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It breaks my fall but only slightly, and I land with a grunt, my Fat Girl Convention–approved butt cushioning my fall. My stomach is coated with beer, my cup a few feet away. At least I land in the grass—while the torch sways ominously back and forth.
No no no no no.
I scramble to my feet, but I’m too late. It seems to happen both in slow motion and all at once: the torch tips over, liquid gold slicing through the darkness as a breeze lifts billows of white smoke into the air. A rhododendron bush catches fire, and then the ivy twisting up the side of the house, leaves turning black as the flames climb higher, higher…
For a moment, all I can do is stare.
I just set a frat on fire.
Chapter 4
“OUT OF THE HOUSE!” SOMEONE shouts. People stream into the street, a few racing to the backyard to see what’s going on while most keep their distance. There’s Kyle, his arm around a girl probably less unpleasant than I was. I don’t see Lucie. I don’t see Miles.
A smoke alarm is going off, its shriek drawing partiers out of neighboring houses. Everyone is yelling and one girl is crying that she can’t find her sister. The flames advance up the side of Zeta Kappa, turning the air to smoke. It could be five seconds or five minutes before my mind starts working again, and I push to my feet just as a couple of bright young minds start dousing the fire with their drinks.
“Alcohol makes it worse!” I yell, torn between trying to help, though I have zero idea how, and disappearing into the night. The crowd is small, the fire flickering off glasses lenses and phone screens.
My heart slams against my rib cage as I search a nearby cooler for bottled water. This can’t be real. I can’t have set a building on fire at a party I wasn’t invited to, with god knows how many people still inside.
In the distance, a fire engine howls.
“How the hell did this happen?” asks a tall, built guy in a business-school shirt, elbowing through the knot of onlookers.
“It was her.” A girl points right at me just as my hand closes around a bottle of Dasani. “She knocked over the torch.”
I withdraw the water, holding it to my chest like a shield. “I didn’t—I’m sorry—it was an accident—”
The crowd tightens, as though making a collective decision to prevent me from escaping. I spot Miles a dozen feet away, near the border between this property and the next. For some reason, he doesn’t look nearly as concerned as the rest of the group. He’s calmly sipping something from a red cup, just… observing.
I’ll add it to the list of things about Miles that don’t make sense and that I don’t care enough about to investigate. Especially not right now.
“Who the fuck is this?” the first guy says, jabbing a thumb toward me. “Does anyone know this chick? Because I’ve never seen her before in my life.”
A wave of murmurs rolls through the crowd. No one knows me. It shouldn’t sting, and yet it does, this reminder that I am an outsider. An outsider who forced her way in and is in the process of destroying something so many of these people loved.
“Barrett?” Lucie pushes to the front of the crowd. Any amount of curl her hair had is gone, and it hangs limply to her shoulders. “What the fuck? You couldn’t have found some other party to crash?”
The relief that she’s okay is immediately overpowered by a fierce sense of betrayal. Lucie’s the one person who can make this night worse—because up until a few seconds ago, I was anonymous.
“I wasn’t crashing,” I say, rage sharpening my words. Each one, I point right at her. “I was just—”
“You know her?” the first guy says. The frat president, maybe.
I catch Lucie’s gaze, hoping she sees the panic in my eyes. Hoping she cares, even the tiniest amount. Please, I try to communicate to her. Don’t say anything.
“Barrett Bloom,” she says smoothly, clearly loving that she’s throwing me to the wolves. “We went to high school together. Unfortunately.”
Apparently, that moment in our room meant nothing.
“The cops are out front,” another guy says. “They want to talk to any witnesses.”
No. This cannot be happening, my first day of college literally going up in flames.
I don’t think. I just run.
Junior year of high school, I ran a sixteen-minute mile. When I crossed the finish line, my legs burning and my throat dry, the gym teacher, who was also the tennis coach, brought up some statistics on his phone.
“Congratulations,” he said, shoving his screen in my face. “You ran that about as fast as the average seventy-year-old.”
