“I guess it’s not so much that they don’t care,” Emma relents, “as they’re out of their depth.”
Their depth. Emma no doubt cribbed that from whatever true-crime podcast she listens to on her incline treadmill walks while she tries to burn brown fat. “You’re going to need to talk to someone else about this,” I tell her, and start down the street again.
“Did PT say anything to you? About my script? Because I think that’s why he wanted to talk to me that morning.”
Gross. Is this Emma’s misguided way of trying to pique my interest in her work? “He apologized on your behalf,” I say out of the side of my mouth, “for turning it in a week late.”
“I know, I know,” Emma groans, hurrying to keep pace with me. “I’d been working on something else all semester, and I just knew itwasn’t right, and then it was, like, the deadline was coming up and I switched gears in a panic.”
“I’d carved out time to read it the week it was due. So now I’ll get to it when I get to it.”
“Wait,” Emma says. “There’s something else.”
Emma puts her hand on my arm, trying to stop me so we can have this conversation standing still. She shouldn’t touch me. I give her a look that communicates as much, and she removes her hand, looking startled and a little bit hurt. I don’t feel bad. Would I have touched Jonathan Granger without his permission when I was twenty-two years old? Not even with.
“I’m parked here,” I say, but where the curb slopes for the entrance to the parking lot of the science building, I can see that I’m blocked in by another car. One of those dark gas-guzzlers with three rows of seating. Connecticut license plate. Rangers sticker on the bumper. I cup my hands around my eyes and peer through the passenger-side window. Tookie’s wand is wedged between the driver’s seat and the center console. This is Campbell’s car.
Someone is sitting between the peeling columns of the old Sig Phi house, holding a vape box to his lips in an overhand grip, bare legs dangling off the side of the porch. I don’t immediately recognize him, but then he hops onto the grass, turning his newly acquired baseball hat backward as he approaches me. It is the kid who turned on the light in the upstairs guest bedroom and blocked the door when I was trying to leave, still wearing his shorts and his blazer. Leather flip-flops stained with oily toe marks have replaced the loafers.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” he says to me in a witchy way.
“Good,” I reply without smiling. I know the way the light is hittingme right now. I know all my angles. I know exactly what he’s looking at when he sees me.
“Come inside for a cocktail,” he says. From the fraternity house thumps an old Jason Derulo bop. I remember how we used to listen exclusively to the Talking Heads and David Bowie, a little Chaka Khan, because we thought it was proper drug music from another, cooler era. We wouldn’t have been caught dead listening to anything current like Jason Derulo. That theory hasn’t changed, evidently. What’s considered throwback has.
“Faye doesn’t want your plastic tequila,” Emma says in an uppity way. I had hoped she would go home when I told her I had to swing by the Sig Phi house to find Campbell and ask him to move his car, but to my dismay, she has remained dutifully glued to my side.
The kid fists his shirt, twisting the fabric like he’s been shot. “It’s not shitty, Emma. It’s Casamigos.”
“Casamigosisfull of additives,” I counter.
“It’s good enough for my brother-in-law and Henry,” he says.
I stare at him in astonishment. This is Corrine’s brother? “You’re Corrine’s brother?”
He rocks back on his heels with a triumphant smirk.
“Oh my God,” I say with a laugh. “You know I met you once at the lake. You were sitting backward in a chair, crying because you were bored.”
The smirk doesn’t disappear, but I no longer buy it.
“Remind me your name.”
“Winthrop. But everyone calls me Win.”
Of course, I think,they do.
The first time some fat junior appraised me at this very door and deemed me hot enough to step inside, I remember thinking that thehouse didn’t feel like a house, though I couldn’t say why. But if my androgynous interior designer has taught me anything besides to submit to terrazzo flooring, it’s that too much space and not enough furniture are what conspire to create a general atmosphere of ennui. It’s why I can feel the playlist in my central nervous system, why it seems as though there are fewer people inside than a census would show, like a marathon-set nightclub before 1 a.m. Miami, not Los Angeles. No one stays out past ten in California.
There is a smattering of students around the pool table, pretending not to stare, and two guys spazzing with laughter in the corner. I have no doubt I am what’s so funny. I do need a cocktail, actually, but saying so would be unbearably corny.
“Everyone is upstairs,” Win says.
To my relief, he starts toward the great room. We pass the small second kitchen on our left, where a kid with skinny legs and a square torso beats a bag of ice on the ground; to our right a couple of girls huddle together on a futon, taking a selfie before their mascara melts off their faces. Then we are climbing the coffin-wide stairwell and turning down a long, lopsided hallway, stopping before the door to the room where Campbell and Henry used to live. “Ain’t Nobody” synthesizes softly from the other side.
“It’s me,” Win says, rattling the pretty old crystal doorknob I am noticing for the first time.
We wait for close to a minute for the pushpin lock to pop, and then it is Corrine standing there with an impatient set to her mouth, as though we have been the ones to keep her waiting. I can tell by the way she’s swallowing over and over—like she’s nervous, which she is never—that she’s coked to the gills.