Free Again by Lisa Burstein Page B

couldn’t imagine Dawn being pricklier than she already
was. She must have really hated her last roommate. I wondered what she’d
drawn on her and her sexual partners’ faces in permanent marker.
    “Hey,” Alex said, her laugh
reverberating off the shiny metal elevator walls. “Maybe Kate’s the real witch.”
    “Yeah,” Steph added, with
her own shrill, drunk laugh. “She put a spell on Twilight to take the cunt out
of her.”
    “Abracadabra,” I said pointing
at both of them and wiggling my fingers. They both tumbled in laughter. They didn’t
get the joke.
    We moved through the lobby
and headed out the glass front doors of the dorm. Before I could even take a
breath, the arctic air outside hit me like a whale-sized fist made of ice. I
almost doubled over. I prayed this night wouldn’t make it so I started college-take-two
with a case of pneumonia. I might have been getting by looking like a nineteen
year old, but I didn’t have the immune system of one.
    “So where’s the party?” I
asked, trying to keep the chattering of my teeth in check.
    “Fraternity Row,” Steph
said.
    “Or as we like to call it, ‘the
salad bar’,” Alex added, with exaggerated quotation marks.
    “What? Cause of all the
choices?” I asked, wrapping my arms around myself, focusing on the sound of our
boots crunching over the snow and not on the freezing air shooting through my
clothes.
    “Nah,” Steph said, her
breathing shallow. “There are so many guys there it’s like all the ranch
dressing you could want.”
    “Or creamy Italian, or poppy
seed,” Alex continued, knocking into Steph with her hip. I was afraid it might
shatter from the cold. Of course, girls their age didn’t have to worry about
early onset osteoporosis.
    “Really any cream based
sauce,” Steph replied with a lilt in her voice, making it clear if it wasn’t
already, which it totally was, that they were talking about spooge.
    Was I this much of a pervert
in college? I mean, sure I was, now. What twenty-nine-year-old who’d lived in
the big apple and had been through the whole Sex and the City awakening
wasn’t, but these girls were girls and they had basically told me they
were on a search for cum.
    “Are you guys in a sorority?”
I asked quickly, saying anything to get the image of buckets of semen with
little brown ladles in them out of my head.
    They shook their heads. “We
pledged, but there were too many rules,” Alex said.
    “We still get invited to
frat parties, though,” Steph continued.
    Considering what they called
Fraternity Row, I wasn’t surprised.
    “It was worth pledging to
meet the guys,” Alex said.
    I didn’t respond, just readjusted
myself even though my extremities were numb.
    “We say we have our own
sorority, Alpha Sigma,” Steph said.
    “But now with you we can be
Alpha Sigma Kappa,” Alex clapped.
    I smiled, even though the
bitter air was converting my bones to powder. I, for one, did have to worry
about early onset osteoporosis. I hoped walking to a party in sub-freezing
temperatures was the only hazing I’d have to endure from Alpha Sigma Kappa.
    Luckily, fraternity row was
just off campus and we were back inside and boiling in less than ten minutes.
I’d forgotten how disgusting frat houses were. The whole place smelled like
beer and feet, and I had to admit, semen. Maybe that was the real reason they
called it “the salad bar.”
    The house was packed, the
music was ear-splitting and the stench in the air seemed to fill the pockets
where there weren’t people or music. Nobody cared. Everyone at this party was
too drunk to notice, or working on getting too drunk to notice.
    “Let’s get a beer,” Steph
screamed above the noise, fighting through the sweaty throngs toward the keg.
    “I’m going to sober up if I
don’t get one soon,” Alex added.
    I followed the back of their
heads like they were life rafts, because if I didn’t it was possible I was
going to drown in the bodies around me. All of