Page 9 of Caged
I do a quick scan of the bar, but it’s hard to make out faces from my hunched position. It’s impossible to hear over the music unless the person you’re speaking with screams directly into your ear, so I’ve been huddled over, listening to this girl tell me about every person she slept with over the summer in painstaking detail, for at least twenty minutes. When I look around, I see so many people packed into this bar that, frankly, I’m surprised the fire marshal hasn’t appeared.
“Are you going to after-hours at Sigma?” she shouts against my hair, and like clockwork, the telltale tune of Journey starts to play over the speaker, building to what I know will be a deafening crescendo.
I give her a look that says, “fuck no,” but she’s insistent. “Come!” she demands. “They’re having a big party; besides, we should be there to represent.”
Her tenacity is annoying, but I know what she means. In the bizarre microcosm of Greek-system politics, we have to show face at these things lest our lack of attendance be considered a snub. It’s also subliminal marketing for our sorority, Delta Gamma, and therefore crucial for the new freshman class to see our faces at these parties, especially Sigma parties.
Besides, I’m tipsy enough to be undeterred by my own anxiety.
Sigma has always sat at the top of the Dornell fraternity food chain. Every guy you hate to admit you want to fuck is in Sigma. They are pretentious, elitist assholes. They all come from money, and like to make it abundantly clear how superior they are, not only to other fraternities, but to all other individuals on this campus, professors and staff included. But girls fucking throw themselves as these guys like they’re gods, and it just perpetuates the whole insufferable cycle.
Two years ago, I would have relished going to Sigma after-hours. At the beginning of our sophomore year, all bets were off. Monroe had just spent the worst summer of her life burying her grandmother, and I was newly single. Neither of us could find a fuck to give. Jace and Kieren were low on the Sigma pecking order as recently admitted brothers, and we savored every opportunity to torment them. We were fucking belligerent, flirting with Sigma upperclassmen at parties, rubbing it in their faces, and there wasn’t fuck all they could do to stop us.
But when we returned from winter break that year, something changed. Maybe it was the new batch of freshman pledges and the fact that Jace and Kieren no longer had to play the role of indentured servants, but the two of them became monsters. I tried to keep Monroe away from Kieren…
I tried.
The thought makes me vomit in my mouth, just a little, to know my friend was trapped in the vortex of an addict as he descended into madness.
No one knows why Kieren didn’t come back at the beginning of junior year. Everyone assumed he went to rehab. He went no-contact, even with Monroe, and truthfully, his absence was a peace she had never known.
We hugged each other goodbye at the end of that semester – Ele, Viv, and I were headed off to various countries around the world, and Monroe would soon start her reign as president of Delta Gamma. It was a bittersweet parting of ways, but it was a consolation to know our time apart would be temporary.
And then he came back.
3
MONROE
Eight Months Prior to Present Day,
Early January, Junior Year,
Dornell University
Ifeel it in the air.
Thick grey clouds hang over campus like an ominous shroud, threatening to unleash a maelstrom of icy, bitter snow at any second. Nauseating angst climbs up the back of my throat. My fingers quiver. A mixture of fear and longing and something else – something dark and unsettling that I have yet to comprehend – churns in my chest.
No one has said anything, no texts have appeared, and no social media posts have been seen to confirm this feeling, but I just know.
I know it in my bones.
Kieren is back.
I shake out my hands in an effort to expunge some of my nervous energy. Hopeful freshman women stand in a line outside the Delta Gamma front door, half frozen to death. Thebullshit rules of sorority rush dictate the precise time we are permitted to let them enter. Any earlier, and we would be reprimanded with a fine and a strike against our good standing.
I watch the second hand on my phone’s clock tick toward twelve. In four minutes and twenty-three seconds, we are finally allowed to begin. The foyer of Delta Gamma is packed with members of each pledge class, ready to cheer like banshees when I swing this door open. It’s absurd. All of it, really, but I don’t make the rules. As sorority president, I just enforce them. Dammit, I wish I was in Spain right now with Gabi. Why and how did I talk myself into this thankless and unpaid job?
A profanely loud knock rasps against our front door.
“Delivery,” a man’s voice says outside.
“You have got to be fucking kidding,” I grumble. All this buildup just to be foiled by fucking Amazon.
The knocking grows increasingly loud, and unsure eyes around the room meet mine. What’s the protocol in this situation? I sure as fuck don’t know, yet everyone is looking at me for answers. Fine, fuck it.
I swing open the door, ready to snatch this package with supersonic speed, when I see…
