Begin Again(14)
“Sweet.”
Just then an alarm goes off on my phone.
“Do you have somewhere to be?” Shay asks, frowning curiously at it.
“Yup.” I adjust the headband Connor’s mom got me to wear for my graduation photos, shaking my hair back so I can get just the right amount of volume on top, the way she taught me, then reach for the absurdly large bag of snack cakes Gammy Nell dropped off with me this morning. “The dorm catchup.”
Shay follows me to the door as I’m yanking it open. “Look,” she says. “I don’t want you to get your hopes up. Cardinal dorm’s not exactly known for its fraternizing.”
I digest this, but also commence my two-point plan by steadily knocking on all the doors I pass. Step one: Get everyone’s attention. Step two: Lure them into the rec room with an abundance of snack cakes. If I still have a shot at a fresh start here, I’m going to have to rip off the Band-Aid now, before anything else can happen to psych me out.
“Everyone just . . . studies, mostly,” says Shay, at a light jog to keep up with me. “And Milo’s not kidding about quiet hours.”
“We’ve got one more hour,” I say, making a point of knocking loudly on Milo’s door, too.
I can hear his muffled response as I make my way up the floor. “Has anyone lost a limb?”
“No,” Shay calls back.
I continue zigzagging back and forth between the doors on either side of the hall, knocking just firmly enough that people start poking their heads out.
A boy with a textbook the size of a toddler opens his door first. “Hello?”
“Did you leave your key in the door again?” another girl asks her roommate.
“I have cake!” I say, thrusting the grocery bag over my head.
They look justifiably startled, but within a minute I have a small trail of undergraduates following me to the end of the hall like a sleep-deprived parade. Shay wasn’t kidding about the fraternizing thing—the lights aren’t even on in the rec room. I find a table and dump the contents of Gammy Nell’s bag, pleased to see the whole gang is here: we’ve got Ring Dings, Hostess CupCakes, Kandy Kakes, Twinkies, Donut Sticks, Yodels, Moon Pies, Zingers, Cosmic Brownies. It’s enough sugar to make a dentist feel faint.
I stick my hands into the pockets of my dress, a thrill running up my spine. As unfamiliar as I am with it, I really do love meeting new people. I’m pretty sure I was a labradoodle in a past life. “Do you mind introducing me to the people you know?” I ask Shay.
Shay edges closer to me, talking out of the side of her mouth. “Uh. I don’t really know anyone.”
“Huh,” I say, waving at the confused faces on the other side of the glass door approaching. “I didn’t peg you for an introvert.”
“I’m not,” says Shay, eyeing the cluster of people who followed us here. “All my friends are from book clubs and the school literary magazine.”
By the looks of things, I’ve lured just enough people in here to know that by the end of the night, we’re going to change that. I grab a chair to prop the door and drag it over, yanking the door open with a merry “Hello!”
“Hi?” says one of the boys, adjusting a Blue Ridge State baseball cap and blinking at us in confusion.
“Help yourself,” I say, gesturing at the very unstable mountain of cake I’ve created. “I’m Andie, by the way. If you want to head back to study, that’s fine, but if you want to stick around I have a fun game we can all play.”
“Are you our new RA?” a girl in a Spider-Man onesie asks.
“No, no, our RA is Miley,” her friend, carting around a half-finished embroidered shirt of a dumpster on fire, corrects her.
Shay sighs deeply enough to power a windmill, but sticks close by me and grabs a peanut butter Kandy Kake, so I know I have at least one taker.
“It’s called Werewolf,” I say. “Everyone gets randomly assigned to be a werewolf, an angel, or a villager. After everyone closes their eyes, the werewolf chooses a victim and—”
“Oh, sick,” says the boy in the baseball cap. “I played a version where vampires could randomly attack and kill werewolves, if there was more than one.”
“Love that,” I say, handing him a Ring Ding. “Let’s do it.”
The girl in the Spider-Man onesie immediately snaps to attention, clearly besotted with baseball-cap boy. “I’m in.”
The girl with the dumpster-fire embroidery smirks at me, her lip ring glinting. “We called it Mafia, where I’m from. And there was booze.”
“Well—I have cake?” I have a feeling Milo would not take too kindly to me helping intoxicate half the freshmen on his floor the first day of the semester.
“Fair enough. I’m Tyler, by the way,” says baseball-cap boy. “Hold up. I’m gonna grab the guys.” He pauses. “They’re in Bluebird dorm, is that okay?”
“The more the merrier!”
Tyler ducks out, leaving a dazed Spider-Man-onesie girl in his wake. Dumpster-fire embroidery nudges her to snap her out of it.
“I’m Harriet. The pajama-clad arachnid here is Ellie. And we need more players,” she says, glancing back at the three other people who are starting to wander in. “I’ll round up more of the floor. But only because I’m a Cosmic Brownies bitch.”