The night before initiation, everyone is sitting out on the porch, relaxing with a beer as the sun sets. Still having heard nothing about the verdict on my membership, I feel uneasy hanging out with those who may vote to kick me out. But also, if this is my last night in the house, I don’t want to spend it locked in my room.
Some of the guys are engaged in an intense round of Snappa, a drinking game I’ve never played before that involves tossing a die across a table with the person across from you having to drink if you make it between two cups but don’t hit the ceiling, or throw it too low, or say the word five, or move your own cup out of its precisely measured spot.
I’m not really sure how you win, maybe when the other person gets drunk and falls out of his chair.
“Cassie, you playing?” Duncan yells across the porch.
“Oh, no, I’ve never—”
“Sorry, Bambi. I’m gonna have to be partners with Cassie.”
I head in their direction.
“I mean, look at her, not gonna take no for an answer.”
I shrug. “You know me. Such a bully.”
Bambi laughs as he stands up, offering me his chair.
“Dream team right here!” Duncan yells as Bambi walks off.
“I don’t know how to play,” I whisper.
“It’s fine—you can’t be as bad as Bambi,” he whispers back as he fills the cups in front of us with Natty.
Yum.
“Looking for some competition?” I turn to see Jordan at the other end of the table, along with a tall, good-looking Indian dude.
“Sure,” Duncan answers.
“Cassie, do you know Sai?”
“I think we met at the Rush Retreat,” Sai says.
They sit down, and Duncan slides the die across the table to them.
Jordan is across from me. “Are you sure you will be able to handle this, Cass?”
I roll my eyes and open my mouth to say something sassy, but before I can he throws the die high into the air. It ricochets of the edge of my cup and onto the porch.
Ha, he didn’t sink it.
“Cassie!” Duncan looks at me like I’m crazy.
“What?”
“You didn’t even try!”
“Try to what?”
“Catch the die!”
“Oh.” I walk over to pick it up. “I didn’t know I was supposed to.”
He holds his head in his hands. “Oh God, not another one.”
On the other side of the table Jordan is doubled over laughing. “That’s...a point...for...us.” He can barely get the words out between laughs.
“You’re really not exemplifying good sportsmanship.” I throw the die, which bounces once off the table before Jordan catches it with one hand.
He shrugs. “What can I say? I’m a competitive guy.”
He tosses the die again, and this time Duncan catches it.
“I broke my arm during pool basketball once,” Jordan says.
“Oh my God,” I gasp. “That’s insane.”
“That’s my shit. It motivates me. Hate to lose.”
I throw the die, and he catches it without so much as blinking.
“When I was little, I would freak out and, like, flip board games if I was losing,” Jordan says.
He sinks the die into the cup in front of me, and I have to drink. To say the beer tastes like water would be too kind; water doesn’t make you cringe.
“They had to cancel family game night because I’d cry.”
I laugh, and beer almost comes out my nose. “Oh my God, you are ridiculous.” I set the cup down.
“I’m still like that.”
Sai catches the die this time.
“Not the crying, of course. But the competitiveness.”
“Doesn’t that get exhausting?”
“Nah, I just try to pick the things I care about and not lose those.” He looks at me. “And when I really want something, I typically get it.”
He stares at me for a second too long, or maybe I’m just imagining it.
“Okay, enough of your life story,” Sai says. “Can you play the game?”
“Oh, sorry.” He throws the die and sinks it in my cup again.
“Cheers, Cassie.”
I brace myself and drink.
God, he really is an all-American boy, isn’t he? Well dressed and athletic, he’s like a Ken doll. While I’m over here in sweatpants, happy if I work out once a month.
He’s way too good for me.
He’s the type who will be happy going to work and going to the gym and climbing ladders and reading self-help books and trying that new all-natural diet and making home improvements and taking it a day at a time. While I can’t decide if I want to never again get out of bed, or get up and go, go, go and never come back.
He has a beautiful heart full and sweet, and mine is wild but woven in barbed wire. And yet for some reason he seems to find my particular brand of fucked-up-ness fascinating. But I’m sure at some point he’ll realize he belongs with All-American Barbie, who doesn’t wake up sad sometimes for no reason or drink too much, who has perfect blond hair and a skinny body from the marathons she runs, and parents who love her.
Is it bad that I just want to bask in his goodness for a while before I free him of the hurt I know I’ll end up causing him, or he’ll end up causing me?
Is it fair to be with him at all, knowing this whole thing is built on lies? Knowing he has no idea that I’m using him and all his best friends to selfishly claw my way to the life I want?
Of course it isn’t fair. But here I am, smiling at him and challenging him to another game.
Jordan and Sai remain undefeated. And after the second game, every little thing becomes so much funnier and I feel bubbly.
As the last few games end, someone lights a bonfire.
“Are we making s’mores?” I ask Duncan.
Jordan laughs at me. “Oh, Cassie, you’re so innocent sometimes.”
I flip him off.
“I wish we were,” Duncan says.
It turns out the bonfire is really just meant to cover up another kind of smoke, but I mean, c’mon, who wouldn’t want s’mores when you have the munchies?
People sit in a circle and pass around a joint. Since I don’t smoke, I decide to have a Corona, hoping it will keep me at the same level as everyone else but knowing it won’t.
“Are the games over?” Bambi asks when I enter the kitchen.
“Yeah.” I close the fridge with a clunk.
The nice beers are marked with a Post-it saying: “Upperclassmen only. No pledges. We are serious, guys.” But everyone will probably be too crossed to notice.
“Finally!” Bambi follows me outside, practically skipping.
We drag two chairs over toward Duncan. Bambi sits with his back to him but clearly would still rather be with us than the upperclassmen on the far side of the circle, who are involved in an in-depth debate about the cost versus benefit of buying a bong.
Jordan is across the circle from us, lying in a lounge chair with his eyes closed. He looks so peaceful in the firelight.
“Cassie?” Duncan says.
“Hmm?”
“Have you ever been in love?”
“What, why?” I look away from Jordan quickly.
“Oh God,” Bambi says. “Are you still all about that climber girl? You’ve had, what? Like three dates? Duncan, just because she has a nice ass does not mean you love her.”
“You know what? Maybe I’m just trying to have a hypothetical, intellectual conversation with one of my best friends. And, for the record, her name is Jackie, and she also happens to have a nice smile.” He turns back to me. “Sorry about that rude interruption.”
“I don’t know.” I peel the corner of the Corona label back with my thumb and think back to high school, to the boys I thought I “loved.” The ones I would stare at in class, dream about at midnight, staring at the ceiling and listening to Taylor Swift, the ones I would cry about in rec center bathrooms at dances when they kissed someone else.
“Yeah, me neither.” Duncan sighs.
“But I feel like that’s what everyone says at this age,” I say. “‘I don’t know.’ Because we’ve all thought we had it at least once and lost it, so we don’t know if that was love and now it’s gone or if we just thought that was love, and maybe people only ever just think that, and what if it doesn’t exist at all?”
“Cheerful.” Bambi coughs on the smoke.
He passes me the joint, but I shake my head and pass it on to Duncan.
“I don’t know.” Jordan sits up. I didn’t even know he was listening. “I don’t think that’s necessarily... I don’t know. I think the problem is, we expect happily-ever-after-forever-and-ever-amen-until-death-do-us-part, but, like, what are the odds of that happening with the first person you fall for? Hell, what are the odds of that happening with the person you marry?”
“Fifty-fifty, actually,” Bambi replies.
Jordan cuts his eyes at him. “I’m just saying.” He reaches for the joint when it makes it around the circle. “Shit, does someone have a lighter? Love. It’s a beautiful and awful thing we do to ourselves.”
Someone hands him a Zippo. “Thanks, man.” He relights the joint and takes a drag before continuing. “We know no relationship can last forever, but we convince ourselves it will. And then it ends.”
He pauses to light the joint again, the fire from the lighter illuminating every beautiful detail of his face.
“And you know, the heartbreak isn’t the worst part for me. Like you think it is, but those extreme highs and lows are what make you feel alive. The worst part for me is always right before it ends, when you’re bored and suffocating and not sure if you were ever in love or just craved the idea of it so much that you put up with something half as good as what you thought it would be. It’s not when you lose the person you thought you couldn’t live without—it’s when you lose them and survive, and you realize you can live without any of these people, that if you disappeared tomorrow they’d be sad, but they’d move on, and this is a pretty goddamn lonely life.”
“That’s bullshit,” Duncan says. “You’ve never had a moment where someone made you glad to be alive?”
“Yeah, but not forever,” I say.
“I guess that’s kind of the point,” Jordan says. “I think it’s about moments. Moments of turning the ordinary into something more. Like when you find a five-dollar scarf under your bed that smells like them, and for ten seconds you just kneel on the floor breathing it in, because in that moment that cheap thing from Chinatown is like the axis the world turns around. And, yeah, later you may be on your own or with someone else, and they may be with someone new, too. But there are seven billion people in the world, and you collided with that one person for at least a little while, and they made synapses fire in your brain in a way they never would have otherwise, and that’s remarkable. They left their mark on you, and just because they aren’t around forever, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t super-fuckin’-cool when you were together. Love ending doesn’t mean love never was. It just means that, like everything else on this earth, it’s finite.”
I stare at him from across the circle.
“Damn, Jordan,” Duncan says. “How long have you been waiting to say that?”
Jordan shrugs and passes the joint.
“But how do you ever know?” Duncan asks.
“It’s when you meet the person who makes you realize that everything before was kiddie pools and this is an ocean,” Sai says.
“Wow,” I say.
“Yeah, until she cheats on you.” He shifts in his seat. “God, where’s the weed? Puff, puff, pass. Were you raised in a barn?” he asks the guy next to him.
Thoughts of love and loss and lies and forever ricochet around in my head for the rest of the night, even as I’m heading upstairs to go to sleep.
“Cassie,” a voice says just as I’m about to reach the top step.
Jordan grabs my arm, and when I spin around we’re only inches apart.
“I can’t stop thinking about you,” he says. “And I want more than texts and stolen kisses.”
I glance at Sebastian’s door, but it’s closed, with no light coming from the crack at the bottom.
“I want you,” Jordan says as he pulls me into the most amazing kiss. “May I come in?” His voice is low and breathy.
I nod as I fumble with the lock, barely taking my eyes off him.