“That would be the smaller infraction, actually,” he explained. “Climbing through a window into a boy’s dormitory room is, according to the code, a bigger offense.”
Somehow, breaking the rules made climbing into Penn’s room that much more appealing, especially since I wasn’t the slightest bit interested in doing the thing that the rule was undoubtedly made for—fooling around with a boy.
“Well, in that case …” I scooched myself toward the window, then stood on the (thankfully) wide branch below me. Clutching every branch that seemed viable, I kept my head straight while I walked toward the building, grabbed the edge of the open window, and swung a leg over the windowsill as if I were wearing leggings instead of a vintage knit minidress. A short hop onto my Converse and I landed squarely in a very large, very messy room full of boys.
Well, this is interesting, I thought, wondering what exactly I should do now that I’d broken a major school rule and was surrounded by several students of the opposite sex. Not that I hadn’t hung out with boys before, of course. My house was absurdly full of them. But these guys were not my brothers—I hardly knew them, even Penn.
There was an awkward silence during which Hank and Sam looked to Penn as if he were holding a clipboard and a list of instructions for what to do when a tree-climbing girl lands unexpectedly in your dorm room during a Saturday night, all-boy poker game. I took that opportunity to check out the table, which was covered with playing cards, colored chips, and what appeared to be a whole lot of Doritos crumbs. From the looks of things, Hank was not having a good night, Penn was holding his own, and Sam was raking it in.
“Who’s dealing?” I asked, breaking the silence and sitting down in the only empty seat—a ratty armchair between Hank and Sam and across from Penn. Just pretend they are your brothers, I told myself. That ought to be easy enough. The room actually bore a striking resemblance to Ben’s, but with different posters—musicians, mostly—and more stuff. The desks and bookshelves were crammed—one with comic books—and there was a lot of furniture. Like the ancient coffee table with the faded leather top, the treacherous-looking sofa, the armchair I occupied with its lopsided, mismatched cushions, and the mini fridge covered in stickers.
“You are,” Penn replied, watching me amusedly from the other end of the table. I noticed for the first time that his smile was crooked—the left side of his mouth drooped a tiny bit. “Do you know how to play?”
“I’ve held a hand or two,” I fibbed.
“What’s your buy-in?” Penn asked. “The usual is twenty.”
Crap, I thought. I knew this was too easy. “Um, I don’t have any cash. I wasn’t exactly planning on having to buy anything.”
The boys exchanged glances and a second awkward silence stretched over us like plastic wrap.
“I’ll spot you,” Penn said. “Twenty?”
Twenty was more than I had in mind—back home we played with pennies and nickels. And my weekly allowance wasn’t exactly hefty. But when in Rome … “Twenty is great.”
Penn counted out several chips in four different colors. “These are twenty-five, fifty, a dollar, and two,” he said, pushing them across the table.
I picked up the deck of cards. “Clean?”
“Sparkling,” Hank replied. I held the already-shuffled deck out to him. He cut, then put a green chip on the table—the small blind. Penn slid two chips across the leather for the big. I burned a card and dealt two to everyone.
I glanced at my hand. Pocket aces—a spade and a heart. Nice, but it was never smart to get cocky.
Everyone matched the big blind on the first round. “All in,” I said, burning a card and laying the three-card flop in the center of the table. King of hearts, eight of hearts, two of spades. I had two aces and three hearts. A tiny improvement, but I’d need two more hearts for a flush.
Hank tossed three dollars’ worth of chips onto the table. He had something. Penn and Sam called but didn’t raise. The bet was at four. I raised by a dollar.
“And she raises,” Penn said, pressing his lips together and nodding slightly.
Hank stroked his square chin and slid two more chips across the leather, meeting the bet. I burned a card and revealed the turn, the fourth, faceup card. It was a three of hearts.
“Lotta hearts,” Penn said.
With all but one final card on the table, I had exactly what I started with—a pair of aces. Another ace would give me three of a kind; a heart would give me a flush.
Hank raised another two dollars.
“Too rich for my blood,” Penn said, tossing his cards to me. Or was it at me? One of them landed face-up … the ace of diamonds.
Damn, I thought. My odds of getting three aces had just dropped, fast.
Sam was in with a call but no raise.
Oh, what the hell. I shoved another two dollars’ worth of chips across the table. If I was in, I was in.
I placed the final card faceup on the table. A ten of hearts.
I willed my face to remain a mask. I had a flush of hearts: the king, the ten, the nine, and the three on the table, and the ace in my hand.
How ironic, I thought abruptly. I held a handful of hearts while Annette was breaking my real one.
It was down to me and Hank, who pushed another two dollars across the table.
“I’ll see you and raise you a dollar,” I said, pushing my chips to the center and trying not to notice how much I was betting.
Penn let out a low whistle. “Subzero does not mess around.”
Hank dropped another dollar’s worth of chips—the last he had—into the pile. He’d matched my bet and was all in.
Sam rubbed his hands together excitedly. “Let’s see ’em, folks.”
Hank flipped his cards first, and I blinked in surprise. He had a flush of hearts, too. For some reason, I hadn’t been expecting that. He also had, overall, higher hearts than I did—the cards on the table plus the queen and the jack. If he’d had my nine, he would have had a flush and a straight. But he didn’t.
I flipped my cards, and Hank groaned. My high-card ace beat his slew of face cards. I won the hand.
“Gentlemen, I believe we have a competitor,” Sam announced.
“Beginner’s luck,” Hank groaned.
“I’m not so sure.” Penn’s crooked smile was back. “But either way, it’s the end of the game for you, my friend.”
“Tell me something I don’t already know,” he groused. “And hand me the bottle.”
“Drowning your sorrows?” Penn asked as he opened some sort of compartment under the end of the table and pulled out a bottle of Absolut and several shot glasses—the same ones I’d used in Annette’s room—and lined them up on the table.
“Does everyone around here have matching shot glasses?”
“Of course,” Sam replied with a shrug. “They sell them in the Brookwood store, so we can charge them to our parents.”
“You’re kidding me.”
Sam shook his head, his almond-shaped eyes solemn. “Dead serious. The receipt says glasses, so they have no idea. Or at least they never ask.”
That was crazy, but somehow totally believable.
Penn set four glasses on the table and filled three. “You in, Subzero?”
“Do I look like I’m out?”
He shot me a hurt look, but I couldn’t tell if he was teasing. “Just checking. I wasn’t sure if they did shots in Minnesota.”
Penn handed out the glasses and we clinked above the giant pile of chips I’d just won. “To Saturday night visitors,” Penn said. “Take Sam out next so he can get back to his comic books, okay?”
“Hey,” Sam protested.
“That’s how you used to spend your Saturday nights, isn’t it?” Hank asked. “Reading about the Green Lantern?”
“It’s just Green Lantern, there’s no the,” Sam said. “And taking me out is never going to happen.”
Hank raised a glass. “Bottoms up,” he said.
We drank. The vodka w
as icy cold, which I wasn’t expecting. There must be a freezer in that secret compartment, I thought as the viscous liquid slid down my throat.
“Make it a double,” Hank said, holding his glass out for a refill. I wasn’t sure if there was one in every group—someone who always wanted more—or if Hank was simply making a show of his loss to an interloper. Regardless, he got the refill he asked for, along with the rest of us, and drank it down in single gulps.
Slamming his glass down on the table, Hank turned to me. “Did they teach you to play like that at Red Lobster?”
“You betcha,” I replied, slipping into my Minnesota accent. “They have poker and seafood smorgasbord every Sunday night.”
“Poker and seafood what?” Sam asked.
“Buffet, Midwestern style. Picture a long, long serving station filled with wilting vegetables, mediocre seafood, and about ten different kinds of Jell-O salad. My grandmother could make an entire meal out of Jell-O salad, especially if she forgot her dentures.”
All three boys cracked up, and I hoped I wasn’t revealing too much about myself, about where I came from. There definitely weren’t any Jell-O salads in the Brookwood servery.
“I love Jell-O salad,” Sam said with a nostalgic sigh. “My aunt makes an awesome cranberry one every Thanksgiving.”
We were all silent as the Absolut seeped in and we pondered the glories of Jell-O. Then Penn put the vodka away, closing the compartment door with a soft thud, and pulled out a roll of Pep O Mint Life Savers. Unwrapping several at once, he handed them out.
“Are you going to shuffle those cards, Subzero?” he asked. “Hank’s the dealer from here on out. If we don’t give him something to do, he’ll drink all the booze.”
“Dude,” Hank protested. His blue eyes were slightly bloodshot, which made him seem a tiny bit vulnerable.
Sam laughed. “It’s true.”
I handed over my shot glass and got to work shuffling the cards. I folded early on the next hand, and the hand after that. If there was one thing I’d learned from my dad when it came to poker, it was better safe than sorry. Unless you were feeling devious and tried to bluff—in that case all bets were off.
Which is what happened on the hand after that. I went all in with nothing but a pair of eights and bluffed the boys out of another huge pot, nearly taking Penn out of the game and making a very big dent in Sam’s earlier winnings. As I organized my hoard of chips into neat little piles, I felt excited for the first time since I’d arrived at Brookwood. And it wasn’t just the winning, or having some extra cash. It was having fun and being myself. It was feeling comfortable. It was nobody in the room thinking I was detrimentally weird. Or if they did, they didn’t seem to mind.
On the next hand, I miraculously got a full house before I even saw the last card, and bet heavily. That marked the end of the game for Penn, and almost the end for Sam.
“Well, gentlemen, I believe it’s time to move on to the next event of the evening.”
A sharp silence descended over the room, and Hank and Sam looked to Penn, who blatantly ignored them as he opened a drawer in the coffee table and pulled out some sort of map.
Hank turned his back to me and leaned toward Penn. “Dude, what are you doing?”
“Getting out the map.”
“Not cool.”
I fidgeted, not quite understanding what was going on, but that it was uncomfortable and clearly had something to do with me. My gaze landed on a small, shabby stuffed animal—a rhino, I guessed, on a shelf above one of the desks. It was old, and quite adorable.
Penn lifted a corner of the map and gestured with his chin to the table. “Do you see the chips sitting in front of her?”
“I’m not blind,” Hank replied. “But she’s—”
I stood, whacking my shin on the coffee table. “Hey, guys, I think it’s time for me to head back to my dorm,” I said. I didn’t want to go, but things were suddenly tense and I really didn’t want to contribute to that. The last hour and a half had been way too fun.
Penn raised a finger in my direction. “Hold on a sec.” Whether to me or to the guys, I had no idea, but I dutifully sat back down in the weary armchair.
“Yes, Subzero is, quite obviously, a girl. But I would like to suggest that she is not your typical Brookwood female.”
Thank goodness for that.
“Let’s consider the facts. She climbed up to Horace Brookwood Tower alone, in a tree, with no prodding whatsoever. She made it through the window in a dress with no fuss and subsequently whupped our asses in Hold’em.”
“Speak for yourself,” Sam objected.
“A technicality,” Penn maintained. “Not to mention the two shots of Absolut she consumed, which appeared to go down like water and, as far as we can tell, had no effect on her cardplaying whatsoever. If you ask me, there is no question regarding her worthiness.”
“Four is too many,” Sam said.
“Three was too many,” Penn replied. “You were the third.”
Hank leaned back on the sofa, crossing his arms across his chest. “Sam’s your roommate. And he’s a geek,” he added. “No offense, Sam.”
“None taken.”
Penn ran a finger across the map.
“A fourth person would only add thirty-three percent additional mass,” Sam calculated.
“Less, actually,” Penn said. “She’s small. And we know she can climb. She might actually come in handy.”
I bristled. What was I, a Leatherman?
Hank sighed and ran a hand through his dusty-blond hair. “This isn’t right.”
“Do we need to review the code?” Penn asked quietly.
“No!” Sam and Hank chorused.
Code? What code? I was feeling very confused. Maybe Penn was wrong when he said that the vodka’d had no effect on me.
“I’m good,” Sam said.
Hank rubbed his bloodshot eyes and exhaled in resigned disgust. “Fine. She’s in.”
The next thing I knew, I was following three boys down the HBT dormitory hallway to the stairs. Hank went in front and made sure there were no faculty around, signaling when it was safe to proceed. We passed a couple of boys I’d seen on campus but didn’t really know, and they waved casually. Apparently, girls in the boys’ dorms without permission were as commonplace as vodka shots.
The stairs dumped us in the basement at the end of a long hall, and the trio of boys turned en masse and moved effortlessly to the far end, where they rounded a corner and stopped just outside an institutional metal door with a large lock and no handle. “Okay, Sammy,” Penn murmured. “Work your magic.”
Penn and Hank strolled away from the door as if they had decided to head back in the other direction, a pair of casual strollers. I trailed behind, forcing myself not to peer at whatever Sam was doing. It wasn’t like me to follow a bunch of boys around like a puppy, but I was seriously curious and also having a good time. If I was going to follow anyone at Brookwood, the boys seemed a lot more fun than the girls.
I heard a soft click behind me, like a latch coming undone. “All clear,” Hank whispered as Sam swung the door open. I peered beyond him and saw a long tunnel with giant pipes running along one side at eye level, disappearing into the darkness. A wave of stale, dry, but slightly sweet heat whooshed out to greet us.
All at once I understood. Sam had just unlocked a door to the steam tunnels, and we were going in.
“In we go.” Penn made an “after you” gesture with his hands. I stepped back slightly, trying to ignore the opening’s resemblance to a giant black maw. “Um, quickly,” he added.
I felt a little woozy as I stepped into the hissing darkness, instantly swathed in a dank heat.
“Incoming!” Hank whispered, hurtling himself into the tunnel and practically crashing into me.
Sam grabbed the edge of the door, closing it behind us just as the chatty voices of passing students reached our ears.
“That was close,” Penn said. His voice sounded muffled and echoe
y all at once, thanks to the concrete surroundings and close quarters.
And then the latch clicked shut.
“Whooooooo,” Hank said creepily, sending shivers up my spine.
“Cut it out,” Penn chided while someone got whacked on the arm.
“Hey,” Sam objected.
“Missed.” Hank laughed.
“Whatever. Cut it out,” Penn said. I heard something rustle and a beam of light illuminated his face. “Take this.” He handed me a headlamp before pulling two more out of his backpack and giving one to Sam.
“You’re shorting me?” Hank said in clear complaint.
“Josie’s new. She needs a light.”
“So give her yours.” Even in the near dark, I could see Hank’s annoyed expression, the challenge in his raised chin.
“I can’t. I go first.”
“She can have mine,” Sam said. “I only need light when I’m picking locks.”
Sam handed over the headlamp while his words sank in. There would be more lock picking, evidently. I shivered in the steam, unable to ignore that I had somehow gone from homesick mess to brokenhearted, rule-breaking hooligan in the space of a few hours.
Penn started to move along the tunnel, making a right turn after about twenty yards. “Be careful, Subzero,” he said. “The steam in some of these pipes is over two hundred and fifty degrees, and there’s no way to tell which ones are hot and which are cold. And you don’t want to get tangled up in the electric cables, either.”
He didn’t need to tell me twice. I could feel the heat emanating from the giant steam pipe several inches from my head, and the snakelike mass of cables on the floor didn’t leave much room to walk. A vintage knit dress was clearly not the attire of choice for this sort of thing, but at least I was wearing sneakers. I focused on not weaving while Penn moved like a speed-walker, chasing the beam of light that stretched out of the darkness in front of us.
“Almost there.”
Almost where? I wondered. I was trying not to notice the trickle of sweat running down my back and just put one foot in front of the other when Penn halted abruptly and I careened into his back, losing my balance.
Without Annette Page 9