Joey scrolled down, found an entry for Rebecca Morgan. Eights and nines for looks. It struck her as not random that the faces were ranked last.
In the sex section, only Missionary was checked. The ranking was quite low. The comments read:
dead fish.
just lies there like a board.
id rather whack off.
And so on.
Something toxic and black roiled in Joey’s stomach. She blew out a breath, trying to get it gone.
It wasn’t gone.
She was just about to close the file when her eye caught on another name: Josephine Morales. She shut her eyes tight, held them closed, argued with herself, promised she wouldn’t look. Then she checked the rankings.
Her ass was a nine.
Her tits came in at five.
Face at a seven.
None of the sex categories were checked, but there were numerous comments.
grunts like a pig in yoga.
id fuck that tho.
dykey but id do her 2.
she’d be an angry fuck .
someone get in there.
She felt that heat again now, running between her skin and muscle like if someone touched her, she might burst. She looked down, saw Rebecca Morgan’s bloodstains on her shirt. Then up at the spreadsheet. Then she closed her eyes again and just held them closed.
Dog the dog came over, nudged her elbow up out of the way, and slid his giant Rhodesian ridgeback head into her lap. He whimpered until she broke from her trance to scratch behind his ears.
* * *
Couldn’t sleep couldn’t sleep couldn’t sleep, and it wasn’t just because she’d downed three Big Gulps of Dr Pepper, because she did that all the time.
She kept thinking of Rebecca Morgan. How her hair fluttered like streamers across her eyes. How lost she looked. How she was there one second and then not.
And how she didn’t make a sound when she vaulted over the balcony. No whimper, no cry, no rending of fabric. Just a quiet little hop and the gentle wind in Joey’s ears.
She got up and walked over to Dog the dog and lay on top of him. He was sleeping on his side, sprawled off his huge disk of a bed, and he took her weight in full. It made his breathing louder, part snore, part purr. His nose was dry, and she kissed his ears, which were so soft she wished her bedsheets were made of ridgeback ears. She rose and fell with his breath, getting a good hit of oxytocin.
Hair like streamers.
There. And then not.
That one arm, twisted the wrong way like a dead tree limb.
Joey got up. She paced around the apartment. Fussed with one of her speed cubes. Made the colors align. Then made a checker pattern. She timed herself, counting in her head.
Seven seconds to solve the cube.
Now six.
Now five.
Becca’s voice, strained through a constricted throat: I can’t do it. There’s no way. I just can’t do it.
Joey threw the cube against the wall. She was breathing hard.
“Damn it,” she said.
She called 1-855-2-NOWHERE.
He answered on a half ring. It was 3:27 in the fucking morning, and he was alert as ever. She’d probably interrupted him doing a core workout or hanging upside down from the ceiling like a bat or pretending not to be not-so-secretly crushing on Mia Hall, the single-mother district attorney who lived downstairs.
He said, “Do you need my help … Joey?”
That was X’s idea of a joke.
She climbed back into bed and sat up, pulling the covers over her knees. “Don’t be lame.”
Then she told him what had happened. Her voice was actually pretty steady. She minded her heartbeat, her body temp, her breath, keeping it under control. It was time to assess and process, not to be all girly.
He listened quietly and let her meander and circle back and finally get it all told.
She breathed for a few seconds, then said, “You there?”
“Yes.”
That was X. Man of few words.
She breathed some more.
Then he said, “Want me to come over?”
“No.”
“Want to come here?”
“No.”
Another long pause. Maybe he was pouring oil in his ear to lubricate his inner machinery.
Then he said, “Do you need to cry?”
“What? No. Gawd. Jesus. I’m just filling you in.”
She hung up and tossed her phone onto the pillow next to her. She slid down into the sheets, hugged a spare pillow to her chest.
She didn’t want to admit that talking to X made her feel better.
So she didn’t.
She fell asleep.
* * *
They were back at the sushi joint the next day.
She didn’t want to be distracted from the mission, but X had insisted on lunch. And he preferred sushi because he only ate protein and rice and other healthy shit because that’s what you did when you were X so you could, like, feel superior to everyone else in the world.
After they ordered, he said, “I have a present for you.”
She perked up. “Really?”
“You seemed distracted lately. The situation at Boyer Hall. So I thought this might cheer you up.”
He reached under the counter and pulled out a nicely wrapped package that he’d somehow smuggled in without her noticing.
She tore at it with abandon before catching herself and slowing down to untie the ribbon like a proper adult. She hadn’t received many presents growing up.
She fucking loved presents.
Except this one.
A lavender sweatshirt with a puffy unicorn iron-on and words written in glitter: I AM ENOUGH.
She flopped it down onto the counter. “Are you serious? Do I look like someone who would wear an inspirational unicorn sweater?”
X glanced over at her, took in her outfit. Torn jeans, wife-beater tank under an oversize red flannel. “Come to think of it, no.”
“You don’t get it. You, like, totally don’t get me.”
Then she noticed his lips twitch. He was trying not to smile.
“X! Seriously? That’s not funny.”
She punched his arm. Hard. She could tell it hurt, but he didn’t flinch. That was X.
But she was laughing.
“Okay,” he said. “Here’s the real gift.”
From one of his cargo pockets, he took a box the size of a deck of a cards. Taped on top was a tiny card in a tiny envelope. It looked like a gift for someone rich.
“Aw,” she said. She took it, trying not to seem too eager, and slid out the little card.
It said, “Even though you are hideously unattractive and difficult to spend time with, you have an okay personality.”
She smirked. Then opened the box.
Nestled inside was a bracelet made of woven metal fibers with two stainless-steel skulls that touched at the crowns to form a magnetic clasp.
She put it on. Admired it. Then looked down at her soy sauce. She tried not to smile.
He’d gone back to his lobster roll, giving her some space and pretending not to notice. But X noticed everything.
“It is pretty cool,” she said.
* * *
Joey was belly-down on the edge of a parking-garage roof with a pair of Bushnell PowerView binoculars trained on the Alpha Nu Upsilon fraternity house opposite, to which she’d sourced the originating IP address of The List. She’d correlated that with the log-in IP of twenty-seven of the fraternity brothers, mostly juniors and seniors. Then she’d searched the BruinCard databases to match faces with names. The colossal dickheads who’d eyed her in yoga had colossal dickhead names: Chad Chassman and Brayden Oakley. But this wasn’t about Joey or about them. A whole lot more dickheads had ranked Rebecca Morgan.
She hadn’t just been embarrassed. She’d been shamed deeply enough to think that she’d never climb out of it, and as far as Joey was concerned, every last frathole who’d logged in to comm
ent on her breasts or her eyes or what kind of noises she made during sex deserved some major ass-stomping retribution.
So Joey had decided to get a closer look. She squirmed forward a bit more and adjusted the Bushnells. She liked the one-touch InstaFocus lever and the light transmission and the way the multicoated optics yielded high-grade brightness. X didn’t approve of her choice of nocks, always mansplaining about why Steiners were superior, but she couldn’t really be mad at him for getting all bincocular-porny, since she’d been known to get hot and bothered over gear herself a time or two.
And since X wasn’t here, he didn’t get a say anyway for once.
She wore a black sweatshirt and black jeans and was close to invisible in the thickening dusk. Cars drifted by below. Far up high behind her, a window washer worked away on the top floor of one of the medical buildings, but he didn’t look in her direction. A few homeless guys rattled by with shopping carts, stopping to hike up stained, loose-fitting trousers.
But she wasn’t here for any of that.
She watched the frat boys come and go, studied them through the windows. There was a lot of drinking and a lot of wrestling. There was a library on the second floor where a few boys worked on their laptops or swung through to plug their cell phones into a big mushroom-shaped charging station. There was a kitchen with an exhausted-looking middle-aged chef who made snacks and cleaned up and made snacks and cleaned up. There was activity in many of the bedrooms, sex being had and porn being watched and studying being done.
She lay on the roof.
She watched.
And she plotted.
* * *
Joey came twenty minutes early to the party at the fraternity house. Being as far from a Greek-system girl as seemed humanly possible, she’d had to do some research online, learning that mixers were closed parties where only a sister sorority was invited and who the fuck had time for any of this?
Well, today she did.
The front door was ajar, allowing her to wander into the enormous dilapidated house on the west edge of the Village. Everyone was in distracted pre-party mode, rolling kegs from room to room, peacocking around with their T-shirts off, slurping from red Solo cups, and lounging on couches trying to make out with a few stray girls who looked left over from the previous night. The floorboards were uneven, soft with rot and spilled beer, and someone was chanting in the neighboring room: “Al-phas! Al-phas! Al-phas!”
Joey wandered through the downstairs, her baby-girl backpack/purse thing jogging on her shoulders, completing her disguise as a Hot Girl. A coed cluster in a parlor room played strip charades, half naked and shouting out guesses:
“—someone who has to pee—”
“—dickless—”
“—creepy dancer guy—”
“Oh—that dude from Silence of the Lambs!”
They barely registered her drifting by.
She moved into the next room, a giant hall with multiple Ping-Pong tables set up for beer pong, and came face-to-face with Chad Chassman.
His forehead wrinkled, and he leaned back a bit, inspecting her down his nose. “Hey, you’re looking hot.”
She was indeed. She’d dressed up in a scoop-neck ribbed thong bodysuit that snapped at the crotch, the leg holes riding high above the waistband of her form-fitting jeans to show half-moons of flesh at her hips. It was sleeveless, too, showing off her arms, and she’d pulled her hair up off her face, letting it tumble over the shaved strip above her ear on the right side. A bit of eyeliner made her giant emerald eyes pop, and when she smiled, it put a dimple in her right cheek. Any male with a pulse stood less than no fucking chance.
Especially a human penis like Chad Chassman.
Big grin, too-white teeth, strong chin, tremendous eyebrow game. He didn’t have much stubble, just a few fine blond hairs, and he seemed evidently and overwhelmingly impressed with himself, the kind of guy who’d graduate and sell stocks and say unforgiveable shit like “market potentialities,” not that she begrudged success—because hell, work hard and do well and good for you—so it wasn’t even his imagined future that she hated at first sight, but the smugness. The total lack of humility and gratitude, the absence of awareness that however capable he might be, he was on the receiving end of an assembly belt delivering him opportunity after opportunity while most people in the world couldn’t even get inside the factory.
“You don’t recognize me?” she said, all cutesy-cute.
He held his hands wide. “We get a lotta girls through here.”
“I’m sure,” she said. “But few women.”
He laughed a bit too long. “Wanna come upstairs with me and have a drink?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Nah,” he said. “I don’t recognize you.”
“How about if I was all sweaty”—she moved closer, twined a finger in his artfully ripped T-shirt—“and bent over—”
“No way,” he said. “Did we…?”
“—and made, like, pig-grunting noises on my yoga mat?”
“What?” he said. “Wait, what? No way. You’re that chick? Jennifer something?”
“Yup. Jennifer something. That’s me.”
“Look, I get it. You’re woke. We hear from girls like you all the time. You criticize the hell out of us, but you secretly want to be here.”
“Not me,” she said. “But yeah, you’re right. Some girls do want to be here. Like Becca Morgan.”
“The chick who killed herself?”
“Yeah. That chick. The one who killed herself after she got sent ‘The List.’”
She watched his face, watched it closely. His Adam’s apple bobbed, and there was a flicker of surprise and maybe even something like regret, but it was quickly gone behind the quick flash of a smile.
“Oh, right,” he said. “She was perfectly okay, perfectly stable, and she just decided to jump off a building because of some list. It’s definitely all our fault.”
“Of course it’s not,” Joey said. “Of course she was probably fucked up and insecure and anxious and put too much stock in her looks and who was dating her, and she probably had a controlling mom who told her she had to be thin and an asshole dad who she could never please, and it’s their fault more than yours. But Jesus Christ, dude. She was a human. Like you fucking used to be at some point before you decided to go Full Dickhead.”
Once more he put on what she assumed was his go-to smile. “Girls like dicks,” he said, leaning in. “So let me ask you. You ever been with an Alpha?”
“Child,” Joey said, “you don’t know what an alpha is.”
She left him there with his mouth hanging slightly open and headed for the stairs. A drunk guy was navigating the steps down, but his eyes popped when he saw her in her ribbed thong bodysuit.
He could barely lift his gaze from her cleavage.
“And you all dared to rank my tits at a five,” she said.
He looked up, confused. “Huh?”
“Nothing.”
“D’ya wanna come to my room?” he said.
“So I can hold your hair while you throw up?”
“What? No. I can tell…” He reached out a wobbly hand to touch her cheek, and she slapped it away. He continued, unfazed. “I can tell you’re really different. From most girls who come in here. I mean, beneath.” Like he wasn’t pathetic enough, his breath smelled like peach schnapps. “And I can see that,” he said.
“Nope,” she said. “Just superficial me.”
“No,” he said. “You’re special. You’ve got, like, depth and shit.”
“I just like shopping and chocolatinis and guys with rilly rilly nice cars,” Joey said.
“But I bet you have, like, you have impostor syndrome, right?”
“Nope. Perfectly comfortable in my own skin.”
“Like if someone could see the real you…”
He reached to put a hand on her shoulder, and she ducked, and he toppled over and fell down the stairs.
S
he continued up to the library on the second floor. Pewter beer mugs slanted like stockings above a mantel, tall shelving units with dusty books, a miasma of pot smoke.
Everything reeked like skunk.
Toying with her badass skull bracelet, she moved past a long table lined with guys smoking vape pens and rattling away on their laptops. They yammered back and forth, not looking up from their screens.
“Wait—don’t we have this quiz in the database? Didn’t Gordo take this class last year?”
“They change the quizzes in Intro to Western Civ every quarter.”
“But Holdman said there’s tons of papers in there. Just make sure you have a different TA.”
She moved to the far end of the library. The giant mushroom pod of a charging station rested in front of a disused fireplace. On ripped and stained couches, two guys were going hard at their keyboards, clearly gaming.
She tried on her best hot-girl voice. “You guys mind if I charge my phone?”
“Sure.” The one with a cross-country T-shirt and eyeglasses nodded toward the charging station. She slung her purse down, pulled out her iPhone, and plugged it in.
They stared at her. She stared at them.
“Well,” she said. “Do you wanna take a picture or something?” She put her arms up overhead and flopped her hands outward, like she was clutching a beach ball overhead.
They laughed.
The kid in the glasses said, “This girl’s cool.”
“I am,” Joey said. “But that’s not one of the things you boys rank on The List.”
“Oh,” the guy said. “You heard about that.”
“Don’t talk about it, Ian,” the guy next to him said. Then he looked at her. “It’s not real. It’s, like, an urban legend.”
“I saw this particular urban legend,” she said. “With my own two beautiful green eyes.”
The other guy snickered. “Well played, Miles.”
“What are some other things you ‘Alphas’”—she gave it air quotes—“don’t rank?” She laid a finger alongside her cheek and cocked her head. “Intelligence. Number of languages spoken. Kindness. Toughness.” Now her stare hardened. “History of sexual abuse.”
They quieted. She looked down at the charging station, frowned. Fiddled some with a connection, then tried another.
The List Page 2
