Free Relatively Honest by Molly Ringle

her hair.
    As we started walking, Clare looked at my arrow wound and asked, “Okay, so what are you? Saint Sebastian? Boromir?”
    I gestured to the lipstick marks. “I’m a victim of love.”
    “And here I thought you’d only ever been a victim of lust,” Julie said.
    I saw Clare suck back a grin. Sinter looked away, trying to whistle through his fangs. I only smiled at Julie calmly. She returned the smile innocently. Sinter asked a question about the Greek houses, and we kept to safe subjects like that for the rest of the walk.
    Animal House had only scratched the surface, I realized when we entered the fraternity. The house, decent enough on the outside, was stripped of most of its furniture on the inside, including details like carpeting and light fixtures. The floor was sticky stone and battered wood. As the crowd shifted, I spied a couch against the wall, but you could only imagine it hadn’t been washed in decades. The music was ear-splitting, the whole place smelled of beer, and you couldn’t see anything very well since the only lights were strings of glowing plastic pumpkins along the walls. As some bloke dressed as Rambo took our coats and threw them onto a card table, a group of sorority women surrounded Julie and started babbling to her. I turned to make a comment about the décor to Sinter, and when I looked back, Julie had been whisked away.
    For the next hour I shadowed Clare and Sinter, talked to one after another of Julie’s “sisters” who popped up to introduce themselves, and attempted to enjoy a cup of whatever ungodly concoction the frat boys had poured into the punch bowl. I knew from London parties what alcohol tasted like and how much I could safely drink. The Betas’ “jungle juice,” as they called it, made my throat suspiciously warm after just one swallow, which led me to guess it was about half fruit punch and half grain alcohol of concentrated strength, and that I should not drink more than one cup if I wanted to walk home under my own power.
    “Careful with that,” I told Clare as she dipped into the punch. “It’s strong enough to strip wood floors. Think they’re counting on the innocent girls not to notice.”
    “Like I’m an innocent girl,” she said, and strolled away.
    It was easily the most depressing party I had ever been to. I wasn’t about to get drunk or start chatting up any of the girls, since Julie was there and I had evidently disgusted her enough. There’s only so long you can watch other people engage in drinking competitions. Clare and Sinter sat on a hay bale in a corner, talking in one another’s ears and looking too cozy to interrupt. I wandered out into the back garden, but it was dismal and cold, so I came in again.
    I decided I would walk back to the dorms alone, and went in search of Julie to tell her so. When I found her, I stopped in disbelief. She was in the middle of the crowded dance floor, dancing with not one but two fraternity men, one bumping up close to her from the front, the other snaking his arms round her from behind. She had a punch cup in her hand, and was laughing. As for the two blokes, they clearly had had more than one cup. Balance and rhythm were out of their realm of capability by this point.
    The one holding her from behind, who appeared to be dressed as a flasher, said something in her ear. She shrugged and agreed. He made a gesture, looking like Let’s head upstairs to the other bloke (dressed as Elvis), and the threesome stumbled off the dance floor. I lost sight of them almost at once. I pushed forward, running into people, apologizing, fighting through the crowd, until I found myself at the foot of a dark staircase. I jogged up it, and arrived in a long corridor of doors: the frat boys’ bedrooms.
    “Julie?” I called. Different music, equally loud, blared up there from one of the rooms. There was almost no chance she would hear me. I began opening doors. After five doors leading to startled yells on the parts of