened. I got a couple of vicious sunburns sailing one of my dad’s smaller boats, day after day, when I wasn’t pretending to intern at his corporate headquarters in the city. Nobody cared.

  Well, I cared.

  But I also cared that someone murdered my friend, and all the sunburns on the planet weren’t enough to wipe those memories from my brain. How could it have been? It was a stupid assumption, anyway, because that murderer is still here. On campus.

  Welcome to senior year.

  Nobody was ever arrested for Asher’s murder. That’s what it was—a murder. Nobody drags a body up to the main set of stairs under cover of darkness because they’re hiding a death from natural causes. You fucking call 9-1-1, is what you do.

  And these are the thoughts that circled around my mind all summer while I let my hands get calloused from hauling on the rigs of my boat. Who did it? What the hell are they hiding? And why, why, couldn’t anyone else have seen that it was suspicious as fuck?

  “Don’t frown, my man. It’ll put off all the hot ones.” A heavy hand comes down on my back in a gentlemanly slap and I shake it off. Carter. He’s made his appearance for the morning, which is shocking considering how much he drank last night. He hides it well. He’s showered, and his reddish hair is on point, as always. “Seriously. What are you staring at?” He looks in the direction I was looking, which is at the center of the crowd at orientation. “You spotted the best ones already, didn’t you? I knew I shouldn’t have let you go ahead.”

  “You weren’t up when I left, asshole.”

  “I—shit.” His phone tumbles out of his hand and when he bends to snatch it from the concrete sidewalk I flash back to that night and the way he bent over Asher’s body, hauling the dead weight from the ground. “Where’s Max?”

  “Where have you been?” Max appears at my other elbow, hair falling to his shoulders in the precise way that it always has and probably always will. He’s wearing a button-down with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and a pair of shorts that look like he ironed them this morning. He probably did, once he was done with his early morning writing. Always writing. You can’t tear him away from his notebooks. Even now, he scribbles in a pocket notebook.

  “Are you asking us a question or writing another love story?” Carter laughs at his own joke. It raises my hackles. He’s always been a dick and it’s never been a problem, until I saw what I saw.

  And they can never know that, so I have to stop leaning away from Carter like he’s got a communicable disease.

  “Nobody told me where we were meeting.” Max shuts the notebook and puts it back into his pocket.

  “Same place we always do.” Carter spreads his arms wide, taking in the entire quad.

  It’s filled with people going through the various bullshit check-in processes that Campbell loves so much. We’re already checked in, since we live at Rose House. But the new crop of freshmen are not. And this is the best place to assess the new arrivals. We’re scanning for people who’ll be a good fit for Skull & Thorns. At least, that’s the stated mission. The real mission is to see if there’s any fresh blood when it comes to the women on campus. It’s hard to care this year, but there’s Carter, eyes narrowed like this is the most important decision he’ll ever make in his life. “Anyone we need to avoid, Wolf?”

  I run a hand through my hair. The woman I took to bed last night won’t be at orientation today. After we were done with each other she put her clothes on and went back out to hit another bar. I’d be lying if I said I remembered her name. Pretty enough. Blue eyes, hair like Carter’s, and a perky ass. She was made for a minidress.

  Nothing long-term.

  “No. There’s nobody.”

  Ellis jogs up then, circling around us for high-fives. “It’s so funny.” He stands in the middle of all of us, smirking. “None of you are ever going to get any girls if you don’t work out.” He looks the three of us up and down. “What are we doing here? Playing wallflowers?” He flexes. “Stand here all you want. I’m going to hunt.”

  “You done, asshole?” Carter laughs, then goads Ellis into a final high-five while I try unsuccessfully to ignore the pit in my gut. They’re here, like nothing ever happened, and if I’m going to get through this year I have to start acting like it, too. “Let’s do a loop.”

  We all fall into step and a bright spike of adrenaline moves through my veins. I’m not expecting anything magic out of orientation, or out of all the girls in skinny jeans and oversized Campbell t-shirts tied at the waist.

  “Mmm.” Carter rubs his hands together. “This looks like a promising class.”

  “You’re fucking gross,” says Max.

  “I don’t see you running back to Rose House.”

  Max shrugs. “It’s a nice day.”

  He’s right—it is a nice day. Early September, still warm, golden mid-morning sunlight illuminating everything. It’s a far
cry from a cold moonlight. I shiver in spite of myself.

  Carter scans the crowd like he’s looking for someone specific. It would be impossible to find anyone in a group like this. Identical falls of soft, shiny hair, straightened to perfection. They even move the same. Hummingbirds. It reminds me of hummingbirds.

  We round the corner of the quad and circle in tighter. Something in the center of my chest tugs me away from all the people and the chatter and the movement. My vision shifts and for a disorienting moment I see this—all of this—like someone who’s already graduated. Like someone who shouldn’t even be here.

  And should we? The first year we were at Campbell, we checked in at that row of tables and got the keys to our dorm rooms and the packets of information we never read. Then we circled the quad, looking for adventure. We ended up finding the same girls from Waltham who’d been prowling around us for years already.

  Still, we keep coming back here every September. For what?

  A group of guys pushes approaches from the opposite end of the quad, all swagger and loud voices. Five of them, spread out across the grass, taking up all the space. They don’t slow down at the edge of the crowd. If anything they speed up, head and shoulders above the rest.

  One minute I’m looking at a bunch of freshman assholes who have nothing to do with me and the next one of them turns his head and I swear, it’s Asher.

  It’s the same close-cropped hair, the same foolish grin, and I stumble forward a few steps before I even know what I’m doing. What the hell am I going to do, run through the crowd and yank him back by the arm and demand to know what he’s doing with my dead friend’s face?

  “Wolf found the queen bee,” Carter shouts and my feet stop moving. “Give us all an equal chance. For the brotherhood,” he says. “Point her out.”

  There’s nobody to point out, nobody there—only I can still see Asher wading through the crowd. An icy cold breeze trips over the back of my neck and I slap my hand on top of it. Not now. Not today. I want to stop feeling that night on my skin every second of my life.

  I turn back toward Carter, fighting the sneer on my face and failing. “How?” I spit. I don’t know exactly where I’m going with the rest of the sentence and it curdles and dies on my tongue. Maybe how are you still standing here like you didn’t kill him. But that would be too far. I know it would, and that horrible sharp frustration lashes over my belly.

  All my life, I’ve had enough money for anything I wanted. My parents tried. They did. But the thing about being so successful is that you can’t hide it. They couldn’t have hidden it from me, just like the scholarship kids at our high school couldn’t hide the fact that they were poor. It just was. So all my life, I’ve known that when push came to shove, money was the solution, even if all else failed. And I knew—I couldn’t help but know—that one day, if I kept my shit together and stayed in control, all of it would be mine.

  I’m losing fucking control.

  Carter looks at me, his forehead creased and his arms crossed over his chest. Max studies me like I’m good fodder for his writing. And Ellis—

  “Dude,” he says, eyes wide. “Have you been drinking enough water? Dehydration can make anybody lose their shit.”

  It’s an absurd question, coming from the guy who had to use his strength to drag a dead body into Rose House. How the fuck is he not losing his shit? How am I the only one who still feels this?

  All at once, I see the dominos falling. It’s the first day of the new year. It can’t start like this.

  So I take a deep breath. I stand up straight. And I plaster the same cocky smile on my face that I’ve always worn. If I’m going to find the killer and protect Rose House and be in any position to take my place at my dad’s company—if I’m going to succeed at fucking anything—I cannot let this happen. I can’t slip up again.

  Put on the mask. Bury the feelings. Stay detached.

  I stab a finger in the general direction of my friends. “How are you all still standing here, wasting time? Do you not see the women clustered around those tables? Gentleman, we have prospects. Et charonis unum.”

  It takes the tension out of the air. “Et charonius unum,” they say, and then we turn to face the crowd again.

  “I see a blonde for you, Carter.” My voice sounds too loud, even to me, but it’s time to commit to this act. “And I see…”

  She catches my eye at the edge of the crowd.

  It’s in the way she moves. Tentative, but with her shoulders squared, like she’s going into battle. It’s different from the perky swing of the hips that all the women around her have. She takes one step forward, then back. And the movement isn’t all, her hair—her hair isn’t long and straight, isn’t swinging in a bouncing ponytail. Chin-length and a velvety dark brown, the edges slightly rough in a way that nobody we went to school with at Waltham would ever have allowed.

  She turns her head, and I get my first glimpse of her face in profile. Full lips. A sharp, pointed jaw. And a softness there that calls to something behind my breastbone, something locked behind the cage I’ve slammed shut over all the shit with Asher.

  I want to run my hand along the line of her body, a body that is hidden under a t-shirt that looks worn in. It’s not campus gear from the student union. It’s all hers.

  Everything seems brighter, in this moment. Warmer.

  She shades her eyes with her hands and turns to face us, like she’s looking for someone. Dark eyes. She has dark eyes, and cheekbones I want to run my thumb over.

  Maybe this year won’t be so bad after all.

  4

  The rest of the day is a whirlwind of meeting strangers and moving my boxes from the student center to my dorm room. After greeting approximately a zillion people, I haven’t met a single person that actually made me feel welcome. Plus, I nearly forgot that I sent ten medium-sized boxes to myself here at the student post office.

  So now it’s almost dark and I am just now transferring my last box up the front steps of Rebekah. Juggling a little bit, I shift the box to my hip. The very last box actually made it all the way across the country, despite looking about as beaten up as a box possibly could. I fish around in my purse for what feels like ages before I give up and set the box down.

  Several kids come by as I’m searching for my keys, but I’m too shy to say anything. I don’t want anyone to question my presence at Rebekah. Or even worse, at Campbell.

  I can just hear them now. What are you even doing here? Don’t you know that this is an Ivy?

  Those voices, even imaginary, are something I can do without. At this point, the sun is starting to set and I am getting increasingly desperate to get into my room.

  I realize with a sudden burst of knowledge that I left my keys on my bed in the room. Cursing myself, I pick up my box and look around. Surely someone will come by soon to let me in. Hopefully someone nice. Someone who won’t ask the questions I fear so much.

  Please, don’t let the person I ask make fun of me. I don’t think I can bear it.

  I look at the immaculately trimmed hedges and search the red brick walkways, but to no avail. Somehow, campus is empty just now.

  Great. Pacing to the broad steps, I stand there and look out across the campus. Rebekah is close to a few other dorm buildings and the quad, a big green square in the middle of the campus. Across the quad, I can see ancient Buttrick Hall, the relatively new student center, the gray stone library, and even a little slice of the red brick dining hall. All of the quad is silent, the grass glowing as the last sunbeams fall on it. Several huge oak trees dot the quad, their shadows looming large, but no people are to be seen.

  It’s like the entire campus is under dusk’s spell. I sigh, shifting the box against my side for the tenth time. The sagging box chooses that moment to split, the bottom giving way to a torrent of clothing.

  I realize a second later that this is the box that holds my bras and panties and leggings… because of course it is. My things cascade across the steps, the wind
working against me again.

  “Fricking… frick!” I utter, scrambling to pick up the spillage. Turning my back on the quad, I pick up bras and panties piecemeal and shove them back inside the box.

  Just then I hear the sound of footsteps approaching. I stiffen three seconds before I hear someone speak.

  “Oooh. Nice bra.” The voice is low and manly, the tone playful. “Please turn around and be a hot girl.”

  Oh fudge.

  Swallowing hard, I turn around. There I find four guys a few steps behind me, looking like they just walked off of a fricking runway or something. The dark-haired one who spoke bends down and picks up one of my lacy bras. He eyes me, grinning.

  “Nice,” another guy says, holding a pair of my panties. He has dark, chin-length hair and cheekbones for days, but somehow that just sets off his startlingly blue eyes. Jesus, he is hot. “Missing these?”

  He raises the silky panties aloft, his expression not quite mocking me. I lurch forward and grab them out of his hand. Another guy casually plucks a bra from a bush. Looking at him, I am startled to see a sandy haired Greek god dressed in jeans and a tee shirt.

  God, are all the students at this school so beautiful? Certainly these guys are an anomaly, right?

  He smirks at my expression, grabbing the bra from his friend. He holds out the clothes to me, forcing me to come closer if I want to have them. I edge forward and snatch the clothes from his fingers. His gaze drops to my mouth. I lick my lips, unable to speak.

  Then I suddenly see a familiar face approaching.

  It’s the boy that held the door for me earlier, the one with the dark head of curls and the Anderson Paak tee. He raises his brows at how I’m holding a split box, ignoring the other guys.

  “Need help?” he inquires.

  “Yes!” I blurt out. My gaze slides over the other four men, anxious to be away from their probing looks. “Can you let me in? I… I forgot my keys upstairs.”