Premature Evacuation (Underground Sorority #1) (8 page)

“You’re good at this,” I said. “Have you thought about fashion design?”

“I don’t know how to sew.” She plucked a gorgeous chunky silver necklace from her stash and presented it to me.

“You could learn.” I made a mental note to order her some supplies—thread, fabric scraps—online as a thank you gift.

I was in the process of switching the contents of my brown purse to my gray one when my cell phone rang. Corey’s name on the display made butterflies swarm in my chest. “Hey,” I said. He couldn’t see my smile but it was there. “I’m heading out right now.”

His sharp intake of breath sounded like a scream to my ear. “Mac, look, tonight’s not really a good night. My dad just flew in on a business flight from Tokyo and he’s pretty fucking jet lagged. I’m heading to their hotel for room service instead of going out.” I waited for the invitation I knew wasn’t coming.
They’re in room X, meet us there?
“Rain check?”

I sank onto the bed. “Um, yeah. That’s cool. I’ll see you later though?” Tears jumped to my eyes, and I blinked rapidly to stave them off. At least until he hung up.

“I think I’m going to crash in their hotel room actually. But I’ll call you tomorrow.” He hung up.

I glanced at the floor, unable to meet Fallon’s eyes. “He cancelled.”

“Oh, Mackenzie, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine.” The tears broke free of their cage in a mad dash to stream down my cheeks.

“Do you want to come out to dinner with my parents and me?”

I shook my head. “Thanks for the offer. I’ll just go out to Quigley’s with Bianca and everyone.” She still hadn’t confessed her feelings for Nate and I was pretty sure her hesitation had something to do with whatever Corey had told her in response to her asking if Nate liked her. “I guess I don’t need to wear this tank top anymore.”

By Thursday night, he still hadn’t called. But Rho Sigma’s Crush Party was that night at Quigley’s and Corey had already accepted the invite. During crush parties, Quigley’s closed to the public, only allowing Rho Sigmas inside and the five guys each of us invited. When I arrived at the bar, Corey greeted me with his standard head nod but forgot to attach a smile to it. He turned his back to me and exchanged a complicated handshake after being reunited with one of his fraternity brothers he probably last saw three minutes ago back at their house. I hovered near them, waiting for an opening. When the brother slipped away, I pounced.

“Did you have a good time with your parents?” A far less appropriate skirt than I’d planned to wear for stuffy adults grazed my upper thigh, and a sliver of flat abs poked out between the skirt and my shiny cropped top. I’d pulled out all the stops for tonight.

“They’re parents, so, no.” He laughed, the smile sneaking onto his face for a fraction of a second before dying entirely. “They managed to find more than the usual amount of things to be disappointed about.”

Nate lifted a hand over his head and waved Corey over to the bar. Corey turned to me with an eyebrow raised, his form of sign language for an age old question,
what do you want?

“Rum and diet,” I said.

He paid for my drink and we downed our requisite shots in synchronized head-tilted-back choreography. I let loose as we danced in a group, feeling like the storm had passed. Far too much space separated him from me. Usually on the dance floor, our bodies were magnets, for a single song anyway. We’d gravitate toward each other, our hips finding a rhythm, our connection so obvious I didn’t know how the others hadn’t figure it out sooner. But this time Corey held up his vodka tonic to me as if it were an excuse. The liquid shimmered blue from a black lights.

“Oh great.” Nate shoved his way between us. “I guess we’ve reached the portion of the evening where you two try to reenact your bedroom antics for us all to see.”

I was so startled by his angry tone, my drink fell out of my hand, splattering on the floor and coating my feet. Erin jumped out of the way.

Nate narrowed his already squinty eyes at me. “For the record, most girls usually wait at least two nights before sleeping with him.” He jerked his thumb in Corey’s direction.

“Dude, what the hell?” Corey punched his best friend in the jaw with a sickening crack that echoed over the pulsing music.

Nate’s face went flying, twisting at an unnatural angle. The entire bar sucked in a collective gasp, everyone pausing as if we were all playing a giant game of Freeze Tag and none of us were it.

Just then several shirtless guys ran through Quigley’s, their hands raised in the air, whistles bleating into the pump of rap music. They each wore a different fuzzy animal head to conceal their faces. People hopped out of their way as they circled through the crowd as if starting a Conga line. When they reached Corey and Nate, a frog-headed guy dropped beauty pageant sashes around their shoulders and continued running. A few more guys stationed around the bar received similar sashes from pig and lion heads before the shirtless guys ran out of the bar entirely.

The people near us converged, craning their necks to see the sash. Corey ripped his over his head and threw it on the ground, stomping on it as he pushed through the crowd with such violence he almost knocked over a girl balancing precariously on razor thin heels.

“What was that?” Bianca asked as I bent to pick up the discarded sash.

“Another fraternity fucking with us,” Nate said, rolling his eyes.

In pink glitter on the front it read:
Future Homeless Person
. The white satin glimmered as I flipped it over to the back:
Next year, we’ll live in your house.

“Here, Mackenzie. You live there more than me. You should probably be wearing this, too.” Nate dropped his sash over my own shoulders.

An anvil tore through my stomach. I pulled the second sash off and tossed both into the crowd where Layla scooped them up in disgust. I stormed after Corey, but lost track of him in the packed room. Everyone pushed against me, their sweaty bodies greasing my own. The blasting song deafened my ears, and the lump in my throat made it impossible to breathe. I battled through the crowd, jabbing elbows to break a path, until I reached the open air surrounding the counter.

I leaned against the wooden bar and gulped steady breaths. My own hand curled into a fist, itching to sink into the same flesh Corey just hit.

Within a minute, Bianca was at my side. “Okay, I think I need to take back what I said the other day about liking Nate.”

“What the hell is his problem with me? I’ve never done anything to him.”

“Except sexiling him nearly every night.” She swirled her straw around her drink, making the ice clink. “He actually took a graveyard shift stocking shelves at the Supermarket because he got sick of crashing in the gross Beta Chi basement.”

A cold crackling sensation raced up my spine. Oh God. No wonder he was pissed at me. I flashed back to last year when Fallon and Liam would curl up in her tiny dorm cot and I’d haul my sleeping bag into the common room for a camp out under the fluorescent lights. Footsteps kept me up all night. Still, my fist curled against my icy cup, sopping up condensation.

Bianca’s own face softened with the same sort of guilt rolling in my stomach. “I’ll yell at him for you.” All the fight deflated from her voice. I could see it in the swing of her hips as she strutted back to him: this only strengthened her crush.

I broke free of my hideout and searched for Corey. When I found him, he was sulking at the opposite end of the bar in a chair, his elbows propped up by his knees and his head sunken into his hands. His face was sullen and the expression he wore could disarm an enemy on contact. The crowd disappeared and all I saw was his brooding body language. His eyes met mine, then flicked away as he scowled.

I stroked the inside of his wrist. “Hey, let’s get out of here, get your mind off—”

“I NEED SPACE.” He might have said the words calmly, a whisper. But that wasn’t how I heard them. He screamed them, kneading them into my brain.
I need space. I Need Space. I NEED SPACE.
The words echoed and bounced off the walls, ringing in my ears as if I had been standing next to a speaker at a punk concert.

I rocked in place, feeling dizzy. The room spun but I’d only had two drinks so far. “Wh—what?”

“I need to be alone for a while.” His eyes veered off in every direction except the one that pointed at me.

Lumps piled in my throat, each one ineffective in blocking the emotion surging in my chest. Hot tears pressed against my eyes. I pushed through the crowd before Corey could see, so I could save a little bit of dignity. Outside, I let loose, my breaths coming in gasps, the tears streaming down my face. Each time the cold air whipped against me felt like a slap.

When I got back to my room, I turned on my computer in a desperate search for a new status message to define the way I felt: like I’d been hit by a car and dragged for miles. About ten minutes later, Corey logged on and sent me a chat message.

“You okay?” he wrote.

“I’d write back but I don’t want to violate your
space
,” I typed. I’d apparently left maturity back at the bar.

“I’m so sorry.”

A pause.

Was I supposed to write back?

I pushed off from my desk chair and crawled into the closet. Jackets and shirts dusted my head; shoes or other objects poked my back and butt. I just wanted to physically feel as small and stuck as my emotions felt.

He liked me, he had feelings for me, but he didn’t want to be with me. He wasn’t ready for a commitment. It was the opposite of Ryan, who strung our relationship out until it was good to the last drop.

Instead, Corey
prematurely evacuated
before we could even form one.

W
EEKS WENT BY WITHOUT Corey. He never came out with us anymore and he seemed to have some kind of radar to stay away from Quigley’s on nights I went there. He’d moved on, erasing me out of his life as easily as I dragged an entire scene from my animation into my computer’s trash bin. In fact, Bianca told me Erin’s skinny jeans/high pony tail friend, Holly McKenna, had taken Corey as her formal date. I didn’t know if their status extended beyond that, but Corey liked things casual…

So I tried to move on. But instead it seemed like I was just treading water to prevent drowning in the same manner as when Ryan had broken up with me a few months earlier. I threw myself into the sorority, helping out with the small tasks no one wanted to do, like taking meeting minutes during chapter.

My laptop rested on my cross-legged lap as Layla loomed over everyone from her winged-back throne. “As I’m sure you’re all aware, what happened at the Crush Party was unacceptable.”

I diligently typed her words but made sure to roll my eyes at Bianca. For weeks now Layla had harped about how the shirtless guys who raided our party could reflect badly on
us
if the Greek Org got wind of what happened. Our Rho Sigma listserv was filled with her rants about it.

Ladies, if any of you extended a Crush party invite to one of them, I need to know.

But no one had come forward and I didn’t see what the big deal it was.

Now, she pursed her lips. “Our Date Haunted Hayride is coming up next week,” she said. “If anything like that happens there, I will cancel our Winter formal.”

Groans shuddered through the room. The threat was stupid, the presence of the shirtless guys had absolutely nothing to do with us. We hadn’t violated any rules. Well, besides for underage drinking in a bar, but Quigley’s was outside the Greek Org jurisdiction. If any of us passed out in front of our dorms, then there might be a problem.

When the Rho Sigma Date Haunted Hayride—in lieu of our semesterly Semi-Formal—rolled around, I assumed Corey and my deadzoning of each other would continue. A month ago, Bianca had suggested we all go as a group, boys included, but then Corey “needed space” and Holly squeezed into the space I vacated. I wasn’t sure if the group still included him, or maybe me, or if I should try to get over him by bringing someone else. But the last time I tried to get over a guy that broke my heart by dating someone new, I ended up with the same disaster. So I invited Fallon.