Page 125 of Degradation
He leaves the room with Mav in tow, and I sit slowly on the bed.
‘Are you o...’ I stop myself from asking the dumb question. Of course she’s not okay.
Her eyes are open and she’s back to staring at the wall.
‘He owns me, too,’ I whisper.
Her eyes cut to me.
I hold her gaze. ‘Novelle. He owns all of us.’
‘I thought it would be different.’ she whispers. ‘I thought being out here, out of The Heath, that I’d befree. But I’ve just traded their rules for his. He still gets to decide everything. I’d be failing English Lit right now if I hadn’t gone behind his back. He still doesn’t know I’ve changed majors.’
‘What will he do when he finds out?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know, but it won’t be very nice. I can’t stay here.’
She says the last part so quietly I almost don’t hear her.
‘What did you lie to us about?’ I whisper, not wanting to know the answer, and yet not being able to stop myself from asking.
‘You’ll know soon enough,’ she says cryptically.
‘I’ll…leave you alone,’ I say, though it’s the last thing I want to do.
Her brow furrows a little and she curls in on herself. She doesn’t say anything.
I get up to go, but when I get to the door, I go back. I lean over her and give her a gentle kiss on the cheek.
‘Last night,’ I lower my voice. ‘We weren’t with anyone else... Not like we are with you. I promise.’
I leave quickly and grab my laptop from my room, intending on heading downstairs to do a little work. The data I pulled from the security system is garbled and I’m pretty sure it’s because of a virus. I’ve been going through it, but it’s taking a lot longer than I thought, which is probably the reason the virus was uploaded. But that means there’s something to find, so I’m going to keep looking until I discover it.
Mav and Shade are already hanging with the guys in the games room. We decided last night that we need to make sure we’re spending as much time with the other members of the frat as Marcus has been in case he’s putting ideas in the other guys’ heads. So far, he’s been laying pretty low since Mav beat the shit out of him, Rob, and Pete on Halloween. He’s been flaunting the fact that he’s fucking Laurie, but even that mostly stopped once he realized Shade doesn’t give a shit. I have a feeling this asshole is going to be like a hydra, though. Cut off his head and three more will appear.
I see Greg and Jayce and give them a nod for being decent to our girl this morning when we weren’t here. Both of them look half-surprised and half-afraid when Shade beckons them over to our couch at the back of the room.
‘We wanted to thank you for helping Daisy,’ Shade begins, but Greg puts up his hand.
‘Look, Admiral, we don’t need thanks for making sure she was okay.’ He glances at Jayce who nods. ‘We didn’t like all that shit with the hazing. I’ve–We’vebeen wanting to say something about it, and I don’t care if I get in trouble for it. It was fucked up, dude. I didn’t sign up to terrorize a girl like that, you know?’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Shade’s voice sounds like he’s a hair’s breadth from violence, which is exactly how I feel.
Greg’s gaze bounces between the three of us. ‘The spreadsheet.’
‘Spreadsheet?’ I snarl, glancing at the others.
But I know what they’re talking about. The spreadsheet Lu talked about on Halloween. I haven’t been able to find it anywhere, and the guys I’ve spoken to have denied its existence.
‘I asked you about it last week,’ I say very quietly and see them both practically cower in front of me.
‘We thought it was a test,’ Greg says. ‘We weren’t allowed to talk about it. Marcus, Rob, and Pete told all of us, the pledges, I mean, that you might ask, and that if we said anything about it, we failed. We had to...’ He trails off.
Jayce nudges him. ‘Send it to them.’
Greg nods and takes out his phone. I get a link a second later. I crack my laptop and bring it up. A document opens with a title that makes my eye twitch. ‘Fuck with the Retard’. There’s a list of all the pledges’ names down the first column and one along the top called ‘get your points’ with stuff like: ‘Follow for twenty minutes, five. Call a bitch, seven. Trip, twelve. Spread a rumor, two. Scare, four. Video in shower, twenty.’
I scan down to see if anyone got points for videoing Daisy naked. Luckily for everyone in this house, it’s zero. No one did it. But the list goes on and there are plenty of things the pledges did do.
