by Callie Hart
“Oh my god.” Mara rolls her eyes. Partly because she thinks it’s pathetic that some kid is drooling over one of us, I think, but also partly because she’s low-key irritated that he wasn’t drooling over her. “Thirsty, much?” she yells. “Quit panting and get walking, asshole. You’re blocking the road.”
I blush, because I have no clue what else I’m supposed to do. No one’s ever been astonished by me before. Confused, yes. Bewildered, most definitely. In my time as a student at Wolf Hall no boy has ever nearly fallen over his own feet because of me, though.
Presley laughs shakily under her breath when the guys ahead all turn around and start to clap, whistling and cheering at us. Mara perks up at this, since all three of us are being applauded, but Presley doesn’t know what to do with herself. She ducks her head.
“Nope. No hiding behind your hair, dude,” I command. “You’re a stone-cold fox. Every single guy at this party is gonna be looking at you. Are you gonna spend the whole night staring at your shoes?”
“You gotta look ’em dead in the eye,” Mara says. “Show them what you’re made of. You can’t waste a knock-out cleavage like that being shy, Pres.”
“Your boobs are looking magnificent tonight,” I confirm. “Even I checked them out.”
Mara smirks. “Pax is gonna notice you the second you walk through the door. You know he will. What are you gonna do if he tries to hit you over the head and drag you back to his cave? That is how Neanderthals do it, right?”
“He’s not a Neanderthal!”
“Hate to say it, but I’m going to have to agree with Mara this time. He doesn’t really come across as the brightest bulb in the box.”
Indignant, Presley sets her jaw, looking up and ahead, the color in her cheeks fading. “He’s really smart, actually. He writes. And he likes photography. He’s very creative. I bet you didn’t know that about him, did you?”
“How do you know that about him?” Mara asks.
“I—I just do.”
“PRES!”
“Alright, fine. I snooped through his college applications. Harcourt has copies of them all in the cabinet outside the front office desk. She gave me the key so I could add something to my file, and, well, y’know, Chase and Davis are right next to each other. Alphabetically. I saw his file there next to mine, and I couldn’t help it. I’m not even sorry!”
“Very sneaky! I approve,” Mara says. “Enough about Davis, though.” She pulls us to a stop at the top of a short, paved pathway, urging us to look up with a jerk of her head.
We’ve arrived at Riot House.
Other Wolf Hall students stream around us, all making their way toward the main entrance of the grand building that’s just appeared out of the looming darkness ahead of us. It really is a beautiful house—all unique angles, knife-edge lines, and so much glass. Light blazes out of the numerous windows, throwing back the encroaching night. Inside, loud music churns, spilling out of the huge, open ash doors.
Presley’s grip on my arm tightens. “Either of you ever been inside?” she asks.
I shake my head, marveling up at the structure. “You?”
Mara just laughs. “Of course I have. If you think the outside’s impressive, just wait ’til you see the inside. It’s fucking ridiculous.”
Mara wasn’t joking.
The house belongs to Wren, but the Lovetts are just as wealthy as the Jacobis, if not even more so. Dash could afford to buy a place like this if he wanted. Three times over. Whenever we’ve spent time together, it’s either been in my room or at the observatory. I never even considered hanging out with him at Riot House—not with Pax and Wren around—so the whole money thing hasn’t really occurred to me. Until now. Now, it’s painfully obvious, and I’m feeling pretty foolish. How can I not have realized that this would be an issue before?
I come from a backwater town in Alabama. My mother never had two cents to rub together. Alderman has money and plenty of it, too, but he’s already done so much for me. I’m not expecting him to set me up for life. He’s giving me a stellar education, which is far more than I could have hoped for if I’d stayed in Grove Hill. I’m hoping that my grades will be good enough so that I can go to college somewhere on a scholarship. Alderman will argue. He’ll want me to attend an Ivy League institution, but I can’t let him spend that kind of money on me. A scholarship could still get me into a great school, but Dash? Dash is going back to the UK to study at Oxford. And once he’s there, amongst plenty of beautiful, rich English girls who are all from noble stock like him, it’ll only be a matter of time before he falls in love with one of them.
I’ll be nothing but a distant memory of that one time when he went slumming in New Hampshire.
All of this hits me as I step into the foyer of Riot House.
“Holy fucking shit,” Pres breathes. “What the hell? This place looks like a hotel.”
She’s right. And not a cheap hotel, either. A five-star hotel with an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a fully equipped gym, Michelin-starred restaurant and day spa attached. The monstrous stairs dominate the entry way and lead up to what looks like an open landing, which leads to another, and then another. The whole thing draws the eye up, up, up, to a vaulted ceiling high above us, which isn’t so much a ceiling as a single, massive skylight. What a view of the night sky you could get through that thing, if none of the lights were on. Dash mentioned this when we met at the observatory for the first time. I hadn’t thought much of it, but now, seeing it, I’m struck with envy.
“I heard Wren did all of the paintings,” Presley says.
The artwork in question certainly looks like something that could have come out of Jacobi’s mind. Dark, swirling, moody and angry, the paintings hanging on the walls are definitely all from the same hand. They’re good. More than good. They’re brilliant, actually, each a seething raging storm captured on a canvas. I can see them being worth money one day. Not that I’d ever admit that within earshot of the artist.
Mara waltzes across the foyer, cutting through the crowd like she owns the place. Presley follows. I stand there for a minute, still trying to take it all in: the sunken living room; the massive sectional couches; the lilies in expensive vases; the gargantuan flat screen television; the glass coffee table that looks like an art piece. Nothing is too showy or ridiculous. There’s a subtle undertone of stupendous wealth here, though, and it’s freaking me the fuck out.
Damn.
I’ve been left behind.
Quickly trying to swallow down the major feelings of inadequacy that have begun to rear their ugly head, I hurry after Mara and Pres, shoving my way through the throng of people dancing in the massive living room. Eventually, I bully a pathway through the madness and wind up in the kitchen, where Mara’s holding court. Impressive, really. She was only sixty seconds ahead of me, but she’s already located the high-end liquor and she’s already poured out three shots. She offers me one and Presley the other, her smile positively wicked. “Here’s to avoiding the hosts for as long as possible and getting shitfaced on their dime,” she says.
Pres clinks her glass to Mara’s without hesitation. She needed some Dutch courage back at the academy just to walk down here. I have no doubt that she’ll be avoiding Pax all night, the tequila won’t help with that, but it might help calm her nerves a little. I, on the other hand, would like to run into one of the party’s hosts.
There are limitations on the kind of interaction Dash and I can have here. I’m not expecting him to charge his way across a crowded room, sweep me into his arms, lift me off my feet and start making out with me. But there’s something to be said for some loaded eye contact. The weight of his eyes on me in the hallways of the academy is like a caress. On three separate occasions, I’ve found myself burning up and turned on from a lingering sidelong look he’s sent my way. He seeks me out, searching for me, then looks away. Searches for me, then looks away. Anyone who wasn’t paying attention would never notice the way his gaze constantly shifts, homing in on me e
very couple of minutes. I do, though, because I’m doing the same thing, always looking for him, always leaning into him.
The three of us knock back the tequila, shivering against the trail of fire that burns its way down our throats. Pres sucks on a wedge of lime that she plucks from a glass bowl in the middle of the kitchen island, pulling a face. “Urgh, that’s disgusting.”
“Herradura Seleccion Suprema actually,” a low voice says behind us. “Four hundred dollars a bottle. That shit’s as smooth as a baby’s ass cheek, Red.”
Presley’s hand tightens around the shot glass. She looks like one of those fainting goats, right before they seize and topple over. The poor girl doesn’t turn around, which is a good thing because Pax Davis is wearing a black button-down shirt, black jeans and a black tie, and even I can admit that he looks smoking hot. It’s no wonder he gets so much modelling work. His tattoos are on show, creeping down his arms and up, out of the collar of his shirt. He winks at me, burns a hole into Pres’ back—looks like he’s actually checking out her ass—and then he keeps on walking, vanishing back out into the living room.
Mara’s mouth is puckered like a cat’s asshole. “He’s gone. You can breathe,” she says sourly. Poor Pres stays stock still, though, the shot glass in her hand shaking. Mara’s eyes go wide. “Breathe! Oh my god, girl, take a fucking breath!”
Presley inhales, the air pulling over her vocal chords, creating the kind of theatrical sound that actors make when they suck in a breath after nearly drowning. I take her glass and pour us all another shot. “Fuck, Pres. Are you sure you even like him? I think you’re confusing attraction with blind terror.”
Morosely, she accepts the shot glass and downs the expensive liquor. She takes it much better this time. “It’s both,” she says. “The two emotions are intrinsically linked now. I’ll be getting turned on during horror movies until the day I die. How fucked up is that?”
It's hard not to laugh, but I cope.
Our conversation is halted by an excited scream from somewhere on the ground floor. A second later, Damiana Lozano careens into the kitchen, wobbling on four-inch-high heels, wearing a metallic silver dress that leaves nothing to the imagination. “Come on, assholes. Wren’s about to do the thing. He won’t start until we’re all there.”
I don’t know what the ‘thing’ is or where ‘there’ is, either, but our fellow classmates loitering in the kitchen do. Everyone rushes for the door that leads back out to the living room. Mara grabs Pres’ hand and then mine, and pulls us along behind her as she, too, charges out of the kitchen.
The music’s still thumping in the living room, the heavy bass rattling my teeth in my head, but all of the people who were dancing a moment ago have gone. Everyone is gathered at the foot of the impressive staircase in the foyer, where Wren, Pax and Dash are standing on the seventh or eighth step, high up enough that they can be seen above the tops of everyone’s heads.
My stomach performs a triple axel, slips and crashes into a concrete wall when I see Dash. His hair looks like burnished copper under the orange lights. I expected him to be wearing a button down like Pax and Wren, but instead he’s wearing a black t-shirt that has small white flecks of paint running down the side of it. The jeans he’s wearing are ripped at the knees, and there are beaten up red high-tops on his feet. He looks the most himself I have ever seen him; this scruffy, casual, at ease version of himself is the Dash I’ve come to know. His hands are in his pockets, his weight resting on one foot. Gone is the ramrod straight back and the rigid shoulders. His eyes are still cold, however, as they sweep across the people gathered at his feet. He is, after all, the Sun God of Riot House.
“Alright.” Wren sweeps his dark hair out of his face, assessing the sea of faces before him like some benevolent god addressing his people. “Welcome. I will be your Master of the Hunt for this evening. For those of you who have attended one of these parties before, you know what comes next. For those of you who haven’t, listen closely. By coming here tonight, you are giving your consent in tonight’s festivities. You aren’t being held here against your will. The door’s right there. Feel free to leave if you need to bitch out. But…if you stay…you’re complicit in what comes next.”
“What comes next?” someone yells from the back of the room.
Wren’s eyes flash. “Tonight’s game is called ‘Bag and Tag. The rules are simple. Around the house, there are bags like these hidden, waiting to be found.” He holds up a tiny plastic baggie for everyone to see—clear plastic, an inch square, and at the bottom, a small amount of white powder.
“Oh, god,” Mara mutters. “Here we go.”
“What’s in it?” one of the college guys yells.
Wren’s deadpan glare is acidic. “If you’d let me speak, you’d find out.” He holds up another small baggie in his other hand, and this time the powder inside is blue. “Bags like this have also been hidden. The white powder is talcum powder. Or Molly. Or coke.” He looks at the bag, rocking his head from side to side. “Maybe it’s speed. Who the fuck knows. The blue stuff’s probably just baking powder with a splash of food dye. But there’s a chance it could be Viagra. Odds are a fifty-fifty split. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to find one of these beauties and gun its contents.”
“And then what?” Boyd Lowrey, captain of the debate team, asks.
Pax jumps in. “And then Bacchanalia, fuckhead. Hook up. Get your dick wet.”
“Or pussy,” Wren adds. “This is an equal opportunities orgy. The person who fucks the most people by the time the sun comes up wins.”
“And what will we win, Wren?” At the back of the room, a male, authoritative voice asks. “Once we’ve downed a bunch of non-descript narcotics and ploughed our way through the senior year?”
A ripple of silence runs through the crowd, because most of us recognize the voice. We spend an hour with its owner every Monday and Thursday morning, recently poring over Romeo and Juliet.
“Oh my god. No way.” Mara laughs behind her hand. She’s delighted even before she turns around and sees him: Dr. Fitzpatrick, leaning against the closed front door, his hands in the pockets of his jeans. The sides of his hair have been freshly buzzed. He’s wearing a black hoody with a grey stripe across it that looks weirdly familiar.
Up until now, Dash’s expression has been perfectly blank. The moment he sees Fitz, that changes. His mouth turns down, his eyes full of steel. He shoots a glance over at Pax, who looks equally as unhappy. Wren’s the only Riot House boy who doesn’t seem perturbed by our English teacher’s presence.
“Our respect, initially,” he says. “And then…immunity.”
Fitz smiles coyly, glancing down at his shoes. “Immunity from what exactly?”
“From me,” Wren says. He nods his head toward Dash. “From him.” A nod to Pax. “And him.”
“Hmm. Well. I can’t see how that’s much of a prize. Immunity from the attentions of three teenaged boys?” Fitz shakes his head, eyes creased at the corners. “Hardly something I need to worry about.”
“You sure about that?” Pax descends down a step, the tendons in his neck straining beneath his skin, like he’s about to launch himself at the bastard, but Wren gives a small shake of his head.
“Don’t worry, man. Fitz isn’t playing our little game tonight.”
“Is that so?” The teacher smirks. “And why’s that?”
“Because you weren’t invited here this evening. It’s very poor etiquette to show up at someone’s house uninvited, Wes. Very rude.”
“But I was invited. Wasn’t I, Mara?” Fitz looks over at Mara. Everyone in the room turns to follow his gaze. And thanks to the fact that Mara’s standing three inches away from me, I suddenly find that there are two hundred pairs of eyes looking at me, too. Including Dash’s.
If I were Mara, I’d be beet red and stammering under the weight of Wren’s scowl, but she looks like she’s actually enjoying the attention. “What? I didn’t think he’d come,” she says. “N
othing wrong with being polite every once in a while. Maybe you should try it, Jacobi.”
This is payback for embarrassing her in the dining hall. He humiliated her when he announced within earshot of five different tables that she’d sent him a bunch of nudes. That was two months ago, and she’s still going on about it. Fuck knows what her thought process was, but having the English professor show up to a Riot House party definitely disrupts Wren’s plans for the night. I mean, he just admitted to having a shit load of drugs hidden in the house. He’s going to have to shut the whole thing down now.
But Wren only smiles. “Guess it’s a good job I crushed up that Viagra then,” he says. “Anyone finds a blue packet, make sure you give it to the old fucker at the back. His dick probably hasn’t been hard in a century.”
“What?” Pres hisses. “He’s letting him stay?”
Mara’s glee wanes a little. She was clearly hoping for fireworks from Wren and her little stunt didn’t get the faintest reaction out of him. Fitz laughs silently, shrugging his shoulders. “Can’t say I’ve had any complaints about the hardness of my dick, but what the hell. Bring it on, Jacobi.”
“It’s already in your mouth. Might as well swallow it.”
Mara snorts at the look on Pres’ face. Her eyes are twice their normal size, and her lips are scrunched up into a tight knot. She shakes her head, refusing to down the jalapeño vodka that Mara just free-poured into her mouth.
I stand a step back from my friends, still trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. Fitz leans against the counter, elbows on the marble, perfectly at home. “The longer you keep it in there, the longer it’s gonna burn.” He offers this sage piece of advice like he isn’t breaking a whole handful of state laws right now. He is, right? He must be.
Presley whimpers, then gulps, squealing as she finally takes the damn shot. “Fuck! Who—” She swallows again, forcing down a retch, eyes watering like crazy. “Who brings jalapeño vodka to a party? That’s just…fffucking…cruel.”
