Page 63 of Riot Rules
My stomach performs a triple axel, slips and crashes into a concrete wall when I see Dash. His hair looks like burnished copper under the orange lights. I expected him to be wearing a button down like Pax and Wren, but instead he’s wearing a black t-shirt that has small white flecks of paint running down the side of it. The jeans he’s wearing are ripped at the knees, and there are beaten up red high-tops on his feet. He looks the most himself I have ever seen him; this scruffy, casual, at ease version of himself is the Dash I’ve come to know. His hands are in his pockets, his weight resting on one foot. Gone is the ramrod straight back and the rigid shoulders. His eyes are still cold, however, as they sweep across the people gathered at his feet. He is, after all, the Sun God of Riot House.
“Alright.” Wren sweeps his dark hair out of his face, assessing the sea of faces before him like some benevolent god addressing his people. “Welcome. I will be your Master of the Hunt for this evening. For those of you who have attended one of these parties before, you know what comes next. For those of you who haven’t, listen closely. By coming here tonight, you are giving your consent in tonight’s festivities. You aren’t being held here against your will. The door’s right there. Feel free to leave if you need to bitch out. But…if you stay…you’re complicit in what comes next.”
“What comes next?” someone yells from the back of the room.
Wren’s eyes flash. “Tonight’s game is called ‘Bag and Tag. The rules are simple. Around the house, there are bags like these hidden, waiting to be found.” He holds up a tiny plastic baggie for everyone to see—clear plastic, an inch square, and at the bottom, a small amount of white powder.
“Oh, god,” Mara mutters. “Here we go.”
“What’s in it?” one of the college guys yells.
Wren’s deadpan glare is acidic. “If you’d let me speak, you’d find out.” He holds up another small baggie in his other hand, and this time the powder inside is blue. “Bags like this have also been hidden. The white powder is talcum powder. Or Molly. Or coke.” He looks at the bag, rocking his head from side to side. “Maybe it’s speed. Who the fuck knows. The blue stuff’s probably just baking powder with a splash of food dye. But there’s a chance it could be Viagra. Odds are a fifty-fifty split. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to find one of these beauties and gun its contents.”
“And then what?” Boyd Lowrey, captain of the debate team, asks.
Pax jumps in. “And thenBacchanalia, fuckhead. Hook up. Get your dick wet.”
“Or pussy,” Wren adds. “This is an equal opportunities orgy. The person who fucks the most people by the time the sun comes up wins.”
“And what will we win, Wren?” At the back of the room, a male, authoritative voice asks. “Once we’ve downed a bunch of non-descript narcotics and ploughed our way through the senior year?”
A ripple of silence runs through the crowd, because most of us recognize the voice. We spend an hour with its owner every Monday and Thursday morning, recently poring over Romeo and Juliet.
“Oh my god. No way.” Mara laughs behind her hand. She’s delighted even before she turns around and sees him: Dr. Fitzpatrick, leaning against the closed front door, his hands in the pockets of his jeans. The sides of his hair have been freshly buzzed. He’s wearing a black hoody with a grey stripe across it that looks weirdly familiar.
Up until now, Dash’s expression has been perfectly blank. The moment he sees Fitz, that changes. His mouth turns down, his eyes full of steel. He shoots a glance over at Pax, who looks equally as unhappy. Wren’s the only Riot House boy who doesn’t seem perturbed by our English teacher’s presence.
“Our respect, initially,” he says. “And then…immunity.”
Fitz smiles coyly, glancing down at his shoes. “Immunity from what exactly?”
“From me,” Wren says. He nods his head toward Dash. “Fromhim.” A nod to Pax. “Andhim.”
“Hmm. Well. I can’t see how that’s much of a prize. Immunity from the attentions of three teenaged boys?” Fitz shakes his head, eyes creased at the corners. “Hardly somethingIneed to worry about.”
“You sure about that?” Pax descends down a step, the tendons in his neck straining beneath his skin, like he’s about to launch himself at the bastard, but Wren gives a small shake of his head.
“Don’t worry, man. Fitz isn’t playing our little game tonight.”
“Is that so?” The teacher smirks. “And why’s that?”
“Because you weren’t invited here this evening. It’s very poor etiquette to show up at someone’s house uninvited, Wes. Veryrude.”
“But I was invited. Wasn’t I, Mara?” Fitz looks over at Mara. Everyone in the room turns to follow his gaze. And thanks to the fact that Mara’s standing three inches away from me, I suddenly find that there are two hundred pairs of eyes looking atme,too. Including Dash’s.
If I were Mara, I’d be beet red and stammering under the weight of Wren’s scowl, but she looks like she’s actually enjoying the attention. “What? I didn’t think he’dcome,” she says. “Nothing wrong with being polite every once in a while. Maybe you should try it, Jacobi.”
This is payback for embarrassing her in the dining hall. He humiliated her when he announced within earshot of five different tables that she’d sent him a bunch of nudes. That was two months ago, and she’s still going on about it. Fuck knows what her thought process was, but having the English professor show up to a Riot House party definitely disrupts Wren’s plans for the night. I mean, he just admitted to having a shit load of drugs hidden in the house. He’s going to have to shut the whole thing down now.
But Wren only smiles. “Guess it’s a good job I crushed up that Viagra then,” he says. “Anyone finds a blue packet, make sure you give it to the old fucker at the back. His dick probably hasn’t been hard in a century.”
“What?” Pres hisses. “He’s letting himstay?”
Mara’s glee wanes a little. She was clearly hoping for fireworks from Wren and her little stunt didn’t get the faintest reaction out of him. Fitz laughs silently, shrugging his shoulders. “Can’t say I’ve had any complaints about the hardness of my dick, but what the hell. Bring it on, Jacobi.”
* * *
“It’s already in your mouth. Might as well swallow it.”
