Chapter 7
The party had powered through five bottles of tequila, two bottles of vodka, one bottle of gin, seventy-something beers, and about thirty bottles of Hennessy. To be fair, there had been some other people there, other new recruits. The only one Ronan remembered was Jack, but that was only because he had tried to start a fight.
As Ronan stood on the balcony outside, looking down at the unimpressive but vast parking lot, he tried to pinpoint when the night had gone sour, because it had, music still blared, but the speakers’ hearts weren’t in it.
The cheerleaders had passed through like feathers on the wind. There were none of them left. Some of the other athletic teams passed through as well. Football, basketball, track, lacrosse, swimming, volleyball.
“Hey,” said a voice from behind him. Matt Boyd. “Could you at least tell me what I said?”
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“Hey, so who wants booze?” Matt asked, walking out of his dorm.
“Hell, someone needs to have the pre-season party, let’s get the vixens in on on this,” Nicky suggested.
So the night was off to a great start. Once Neil and Andrew got back, Nicky made a few calls, talking a mile a minute and smiling as wide as humanly possible.
“Katelyn, babe, we’re breaking out the booze, get the vixens over at six, Matt’s dorm, maybe the girls’ too if we can but we’d have to ask Allison,”
“Go for it,” called Allison from another room. She and Blue had made fast friends, much to Gansey’s chagrin. There was no way to get to Blue without going through Allison too, and Ronan would have had fun watching him attempt it had he not been furious with Gansey. Adam was perched on the arm of the sofa watching Gansey without any previous inhibitions.
Gansey had finally picked up the courage to walk into the room where Blue when Ronan felt a pressure on his shoulder and turned to find Adam, looking away with a mock-innocent look on his face, fighting a smile before giving in. Adam’s hand was gone as quickly as it came, but the smile remained. Adam pointedly avoided looking at Ronan. Ronan rolled his eyes and tapped Adam’s shoulder. Adam’s smile grew but he still did not look at Ronan. Ronan did it again, this time Adam looked at him, but he quickly looked away. Ronan felt a smile spreading across his own face at Adam’s childishness. Ronan tapped Adam’s shoulder a third time and leaned in when Adam turned to look at him. Adam leaned in until Ronan closed his eyes, and then leaned back again, giggling when Ronan opened his eyes.
“Well if you’re going to be an ass about it-,” Ronan stopped when Nicky entered the room.
“Okay, so you guys are unpacked right?” asked Nicky. “Good, you’ve got about two hours to yourselves before you get mobbed, hide your valuables and change into something hot if you’re looking to get laid,” He said, his voice echoing as he walked to his dorm room.
Without saying anything, Allison and Blue flew out of the room, Gansey unsurely trailing after them, obviously not familiar with party preparations.
A voice by Ronan’s ear said “Hey,”
Ronan jumped. Adam had leaned down by his ear.
“JesusMaryJoseph Parrish, try and be a bit more creepy next time, why don’t you,”
“Sorry, but I’m not exactly sure about something Nicky said, am I looking to get laid?”
Ronan felt himself blush. He had to remind himself few times that yes, this is real, yes this is Adam Parrish, yes, you are awake. Fuck. Ronan forced himself to be cool.
“Not at the party, not after that fucking dick move, but how much time did Nicky say we had?”
“Two hours I think?”
“Yeah, you might get lucky before the party, now let’s hide all our shit,” Ronan said, springing up from the sofa and practically running to the dorm room.
When they arrived at the room that he, Adam, Gansey, and some other freshman that Ronan had yet to meet shared. Gansey had just “finished”. Which meant he had stuffed most of his things hastily in the closet.
“Uh, Ronan! Adam! I’ll be out of your moment in a wa- er, out of your way in a moment,” Said Gansey, scrambling to get a book out of his suitcase and flying out of the room.
Ronan didn’t say anything, just watched Gansey leave. Adam wasn’t as cold, and gave Gansey a fist bump as he left.
Ronan and Adam stood in silence for a moment before realizing what they were both there for. Each of them lifted up his mattress and put his books (Adam), clothes (Ronan), and racquet (Both) under it, spreading them out in an even layer as to not cause disturbance in the mattress.
Ronan looked over “Dude, who’s stolen your fucking books?”
Adam did the same “You’d be surprised, who’s stolen your clothes?”
A slow, wide grin spread across Ronan’s face “Use your imagination,”
“Now I don’t want to know,”
Ronan turned back to flip his mattress back down, Adam did the same.
“Okay,” Ronan said, “So I’m about done here, did a good fucking job if I do say so myself. What about yo-,”
Adam kissed Ronan. Hard. It was a little bit awkward at first because of the teeth and the noses and the general sudden-ness of the kiss, but then Ronan tilted his head a little and there we fucking go. This kiss felt like a long pull of whiskey, it was like falling into the ocean, it was all-encompassing, it was something warm enveloping him and Ronan not wanting to come up for air.
Adam pulled back anyway because he was not so fine with suffocation as Ronan was. Moving swiftly, he pushed Ronan up against the wall.
Ronan smiled, something told him that this was going to be a good night.
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As entertaining as the foxes were sober, Ronan found them infinitely more entertaining when they were drunk. Kevin had taken to standing on a couch and discussing Exy plays with thin air. The people who cared to listen would have heard that they were kind of fucking genius, but no one really cared to listen.
Ronan found that the only way to distinguish between the two Minyard twins was that Aaron was the one with the red solo cup. Andrew did not drink.
Matt and Allison were hanging off the walls, covering 80’s rock songs. If Ronan was being honest, the weren’t half bad.
“Shot through the heart!” Allison had shouted as him when he walked by.
As he stood by the drinks table, Dan came up and stood next to him.
“Having trouble?” She asked, referring to the wide selection of alcohol. There was a lot of beer, a box of white wine, tequila, vodka, whiskey, gin, someone had put a bottle of rubbing alcohol up as a joke, and the crowning jewel, a disproportionate amount of Hennessy cognac.
“There’s a lot to choose from, I’m leaning towards the rubbing alcohol, unless you can find anything more appealing, any recommendations?”
“Well, I’ve always been a Hennessy kind of girl myself,” Dan said, smiling like Ronan was in on the joke. “and courtesy of some extremely investigative Ravens fans, we got a whole crate full delivered to us earlier this week,” It took a moment for Ronan to realize that she meant the Edgar Allen ravens, not the Aglionby ones. There was an edge to the captain’s voice, like the liquor meant more to her than it should have.
“I think I’ll stick with beer, thanks”
“Suit yourself,” She sauntered off, more lioness than person. Her feet tapped along the floor to the Matt-and-Allison rendition of “Living on a Prayer,”
Ronan scooped a dark green glass bottle and moved over to where the mostly-drunk foxes and a few football players were settling in. The football players scrambled off the couch when Ronan made it evident that they were where he wanted to sit.
As the hours of the night passed by in a slow, begrudging kind of way, only moving because it had to. The night fell into a drunken haze as the non-exy players left the party.
“Truth or dare?” Allison asked.
“Truth or darrrre,” Nicky agreed.
And so they played truth or dare. It was severely underwhelming, but Ronan saw that each of the foxes had their own style of asking. Dan and Matt were big fans of dares but they really had nothing to ask for when their victim answered “truth”. Renee, on the other hand was particularly demure when it came to both. She seemed genuinely interested in getting to know everyone a little better, her dares left something to be desired, but she gained Ronan’s respect when she sentenced Allison to spend the rest of the night makeup-less. Nicky was bad at the game, he never knew what to ask and he took forever to come up with something. Allison was ruthless, she always knew where to dig so that what she asked was borderline mean but never went far enough to be problematic.
At some point, the game just devolved into people skipping the “truth or dare” part and just asking other people questions.
“Heyyyy, Lynch, hey Lynch, Lynch, hey,” rambled a beady-eyed freshman. Jack. Ronan had deduced that he was an asshole. “Dare you to take off the wristbands,”
Ronan shot Jack a glare, not at full potency because of all the alcohol flooding his system, but begrudgingly removed the bands.
“Daaaamn, didn’t peg you for a cutter,” Jack jeered. Ronan resisted the urge to respectfully break Jack’s nose.
“I’m not,” he said instead.
“Then where did those come from” Jack said, referring to the raised flesh.
“My sub-fucking-conscious, now leave me alone asshole,”
“My turn,” Allison said, sensing things were about to get ugly. She raised a long slender finger. “Who to choose, who to choose, one of the freshmen I think,” The upperclassmen breathed a sigh of relief. “Eenie, Meenie, Miney, you,” She pointed to Gansey. “Truth or dare,”
“Truth, because to be honest,” Gansey let out a stream of little snorts and chuckles, the kind that came from drinking more than you should have “I’m quite scared of you,” Gansey giggled. Gansey was very, very drunk.
“So, you disappeared of the face of the earth, why?”
Gansey burst out into a fit of giggles and said “Good question, very very good question, and the answer is,” Another fit of giggles “I died,” Gansey couldn’t contain his laughter at this point. He laughed and laughed and laughed and then grew very solemn. “and then someone brought me back, and then I went on a wild goose chase to find him,” He made a shape like a plane with his hand “wheee,” the whimsical gesture would have been funny if not for his dry tone. The plane plummeted and crashed, Gansey made a sort of pew noise. “Turns out I didn’t need to, but I also sorta did, because then I wouldn’t know Ronan, or Adam, or Blue, or Henry, or No… no one else,”
“How drunk are you, Gansey?” Allison teased.
“On a scale of one to ten? Twenty-four point Oh Oh Two,”
Ronan never liked when Gansey said “oh” instead of “zero” It seemed too mechanical. Too efficient. Declan said “oh”.
The foxes all shared a good, but tense laugh. They were amused, but they could sense that his time away was a sore subject for Gansey.
“Hey, soooo, um, you guys are from Virginia right?
“Adam gave a tentative “Yes?” from the corner
“ I have a few.. friends from the area who told me to ask you guys what happened to Kavinsky,” Matt blurted out. The air in the room tightened. Ronan felt it pushing down on him, squeezing his head until he thought it would explode from the pressure. Everything went sideways. Ronan felt like he was falling, until he blinked and saw that nothing had shifted.
Adam, Gansey, and Blue set nervous eyes on him, making everyone else look to see what was wrong. Matt looked like he had swallowed a boulder. Ronan felt something wet by his foot. He had dropped his beer bottle. He stood up and left the room.
“Well what happened to him?” He heard Dan as he left.
“Far too much,” he didn’t get to hear Gansey answer.