I pace for about an hour, the textbook in hand, as I find myself reading the same paragraphs over and over.
When I check my phone again, her dot hasn’t moved. I wouldn’t find this weird except that it never moves. At all.
The decision is already made. I’m too impatient to wait for the elevator and run down the four flights, taking the steps two at a time and peeling out of the student parking lot. I’d rather Clover hate me for the rest of the semester than for her to end up as just another body on their disgusting scoreboard.
I follow the route she took to the house and slam on my brakes at an intersection when a girl in a foil skirt spins out in front of me followed by a tall and slightly irritated redhead.
Immediately, I roll down my window and yell out to them. “Hey! Daisy! Briar!”
Daisy skips over to my window and her whole face lights up when she sees it’s me. “See, Briar! I told you he would come for her.”
“Come for who?” I ask, the blood in my veins pumping twice as hard. “Clover? Where is she?”
Daisy gives me a far-off smile before clasping my cheeks with both hands and kissing me on the forehead. “It’s cold!” she declares, and then opens the door to my back seat and lets herself in.
Briar strolls over to the window too slowly.
“Where is she?” I ask. “You just left her there?”
“We were literally on our way home and I was going to tell you to go pick her up. Chill, okay? She was fine. Just a little tipsy.”
“Get in the damn car,” I say, and hit my forehead against the steering wheel. “Isn’t there some kind of girl code that says not to ditch a girl at a party?”
Briar slides into the back seat beside Daisy. “Obviously, but the girl code doesn’t really have a decision tree that explains what to do when one friend is happily dancing at a party and the other is puking in an antique vase.”
I grab a plastic bag I stuffed under my seat the other day and pass it to Daisy. “Here.” I look in the rearview mirror at Briar. “You’re just going to sit in the back seat while I drive you both around like an Uber?”
“That’s the idea,” she says. “Better get to driving if you want that five-star rating,buddy.”
Daisy laughs like that’s the funniest thing she’s ever heard.
The two of them were only about a mile out from the house when I picked them up. I’d bet that Clover has been alone for thirty minutes or so.
I didn’t want to bring Tate up earlier tonight since he was the source of our explosive fight earlier this semester, but I guarantee that once he saw us fighting outside that house party, he decided that she would be on his hit list.
The guy is a patient fucker. He did this last year too. He sets the trap early in the semester and does some harmless flirting. He gets in a girl’s head and then he invites them to the house, and no one passes up the chance for an invite to 1919 Hemphill. The girls with cards get marked with X’s and most assume it’s to denote partygoers under the age of twenty-one. It’s a fair assumption because most of the girls who get a card are first-years.
“Show me your hands,” I say to Briar and Daisy.
Briar holds hers up and Daisy flings her body on top of the center console to show off her hands. Both girls are decorated with black X’s.
“Shit,” I mutter.
Each guy has their own color. Tate’s is black.
“Stay in the car,” I tell them as we turn down Hemphill.
“Yes, Dad,” Daisy says, and slumps against the back seat with her lids half closed.
I slam on the brakes in front of the house and don’t bother to check if I’ve parked legally. My phone is outstretched in my hand like a metal detector as I call Clover on speaker phone.
After a few seconds, a muffled ringtone leads me to a flower box under one of the windows where Clover’s phone is sticking out upside down. Once I yank it out of the soil, I feel a little thrill at the fact that I am listed as husband . I do take offense to the fact that my photo is a picture of Joffrey fromGame of Thrones.
I know the layout of the place, as well as most of the guys who live here. There are the Rocco twins. Tate “Shitbag” Farris. One of the Garcia brothers and not the smart one. And then a few others who moved in this year that I have yet to meet.
It’s late. Nearly three. People are starting to pour out of the house, and there’s no one at the door to stop me. As if they could.
I make a lap around the first floor and then a nauseating thought occurs to me. What if Clover is in the basement?
