Free Random Acts of Hope by Julia Kent Page A

his chest and glowered.
    “And I kept my mouth shut because you don’t talk about this kin d of hit.”
    “Hit?” Amy asked, frowning.  
    He pretended to be gut punched. “Yeah. Hit. Can you imagine what he went through? I’d have thro w n the phone through a window and gone all Hulk-crazy if that happened to me. Trying to pass off the baby as Liam’s?”
    Thanks, bro.
    “Trevor!” Darla’s voice carried out into the living room. “It’s a full moon and we need your hairy ass in here. Joe’s got the hairy feet covered. ”
    “ My feet aren’t hairy!” Joe’s cries of protest mingled with the sound of Darla giggling.  
    Trevor grinned. “I gotta go.”
    “ Y eah,” I muttered, watching Sam and Amy murmur a bunch of sickly sweet crap to each other and kiss.
    “Everyone’s got a date tonight except me,” I mumbled. The beer in me was only rented and it was time to vacate, so I went to the bathroom, opened the door and—
    My blow-up doll date was in the shower with a sign taped to her:
    “ I’m your number one fan .”

Chapter Seven
    Charlotte
    “There’s a boa constrictor loose in Boothman.” The call from security at 3:22 a.m. w oke me out of a hot dream involving Liam and a blowup sex doll. It was like 9 1/2 Weeks meets Naked Lunch .
    I was wet and throbbing and panting slightly. “A what ?” I barked into the phone.
    “A boa constrictor.”
    “As in a snake ? A giant snake is loose in one of the buildings?”
    “Yep.” The voice on the other end of the line wa s new to me. The start of every semester meant we had a new crop of student workers. This wa sn’t Dale Evanston, the ass i stant chief of police calling me. That voice I knew. A little too well. Or the d irector of c ampus s ecurity, Sharon Dunston.
    This was Anonymous Minimum Wage Student Worker #17.
    “What am I supposed to do about it?” I asked.
    “I…uh…” He went from being casual to worried. “I don’t know. I just know protocol says I inform the resident director on duty.”
    “Did you call animal control, too?”
    “The students said they did.”
    “Were they drunk?”
    “Um…they said they weren’t, but the y also said the reason the snake got loose was because the ping-pong ball from beer pong popped into the cage and they opened it to get it and—”
    I threw off the covers and started fishing around in my drawers for clean sweats. And fresh underwear, because mine were soaked.
    God damn Liam and my dreams.
    “ The first rule of working in student services is never automatically believe what the students tell you. What’s your name?”  
    “Dan.” His voice cracked.
    “ Dan, y ou call animal control right now ,” I said with a long sigh. “What room was this in?”
    “412. They really did swear they weren’t drunk, ” he added in a pleading voice. I pattern matched in my mind to the best of my middle-of-the-night abilities. Freshman quad. Four drunk eighteen year olds with a six-foot snake.
    An escaped six-foot snake.
    Awesome.
    “Thanks.”
    “So…you need me for anything?”
    Eye roll. “Just call animal control and document it in the log.”
    “Should I review the security tapes?” His voice was a little too eager, just like my RA Jordan’s had been the other day. The student workers loved to watch security video. I think they’re all destined to become NSA agents.
    “No. If we need to do that, the R D s like me will handle it.”
    Disappointment filled his voice. “Okay. Thanks.” Click .
    “Go into residence life, they said. It will be fun, they said,” I muttered as I threw on new pants and a crappy old hoodie from high school with some band slogan on it. Saturday nights in the dorms were always a bit crazy, but so far this night I’d handled two lockouts because the RAs were busy doing other things, one case of a female fresh ma n coming back to her room and walking in on her roommate having hot monkey sex with her boyfriend, two overstudied premed students who fell asleep