“Those are paper bats,” Asher says, walking around the room. “And you can’t post any of this. Sam will kill you.”
But I don’t listen to him as I film down the wall over what seems like hundreds of photos of the society since it originated in 1910. I walk past a curtain to a small room with only a little table covered in white powder. A bloody body impaled with a sword sits in a chair next to the table.
“This looks so real,” I say, reaching out to touch the prop, but my arm feels like it’s moving through molasses.
Asher comes in after me and gasps. “Sloane, don’t touch it!” he yells, and I startle, dropping my phone. He pulls me back behind him. “Fuck.”
The room spins around me—colors and shapes collide and separate. “What is it? Don’t even try to tell me this is another paper bat.”
“No, this is Bryce Peterson.”
Chapter 16
“Bryce?” I ask, confused. That doesn’t even look like Bryce, but then again the room is spinning.
“Get your phone. We’re getting the fuck out of here.” Asher ushers me away from the room. “And do not touchanything.”
He shoves me from the room in a hurry, down the hall, back out to the dance floor, through the bookcase, and up the stairs. The knight that grabbed me, Kane, yells something to us about leaving. Asher tells him to fuck off. When we’re back aboveground Asher paces back and forth.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he says, tossing his mask on the ground.
Everything blurs around me and a sharp pain forms in my stomach.
“I feel—” But I don’t get the words out as I vomit into the bushes. Then again, and again. I hear Asher say “fuck” again. I’m on my hands and knees as my body heaves, until darkness takes over.
I wake with cold water hitting me in the face.
“I’m calling 911,” I hear Adrienne say.
Adrienne? That can’t be right. I look around and realize through the spinning that I’m in my bathtub.
“No,” I manage to say. Asher shuts the water off.
“Then I’m calling your mom,” Adrienne says to me.
“No, please,” I say again. If I get sent to the hospital with Xanax, absinthe, and shrooms in my system, my mom will have me finishing my degree online from the comfort of her living room.
“I’ll handle it,” Asher tells her.
I don’t hear Adrienne’s reply as I fumble out of the tub to throw up in our toilet before passing out again.
I open my eyes slowly, feeling a splitting headache behind them, and a severe need for water. I’m in my bed. I turn over, and that’s when I notice the IV in my arm. I follow the line up to see a saline bag hanging over my lamp.
“What the hell?” I whisper.
There’s a long breath from my bedroom floor. “Now that I know you’re alive,” Asher says, “you owe me big-time.”
I look down to see I’m still in last night’s dress, with a bath towel wrapped around it. “What the hell happened?”
“Bryce is dead,” he says.
“That wasn’t funny the first time you said it and it’s not funny now.” I stare at him.
“It’s not a joke.” Asher is sitting up, pulling a paper from his pocket. It’s my eulogy for Bryce, ripped through the middle and soaked red. You can barely tell what it says, but I’d know it anywhere.
Frat boys, sorority girls, and everyone else who tolerated Bryce Peterson’s existence—today marks the end of an era. An era of late-night “you up?,” other girls on his Snapchat, and getting into the best frat parties, which in the end meant more to me than he ever did. May we never forget the way he gave me an STD, told everyone I gave it to him, then blacklisted me and my friends from everywhere. Bryce leaves behind a superiority complex, the beer box taped over the broken bottom half of his door, and the audacity.
May he rest... somewhere very fucking far away.
