But Fifi just laughs and calls back, “Watch and learn, my friends. Watch and learn.”
25.Dis-Go with It
AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOWwhat’s going on?” I ask as we walk away. “Because I don’t.”
“You will,” Fifi tells me, sliding one of the bracelets off her wrist and handing it to me.
As she does, I realize she only has a couple left of the twenty or so she put on before leaving our room.
She sees me looking at her bare arms and grins. “I’ve been handing them out all evening.”
“Okay.” I’m not sure what that has to do with anything—until I start to slide it on my wrist and see the letter beads facing the inside of the bracelet. They spell out APPLE 10.
“What doesapple 10mean?” I ask, even as I wonder if it’s some strange Aphrodite code I know nothing about.
“It means meet me at the apple at ten o’clock.” She glances at her phone. “And it’s nine fifty now, so we need to move.”
“What apple?” I ask, completely confused.
She shoots me a look that says she can’t believe I have to ask. “Theapple. You know, the one in front of Aphrodite Hall?”
“The tie-dyed one?” I vaguely remember seeing it when we first got here, but so much has happened today that it barely registered.
To be honest, it’s still barely registering.
“Is there another one?” Fifi punches the button to the elevator and the doors open right away. “That’s a good sign.”
“What’s a good sign?” I ask as we step inside.
I feel like a parrot at this point, and not a very clued-in one at that. Then again, Fifi could stand to be a little less mysterious. I’m her roommate, not an extension of her brain. Not to mention, before a few hours ago, I’d never spent more than a second or two thinking about Aphrodite Hall. I know nothing about it except the most basic stuff.
“The elevator being on the roof,” she replies. I expect her to punch the button for our floor, but instead, she punches it for the bottom floor. “That means everyone’s still up here.”
“And that’s good? I thought you wanted people to meet us at the apple.”
“Not people. A select group of first years. Everyone else can stay upstairs—the last thing we need is a bunch of upperclassers snooping around, trying to ruin this.”
My stomach turns uneasily. I have no idea what Fifi is up to, but if she needs darkness and privacy to do it, it’s probably not great. “I don’t think this is a good idea.”
“You don’t even know what the idea is.” She rolls her eyes. “But trust me, it’s epic.”
Ireallydon’t like the sound of that. Everything I’ve learned about Fifi so far today has taught me that her idea of epic and mine are super different.
“But before we do anything,” she continues, completely oblivious to the fact that I’m one bad suggestion away from running back to our room and diving under the covers, “we need to find the package piazza.”
“What exactly is that?”
“It’s the mail room, silly, with a pizzazzy name. It’s more fun to get cool packages from the package piazza than from a boring old mail room.”
“Do Aphrodites get that many cool packages?”
“Of course they do!” This time she’s the one who looks confused. “Parents love to send care packages.”
There’s a strange sort of logic to her answer, so I decide to go with it. Even though it seems hard to believe that so many care packages come through that they need an entire room to handle them—not to mention someone to work in that room.
Instead of heading toward the front door—and the apple—when we exit the elevator, she turns left into a long, winding hallway.
The walls are made up of the same tile mosaics that make up so many of the walls and floors in Aphrodite Hall, and I do my best not to look at them. Even though I know what happened on the dance floor was a onetime thing brought on bya weird combination of heat and hunger, there’s a tiny part of me that can’t help wondering if it was something more.
