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with a slot for a cassette player crammed full of what looked like parking tickets.
    “Do you have a purity ring or whatever?”
    Now that I was in, and the beer had loosened my lips, I said the first thing that came into my head. “I prefer to call it my hymen.”
    Tyler let out a laugh. “No, I mean one of those rings you wear on your finger . . .” He looked at me, understanding dawning. “Oh, wait, you’re being sarcastic, aren’t you?”
    I nodded.
    Which made him laugh harder. “Rory, you are an interesting chick.”
    Interesting wasn’t exactly a riveting compliment, but he hadn’t called me a freak, which was how I felt sometimes. As if I had been assembled in a different way altogether than everyone around me, and while I liked the end result, everyone else was confused about how to interpret my very existence. They watched me, suspicious, as if I were a Transformer and they were waiting for metal arms to spring out from my chest cavity.
    I didn’t think that I’d ever seen him laugh before, or maybe I had just never noticed, my attention focused on Grant, who I had thought was more likely to fall in with my plan of exploring human mating and relationships. But then again, Jessica and Kylie tended to dominate all conversation in a group setting, so maybe their own perfectly affected laughter had drowned out Tyler’s.
    But for some stupid reason, I liked to think that he was laughing just for me.
    Which was when I knew I was even more drunk than I realized and I needed to get away from him before I sat there blinking at him like a baby owl indefinitely. Before I put some sort of hero worship onto him that he might deserve, but didn’t mean a damn thing. Before I substituted one pointless crush for another.
    I shoved open the door, half falling out, clinging to the handle and the remnants of my dignity, like he could hear my stupid thoughts. “Thanks,” I said over my shoulder, barely glancing back as I exited the car, clutching my bag.
    There was no response, and when I struggled to slam the heavy door, which seemed to weigh a million pounds and required more coordination than my icy fingers had, I realized that he was just staring at me. There was a cigarette in his mouth, and he was lifting the car lighter up to it, his hand guiding it to his destination without thought. As he sucked on it to catch the paper and tobacco on fire, his eyes never left mine.
    The smile was gone. There was nothing but a cool scrutiny.
    I shivered.
    Then I walked as fast as I could to my dorm, digging in my bag for my swipe card.
    Once inside, I paused at the front desk to check in and I glanced out the front doors.
    His car was still there, and I could see the shadow of his outline, the tiny red glow of his cigarette.
    ***
    “How are you feeling?” Kylie asked, coming into our room with more noise than could possibly be necessary.
    I pried my eyes open and gave a mumbled, “Like shit,” before crawling back under my blanket. I had woken up at five in the morning and had gone into the bathroom we shared with the room next door to throw up. It had shot out like a garden hose on high, and I had slid down onto the cool tiles, regretting my lack of dinner, regretting those stupid beers that I’d only had because I was nervous being around a guy who had turned out to be a douche bag.
    None of it was logical. I didn’t do stupid things, as a rule.
    I was paying for this one. And after crawling back to my bed, soaked in sweat, I had slept restlessly off and on for hours. I had no idea what time it was when Kylie and Jessica came back, and I didn’t give a shit. I wanted to die. I would dedicate my body to science, and they could study the effects of cheap beer on socially awkward college sophomores.
    “Do you want anything?” Jessica asked.
    “A gun to shoot myself.” My head felt like someone was repeatedly taking a sledgehammer to it, and my stomach felt like the lining had been manually torn out by werewolves, and