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Up on the second-floor balcony, one guy poured beer through a long funnel into the open mouth of his friend down below. Both of them were shirtless, frat letters painted on their chests. A cheer went up when most of it landed on the second guy’s face instead.

“This is it,” Bailey said, grinning. “What do you think?”

“I’ll let you know.”

They linked arms, climbed the porch steps, and pushed through the front door into the noise and the thick, sticky heat of too many bodies in one place. Somebody had strung red lights across the ceiling, so everything had a hazy glow, and the whole house smelled like cologne, sweat, and beer.

One of the brothers was on them before they’d cleared the doorway, holding out two red cups. “There they are,” he said. “Two beautiful girls who look entirely too sober.”

He pushed one cup at Nicole and the other at Bailey. Whatever was in Nicole’s smelled fruity, with way too much liquor hiding underneath.

“No, thank you,” she said, but he’d already moved on to the group of girls who came in behind them. One of them announced herself with a loud “Yeah, bitches!” and the rest of them screamed right along with her, shimmying to whatever rock song was blasting through the speakers.

Bailey took a sip from her cup. “Not bad.” She wrinkled her nose. “Strong, though.”

Nicole didn’t touch hers. She knew better than to drink anything a strange guy handed her when she hadn’t watched him pour it. “You shouldn’t drink that,” she said.

Bailey looked down into her cup. “Why not?”

“Somebody could’ve put something in it.”

Bailey snorted. “And Ryan would kick their ass.”

Everywhere Nicole looked, something was going on. There was a mosh pit on the dance floor, couples making out in the corners, guys lined up at a keg in the kitchen, and somebody in a side room chugging a beer while everybody counted him down. People were louder and drunker than she was used to at the parties she usually went to, and nobody seemed to care about dancing on beat as long as they were having a good time. It wasn’t a bad party. It just wasn’t her crowd.

Nicole left her cup on the first table she passed, and she and Bailey moved deeper into the house, squeezing past bodies. They stepped over a guy sitting on the hallway floor with his back against the wall, his eyes half-closed and a Sharpie mustache drawn over his lip. Someone had balanced an empty beer can on his head.

When they’d had enough of the inside, they headed out back, where it was calmer, but not by much. The yard stretched all the way to a line of trees, with tiki torches flickering around the edges and Christmas lights crisscrossing overhead. A makeshift bar made from plywood and sawhorses stood off to one side, bottles of liquor and mixers crammed across the top.

A fire pit was going in the middle of the yard. The wood smoke mingled with cigarette and weed smoke drifting over from near the fence. Nicole looked out over the crowd, slow and casual. To anyone watching, she was only taking in the party. But really, she was looking for Drew.

Chapter Five

Nicole knew Brandon from American Government. It was one of those huge lecture-hall classes with more than four hundred students—a general ed requirement she could’ve knocked out freshman year but kept putting off because spending an entire semester memorizing court cases and constitutional amendments sounded like hell. They’d sat in the same row a few times but never actually spoken. She’d caught him looking at her more than once since the semester started, though. Every time she did, he looked away and pretended he hadn’t been.

They were up on the raised wooden deck, a few steps above the yard. Speakers set up outside carried whatever country song the DJ was spinning inside, and down on the grass, people stood around in little groups or sat wherever they could find a spot. Bailey had ditched her to grab a drink with Ryan about twenty minutes earlier. The last time Nicole had seen them, they were disappearing into the house.

She nursed a beer she’d poured herself from the keg and laughed while she and Brandon went off about the ridiculous number of projects their professor had crammed onto the syllabus.

“If you ever want to study together, let me know,” he said, tucking his hands into the pockets of his jeans.

She might’ve taken him up on it. He’d aced the midterm, while she’d barely scraped by with a B-minus—the closest thing to a C she’d ever gotten in her life.

“Do you live on campus?” she asked.

“No. I live here, actually.”

“Oh. That’s cool.” She hadn’t expected that. Brandon could pass for white if he wanted to, but Nicole had suspected from the first time she saw him that he had Black folks somewhere in his family. She couldn’t have explained how. Sometimes you just knew.

“You seem surprised.”

“No, not really. I just . . .” She squinted. “Okay, maybe a little.”

“Why? Because I’m half Black?”

“Well . . . yeah. I just don’t see a lot of us around these houses, that’s all.”

“My dad was a brother here.”