James Games (3 page)

“No, but…”

“Then it doesn’t count.” She returns to her knitting. Iris is always knitting. I don’t know why, since she wouldn’t be caught within a ten foot radius of a cozy autumn garment, but she’s never in our dorm without a half-finished scarf or a bobbly hat between her needles.

I circle the first slash for emphasis. “Fuck you. It counts. Now let’s go over them. There was the brown-eyed baby-faced sweetheart, the long and lanky guy with the Arcade Fire T-shirt, the one with the pirate earring, the dude who only spoke Spanish, and now sexy masked wall-destroyer.”

I pause and write
Fiona’s Board of Sex
at the top of the whiteboard. A gift from Aunt Caroline, ostensibly to keep track of my homework assignments. If she visits, I’ll have to tell her that sex stands for Stupendous Education Xylophones, since nothing starts with X. Then I cover it with smiley faces and hearts, and at the bottom I scribble a close approximation of Masked Guy’s face.

“You forgot to tell me you fucked Sonic the Hedgehog with face cancer,” Iris deadpans, halfway through a fluffy pink sweater.

“That’s not face cancer, that’s his sexy mask.” I label it. “God, he was good. Definitely my favorite so far. Did I tell you he broke the wall?”

“You may have. I was probably asleep,” she yawns.

“Well, he broke the wall.”

“Your heart’s up next.”

“As if,” I laugh, spinning and placing a hand on my hip. “None of these boys are invited anywhere near my heart.”

Our dorm room is split exactly down the middle: black and pink. Her ancient Evanescence poster is taped above her bed, there’s dark artwork framed everywhere, and even her blanket is a near-black dark blue. My side is sunny and bright, with a shirtless firemen calendar and a fluffy pink unicorn comforter. Once my big stuffed owl, Ursula, slid onto Iris’s side of the carpet and she curled up on her bed and hissed at it like a cat. But other than that, we manage to coexist pretty well. I tolerate her nightly angst-music and she tolerates my Katy Perry. Her version of tolerating is to threaten me with lighter fluid and a match, of course, but I think she’s learning to love and respect our differences.

Iris rolls back on her bed. “I’m going to laugh when you’re a disease-riddled washed-up stripper with ten accidental kids and an ex-husband who watches pro-wrestling.”

“I appreciate your love and support, as always.” I beam at my sex board. Each one of those five slash marks represents an utterly spectacular night. There would have been six, if the guy with tattoos and a buzz cut hadn’t been lackluster. As if I’d sit through bad sex.

“Do you even remember any of their names?” Iris asks.

I scrunch up my nose and ponder. “I think the first one was named Daniel. No, Darius.”

“Sam. He’s in my Intro to Economics class.” Iris drops a stitch and swears before finally setting down her knitting and looking at me. “What do you hope to accomplish by fucking every guy at UCSD, Fiona? You’re not going to get an achievement badge.”

“I do too get achievement badges. They’re called orgasms.” I flip my long brown hair over my shoulder. “And you know why I’m living it up. I poured my heart out to you over first-night-at-college drinks.”

“What was it you told me again?” She puts a finger to her perfect chin in mock thought. Iris is beautiful. In a gothic vampire, ancient European church kind of way. Her skin is ivory, her hair pin-straight and jet black. Her almond eyes would be soft and gentle if she didn’t harden them with liquid eyeliner. “You used to be…”

“Don’t you dare say the A-word,” I squawk, nearly throwing Ursula at her, but stopping as Iris waves her knitting needles threateningly. “You signed a contract. A contract of the soul.”

“I’m just trying to remember what it was I wasn’t supposed to say.” Her lips curve. I swear, the only time Iris looks happy is when she’s spreading misery. “That you used to be A—”

“Don’t you dare say it.”

“A…”

“Don’t say the A word.”

“A big dork,” she finishes, and cackles like the evil witch she is while I glower at her.

I used to be Amish.

What are you picturing? A white bonnet, a high-necked blue
Little House on the Prairie
dress? Long black stockings? Shoes caked with horse shit?

I wish I could make fun of you for being so stereotypical, but you’re right.

When Amish kids turn fourteen, they decide whether or not they want to become permanent members of the church. Leaving means deserting your family and community. Most people stay. I didn’t. I changed my last name from Stoltzfus to the much sexier Arlett, and went to live with my Aunt Caroline in Philadelphia, who’d left the community just like I had but retained a hell of a lot of the strictness. No sleepovers, no staying out on weekends, no dating, no hemline above the knee.

Three weeks ago, when I came to UCSD, I was suddenly free. The first thing I did was go out and spend an insane amount of money on crop tops and little skirts.

The next thing I did was glue myself to the nearest hot boy’s face.

Now I’m living the life I was always meant to have—a life of fun and sex and crazy wild antics—and nothing is going to stop me. Not my family, not some skewed sense of morality, and not my
heart.
Yuck.

I make the executive decision to change the subject. “So I heard a rumor that initiation for Phi Delta Chi is tonight.”

“Yippee. I’ll go put on my best cocktail dress.” Iris sets her sweater down and groans.

“They keep the details a secret,” I press, trying to drum some excitement out of her. “Maybe we’ll each have to sacrifice a baby goat.”

I thought for sure that would up her eagerness, but she just rolls her eyes and puts her face in front of the fan. Our AC’s been broken ever since we moved in. Freaking freshman housing.

“Can I ask you something?” I pick myself up and plop myself down on her bed, rubbing the fuzzy sweater. She just groans again in response.

“Why are you interested in getting into Phi Delta Chi? They’re a big party sorority. Lots of drinking, lots of sex. Doesn’t really seem like your thing. I practically had to threaten you with pink and sparkles to get you to come out with me last night, and you left halfway through the concert. Yet you’ve been coming with me to every single pledgeship meeting for Phi Delta since the first day of school. Is it the booze cruise they have in November? A lot of people try to get in just for the booze cruise.”

“Can you go shower?” she grumbles. “You smell like alcohol and sex.”

“That is the smell of
life
, my dear. Breathe it in deeply.” I wedge myself between the fan and her face, waving my pits under her nose. When she’s done alternating between fake-vomiting and fake-almost-real strangling me, I wait expectantly, but she fumbles for a new topic instead of answering my question.

“Have you seen James Reid yet?” she finally says.

“Who?”

“You’re kidding.”

“Yeah, a little.” I stretch my arms over my head, relishing the way the crop top pulls up to expose my ribs. “He’s some celebrity on campus that everyone wants to bang, right?”

“You sound like you don’t care.” Iris pokes my stomach disdainfully. “I don’t care about anything, and I care about James Reid. Don’t you remember him in
All About Us
? He was huge when I was a kid.”

“Funny thing about growing up Amish: you kind of don’t pay much attention to celebrities. Or actors. Or TV shows, seeing as you don’t have a TV. Believe it or not, I don’t even know what this guy looks like.”

“I thought we weren’t allowed to say the A-word.”

“
I’m
allowed to say the A-word.
You
are not.”

She repeats the word ‘Amish’ about fourteen times and finally gives up when I tug a little too hard on one of the loops in her sweater.

“Okay, okay,” she says, yanking it away from me. “I guess that explains why you don’t know about him, then. He was every preteen’s wet dream and then he dropped off the face of the earth—out of the press, out of Hollywood, everything. His show was canceled. He just quit, and everybody wanted to know why—but he wouldn’t tell. He was totally off the grid until he came to UCSD.”

“Why would I bother with an ex-cool celebrity who’s probably as stuck up as he is washed up? I don’t care what boys looked like on a screen four years ago, I care what they look like in my bed now.”

“You haven’t seen him,” she says simply.

I pat her shoulder. “You can have him. I prefer to get with guys who aren’t obstructed by a mountain of girls with unfulfilled preteen fantasies.”

“Go shower,” she glowers. Note to self: don’t badmouth James Reid in front of Iris.

In the shower, I take stock of my body. I’m still sensitive where Masked Boy touched me. The musky smell of sex slips off my body and goes down the drain with the water, and I immediately miss it. It smelled like him
.
All tall, strong boy body and silence and the most intense eyes. No wonder he didn’t speak. With eyes like that, other forms of communication are redundant.

Forget James Reid. There’s no way he’s as hot as my masked stranger.

The concert was mostly students, but it was off campus, so the chances are fifty-fifty that the stranger goes to UCSD. If only I’d gotten his name. Or his major. Or any details at all. The experience was so surreal that I’m starting to wonder if someone slipped LSD in my first drink of the night and I imagined the whole thing.

The thought makes me slightly sad. I don’t want him to be imaginary. But I don’t have to worry about it, because I have a shitty imagination, and there’s no way I could have come up with the cold, cutting line of his jaw…the lift of the muscles in his stomach…or the typhoon in his eyes.

My hands drift lower. I hesitate—it’s hard not to feel a shadow of guilt when you grew up Amish—but when I close my eyes, I see him, and all hesitation disappears.

~4~

That night, I’m shaken awake in my bed by a hooded figure.

I immediately assume it’s a Dementor, scream, and throw Ursula at it in lieu of a Patronus. My stuffed owl friend bounces off the apparently corporeal head, and a girl’s voice hisses from beneath the hood: “Shut up and come with me.”

That’s what I get for re-reading all the Harry Potter books this summer. I sit up, blinking the sleep from my eyes. Across the room, Iris is being hustled from her twin bed by a similar figure. My Dementor shakes my arm again, and I finally wake up enough for excitement to shoot through my veins like a drug.

This is it. Initiation.

I leap out of bed, my feet thudding on the wooden floor. Dementor girl hisses at me again: “You want to wake everyone up or what?”

We’re led out of our room, Iris remembering just in time to snatch the key from her bedside table. In a few hours, I bet Campus Security will be faced by a legion of girls in their pajamas, all of whom mysteriously locked themselves out of their room tonight. I giggle and Dementor shushes me.

The hooded girls take us down the stairs and outside the building. I have half a second to bask in the moonlit California night air before a cloth bag is yanked over my head. Beside me, Iris grumbles as she faces a similar fate.

“Shouldn’t you have put the bags on from the beginning?” I quip as we’re led barefoot over a dew-wet lawn, me tripping every few feet.

“A pledge broke her arm one year going down the stairs,” says Iris’s Dementor, and mine, whose only apparent goal in life is to shush people, shushes her.

We’re bundled into a car and belted in. Somewhere, there’s probably an ex-pledge in a neck brace who shot through a window when an older sister rear-ended someone. Still blind, I jostle Iris, only to have her bark, “Fuck!” when I accidentally elbow her in the nose.

The drive’s not long—five minutes, maybe. They must be taking us to one of the student-rented houses that ring the main campus. I can’t stop myself from bouncing in place. The fact that we’re being kidnapped like this means we’ve fulfilled our pledgeship requirements—to the most exclusive sorority at UCSD—and we’re being accepted into the fold.

Goodbye, Amish girl with the weird last name. Hello, Fiona Arlett, Phi Delta Chi sister living it up in California.

There’s the click of the door opening, and then I’m pulled back out onto the wet grass. I’m marched prisoner-style up a set of front steps. Iris’s guard helpfully tells her when to lift her feet, but mine doesn’t, so I limp inside the house with ten stubbed toes.

When the bags are finally pulled off, we’re in a large candlelit room with about fifteen girls arranged in mats on the floor. I wave to Mags MacLeod, an shy asthmatic girl from my Intro to Computer Science class, but all she offers in return is a wide-eyed, solemn stare. Nobody is talking and the cult vibe is palpable. Maybe my joke about sacrificing baby goats wasn’t so far off.

Iris and I take the last two mats available. I glance around. Nightshirts, tank tops, and one poor girl got caught in her bra and panties. Iris, naturally, is wearing some high-necked black lacy thing straight out of a Victorian museum. I’m wearing a huge white heart-covered T-shirt that says ‘It’s Not That Time of the Month, I Just Hate You’ but I rock it.

Our two captors move to the center of the room and remove their hoods. I recognize them at once. Both seniors. There’s Ellie, a girl with the world’s softest-looking pin-straight hair that falls past her butt. The one who gave me my stubbed toes is Sigrid, the redhead who interviewed me for my first pledgeship meeting and whose personality fits her name perfectly.

I wait for something to happen, but nothing does until one last girl walks through the door and takes her place between Sigrid and Ellie.

Brooklyn Windsor, sorority president.

They say she can drink eight shots and still recite the alphabet backwards. They say she has the entire UCSD soccer team on speed-dial for whenever she wants some. They say that a boy once threatened her with a knife at a party and she broke three of his ribs and two of his fingers within twenty seconds. They say that she eats cereal bowls full of diamonds for breakfast and has a manservant named Claude who used to be a famous model but swore his life to her when he saw her walking down the street one day.