James Games Read Online Free Page B

communication are redundant.
    Forget James Reid. There’s no way he’s as hot as my masked stranger.
    The concert was mostly students, but it was off campus, so the chances are fifty-fifty that the stranger goes to UCSD. If only I’d gotten his name. Or his major. Or any details at all. The experience was so surreal that I’m starting to wonder if someone slipped LSD in my first drink of the night and I imagined the whole thing.
    The thought makes me slightly sad. I don’t want him to be imaginary. But I don’t have to worry about it, because I have a shitty imagination, and there’s no way I could have come up with the cold, cutting line of his jaw…the lift of the muscles in his stomach…or the typhoon in his eyes.
    My hands drift lower. I hesitate—it’s hard not to feel a shadow of guilt when you grew up Amish—but when I close my eyes, I see him, and all hesitation disappears.
          
    ~4~
     
    That night, I’m shaken awake in my bed by a hooded figure.
    I immediately assume it’s a Dementor, scream, and throw Ursula at it in lieu of a Patronus. My stuffed owl friend bounces off the apparently corporeal head, and a girl’s voice hisses from beneath the hood: “Shut up and come with me.”
    That’s what I get for re-reading all the Harry Potter books this summer. I sit up, blinking the sleep from my eyes. Across the room, Iris is being hustled from her twin bed by a similar figure. My Dementor shakes my arm again, and I finally wake up enough for excitement to shoot through my veins like a drug.
    This is it. Initiation.
    I leap out of bed, my feet thudding on the wooden floor. Dementor girl hisses at me again: “You want to wake everyone up or what?”
    We’re led out of our room, Iris remembering just in time to snatch the key from her bedside table. In a few hours, I bet Campus Security will be faced by a legion of girls in their pajamas, all of whom mysteriously locked themselves out of their room tonight. I giggle and Dementor shushes me.
    The hooded girls take us down the stairs and outside the building. I have half a second to bask in the moonlit California night air before a cloth bag is yanked over my head. Beside me, Iris grumbles as she faces a similar fate.
    “Shouldn’t you have put the bags on from the beginning?” I quip as we’re led barefoot over a dew-wet lawn, me tripping every few feet.
    “A pledge broke her arm one year going down the stairs,” says Iris’s Dementor, and mine, whose only apparent goal in life is to shush people, shushes her.
    We’re bundled into a car and belted in. Somewhere, there’s probably an ex-pledge in a neck brace who shot through a window when an older sister rear-ended someone. Still blind, I jostle Iris, only to have her bark, “Fuck!” when I accidentally elbow her in the nose.
    The drive’s not long—five minutes, maybe. They must be taking us to one of the student-rented houses that ring the main campus. I can’t stop myself from bouncing in place. The fact that we’re being kidnapped like this means we’ve fulfilled our pledgeship requirements—to the most exclusive sorority at UCSD—and we’re being accepted into the fold.
    Goodbye, Amish girl with the weird last name. Hello, Fiona Arlett, Phi Delta Chi sister living it up in California.
    There’s the click of the door opening, and then I’m pulled back out onto the wet grass. I’m marched prisoner-style up a set of front steps. Iris’s guard helpfully tells her when to lift her feet, but mine doesn’t, so I limp inside the house with ten stubbed toes.
    When the bags are finally pulled off, we’re in a large candlelit room with about fifteen girls arranged in mats on the floor. I wave to Mags MacLeod, an shy asthmatic girl from my Intro to Computer Science class, but all she offers in return is a wide-eyed, solemn stare. Nobody is talking and the cult vibe is palpable. Maybe my joke about sacrificing baby goats wasn’t so far off.
    Iris and I take the last two mats