He stops, turns to face me, and for a second, I see the old Hunter, the one who orchestrated fake scavenger hunts and left notes in library books for the cleaning staff to find. But now his grin is colder, sharper.
“It’s not about humiliating you, Montgomery,” he says. “It’s about giving the world a show they’ll never forget.” He nods back in the direction of the science building. “And if Thompson is there to see it—well, that’s just the cherry on top.”
I blink, unsure whether to feel relieved or even more horrified. “You want to—what, upstage him? Use me as a distraction?”
Hunter’s teeth flash. “That’s the beauty of it. He’ll never see it coming.”
I shiver at the gleam in his eyes. “And I’m the bait.”
“Think of it as payback for how he treats Natalie.”
I do want that. “I suppose I should just trust you.”
Hunter claps me on the shoulder as we walk. “After all these years, now you’re gettin’ it.”
We reach Sara’s place, and in thirty minutes, she has me all dolled up again as the ultimate cartoon pinup girl. She slips into a vintage flapper costume as Hunter dons an Indiana Jones getup. Sara grabs a clutch and her keys, while Hunter checks his reflection in the microwave and runs a hand through his hair.
“Let’s go,” he says, and for once, I don’t argue.
I totter down the hall, every step a potential disaster, but I’m still standing by the time we reach the elevator.
“Ready for your big debut?” Hunter asks.
I glance at Sara. She winks.
“Let’s get this over with,” I say, and as the elevator doors slide shut, I catch one last glimpse of myself in the polished steel—a living, breathing chemical reaction, ready to detonate.
Flanked by the two of them, I practice my walk across campus, focusing on keeping my shoulders back and my hips loose like Sara showed me. With each step, I'm terrified someone will recognize me, but also strangely exhilarated by how invisible I am in plain sight.
“Heard Thompson was being a prick earlier,” Sara says, voice clipped.
“Whole building heard it,” I reply.
“And I have a plan to snuff him out a little,” Hunter says.
Sara’s smile turns predatory beneath the pathway lights. “Good. He could use a little humbling.”
Hunter slips into the middle and puts an arm around both our shoulders, steering us toward the distant thump of bass from Pi Omega. “This is gonna be lit,” he says.
The closer we get, the more the nerves come back—the makeup, the wig, the skyscraper heels, all the ways this could go wrong. But there’s also a sense of anticipation, the charged air before an experiment. I don’t know if I’ll survive the night, but I do know that whatever happens, it won’t be boring.
We round the corner into party territory, and I catch my reflection in a dark window. For the first time, the face looking back doesn’t seem like a stranger—it’s me, but refracted, all nerves and potential energy.
Hunter squeezes my shoulder. “Ready?”
I nod, even as my stomach does a backflip. “Let’s get this over with.”
Inside, the music rises, the lights shimmer, and the next phase of the reaction is about to begin.
Chapter 3
The Pi Omega house shudders with subwoofers, a living, breathing monster of thumping bass and sweat and too-bright LEDs strobing the front porch like a cop car. For a wild second I consider faking a medical emergency and bailing, but Sara has my wrist in a death grip and Hunter’s already halfway up the steps, a low-slung leather whip coiled at his belt for maximum Indiana Jones effect. I hover in the shadow of the doorway, the sequined red dress glued to my chest like a second skin, the wig itching worse than mosquito bites in August, and for the first time in years, I wish I had a vape, or a valium, or a time machine.
Sara tugs me inside. We pass through a knot of half-familiar faces, none of them clocking me for more than a heartbeat before moving on. I register only fragments—a firefighter helmet, plastic devil horns, a full-bodied Pikachu so yellow it leaves afterimages. The entryway is a graveyard of discarded solo cups and empty chip bags, the smell a chemical fog of Jäger and Pine-Sol and something sweetly rotten beneath. My feet—strapped into too-tight purple stilettos, the closest wearable size at Goodwill—slide a little on the sticky hardwood.
“Just keep moving,” Sara murmurs, steering me with gentle but absolute force. Her hand is warm and small in the crook of my elbow. “The faster we blend, the less anyone cares.”
I want to correct her—there is no way to blend when you’re a six-foot cartoon sex bomb—but I don’t trust my voice not to betray me, so I just nod. I blink, my eyes still re-adjusting to the contacts I keep for times when glasses just won’t work. Every nerve ending from my cheekbones to my shins buzzes with static. I can feel the eyes, the ripple of interest as we push deeper toward the kitchen.
