Reckless (7 page)

Yvonne and a couple of her dopey friends ran downstairs, eager to spread the good news to the other Dumbarton dorks. Tinsley smiled to herself as she strutted down the third-floor hallway, deliberately ignoring room 303. She couldn’t resist pausing for a second in front of it, however, just to see if they were talking about her. The room was quiet except for the low hum of a hair dryer. How disappointing.

An hour later, approximately twenty-five girls were crowded on the roof and sprawled out in lawn chairs, chatting excitedly. The more the girls drank, the quieter the music seemed—so the volume on the iPod sound deck had crept steadily higher. But everyone was too happy emptying the keg and dancing around the central air-conditioning unit to notice. The stars had come out, and Tinsley lay on her back on one of the padded lounge chairs next to Callie.

“You have to admit, this was a great idea.” Tinsley’s voice was dreamy, and she couldn’t help thinking that maybe the party would have been even better if some boys had been there. Namely, a tall, sexy freshman with bleached-out dirty-blond hair that hung to his chin. A perverse smile came to Tinsley’s lips just thinking about Julian.

Callie opened her mouth to reply sarcastically, but whatever she was about to say was cut off by a sudden shout from below, somewhere near the front door of Dumbarton.

“Freeze! Who’s up there?”

The girls stopped dancing, immobilized by fear.

“Don’t move! We’re coming up!”

Immediately, as if a fire had broken out or someone had announced a clearance sale at Neiman Marcus, the girls pulled open the roof door and flew down the stairs, desperate to return to their rooms before Marymount or Mrs. Pardee or whoever the hell it was out there managed to reach them. Looking almost gleeful, Tinsley scooped up her iPod sound deck and joined the mad rush down the back stairs, only remembering the nearly empty, abandoned keg when it was too late to retrieve it.

Instant Message Inbox

EmilyJenkins:
Was that really Marymount? Are we screwed?

CelineColista:
Totally.

EmilyJenkins:
My first society party and Tinsley let all the losers come up? Hello?

CelineColista:
Um … three hours ago you were one of those losers!

EmilyJenkins:
Don’t remind me.

Instant Message Inbox

YvonneStidder:
Just wanted to give you a heads-up—Marymount and Pardee are knocking on all the first-floor doors. Asked why you and Brett aren’t in your room—I said you were upstairs in Callie’s. K?

TinsleyCarmichael:
Are they asking about the party?

YvonneStidder:
Not really. Pardee looks trashed. I think Marymount crashed her girls-night party.

TinselyCarmichael:
Interesting …

Email Inbox

To:
Dumbarton Residents

From:
[email protected]

Date:
Thursday, October 3, 10:16 p.m.

Subject:
Disciplinary Committee

Residents of Dumbarton dormitory,

I am extremely disappointed to announce that tonight, after a teacher reported a noise disturbance in Dumbarton Hall, I discovered a keg of beer on the roof of the dormitory.

All residents of Dumbarton are to appear before the Disciplinary Committee. The meeting will take place in board room 3 on the first floor of Stansfield Hall tomorrow morning, at 10 a.m.

Attendance obligatory.

Dean Marymount

Brett was irritated about the last-minute Disciplinary Committee meeting, even though she did appreciate getting pulled out of her mind-numbingly dull chemistry class with Mr. Frye. At quarter to ten, just when the other students were strapping on their sweat-inducing plastic goggles and chemical-proof aprons, Brett, Benny, and Celine all gathered their things, and Professor Frye gave them an absentminded nod, his hands already full of clattering glass test tubes.

“This bites,” Celine grumbled the second the lab door closed behind them. “But at least we missed out on the goggles.” Celine’s black hair slid in front of her eyes and she touched her fingertips to her smooth olive skin. “Those things leave indentations on your forehead for, like, an hour.”

“Today was my turn with Lon Baruzza as a lab partner,” whined Benny. “You know I’ve been waiting for that forever.” She gripped her stick-straight light brown hair in her fists and tugged in anguish.

“He does have a really nice ass.” Celine pushed open the front door of the science center and the three girls headed down the steps and toward Stansfield Hall. “But you could get close to that without having to be his lab partner,” she pointed out with a giggle.

Brett rolled her eyes, her mind on other things. It had sounded like the whole freaking dorm was on the roof last night. Not that Brett
wanted
to be there or anything, but it still would have been nice if someone had asked.

Whatever. At least now she wasn’t the one in trouble. As Benny and Celine prattled on, Brett kept her face composed, knowing she looked completely innocent in her pale pink Nanette Lepore baby doll dress, black leggings, and pale gray Sigerson Morrison ballet flats. She smiled to herself. Even her nails looked nice.

Once inside the Stansfield board room, Brett headed over to the committee side of the enormous table with Benny and Celine right behind her. Rows of girls in uncomfortable-looking folding chairs stared out at her from across the room, their knees pressed together primly, maroon blazers neatly buttoned. It was weird to see so many defendants for a DC case—usually it was one or two stray delinquents, although once the whole Thespian Society had been summoned after they famously performed
Our Town
wearing only Saran wrap.

Dean Marymount, wearing a tie with Van Gogh sunflowers splattered all over it, entered the room and immediately stopped short at the sight of Brett and the other DC girls sitting on their accustomed side of the table. “Ladies.” He made a shooing gesture with his hands. “Please take a seat with the rest of your dormmates.” He gave them a withering look as if they should have known better.

Brett’s jaw dropped, and she glanced at Benny, who looked equally surprised. “Sir?” Brett spoke up. “But we … I—”

Marymount cut her off. “You three live in Dumbarton, don’t you?” Marymount didn’t wait for an answer and sat down at the end of the table, shuffling through the papers in his hands.

Well, then.
Her cheeks flushed as red as her hair, Brett stood up in a huff and headed over to where Jenny was sitting in the front row. She flopped into the empty seat next to her. “We didn’t even go to their stupid party,” she growled under her breath.

Jenny patted Brett’s arm. “It’ll be okay. What can they do? Suspend us for doing our nails in our dorm room?”

“You’ll see,” Brett replied skeptically.

Jenny’s chocolate-colored eyes looked vaguely worried as the two of them watched the room fill up with girls. It was totally weird for Brett to be on
this
side of the table. The girls were biting their manicured nails and tapping the toes of their shoes against the shiny wooden floor, whispering to each other a little too loudly.

“Asshole,” Jenny heard someone say. At the table, Ryan Reynolds and the non-Dumbarton members of the DC, mostly freshmen and sophomores, had taken their seats next to petite Miss Rose of the English Department, who had taken over as the temporary DC adviser after Mr. Dalton’s resignation. With her black turtleneck beneath her probably size-zero maroon blazer and her dark brown hair pulled back into a neat pony-tail, she could have easily passed for a freshman.

“Let’s get started, shall we?” Marymount looked tired, his round wire-rimmed glasses making his small blue eyes seem even smaller. He continued to flip through the papers in his hand, which Brett guessed had absolutely nothing at all to do with the keg bust last night. He just liked his props. “Mr. Wilde, you were the first one to notice the, um,
gathering
while walking by Dumbarton last night, correct?”

“Yes, correct.” Mild-mannered Mr. Wilde looked uncomfortable in his role as disciplinarian. He was one of those teachers who really cared whether or not his AP History students liked him, and the walls of his office were plastered with posters of album covers—not just ones from his generation, but ones the kids would respect too—OutKast, Coldplay, Interpol. He looked like it killed him to be here, getting his students in trouble. He tugged obsessively at his collar. “I was on my way home from the library when I heard some … uh … loud music. There appeared to be people dancing on the roof of the dorm.”

Marymount tapped his silver pen against the mahogany table. “What did you do next?” he prompted.

“I called security,” Mr. Wilde admitted apologetically. “Then I shouted up to the girls to stay where they were. By the time I knocked on Mrs. Pardee’s door”—he paused and blushed, and there was some twittering in the crowd of girls since everyone knew that Pardee had had some girlfriends over last night for a wine-drinking pajama party—”and the two of us got up to the roof, they’d all disappeared into their rooms.”

Marymount cleared his throat. “And so it’s not really clear how many were there—or who had been there, correct?”

“Correct,” Mr. Wilde confirmed. “But they’d left an almost-empty keg behind—and a trash bag full of plastic cups.” He took a sip from his cup of coffee.

“Were there a lot of cups?”

Brett kicked Jenny’s foot. Who cared?

“The trash bag was almost full.”

“Thank you.” Marymount flitted his eyes over the group of girls for the first time since they’d started. “Girls, I know you are all aware that the consumption of alcoholic beverages is behavior we cannot tolerate.” Brett could tell he was attempting to look sternly in each of the girls’ eyes, but he gave up halfway through and began to glare at the table. “The timing of this incident is especially unfortunate, as we are preparing to host the trustees on campus this weekend and do not have time to babysit you.” Marymount sighed, something Brett noticed that he did often during DC meetings to give the impression that he was terribly unhappy about being their headmaster in the first place. “Unfortunately, because it is not apparent who exactly the guilty parties are, we are going to have to punish you all.”

“No fucking way,” Brett gasped.

A murmur ran through the crowd, which Marymount immediately silenced by shouting over it. “Beginning tomorrow evening after dinner, you will all be under house arrest for the weekend and confined to Dumbarton Hall until Monday morning. Meals will be brought in, and any girl seen leaving the residency will face serious consequences.”

Serious consequences? What about not being able to go to Jeremiah’s homecoming game? Or out to dinner with his parents or out to the St. Lucius parties to show all those St. Lucius girls that Jeremiah was off the market? Or to lose her virginity! “This is so unfair!” Brett exclaimed loudly, though her voice was drowned out by the exclamations and complaints of the two dozen other girls.

Marymount cleared his throat and rapped his knuckles on the table. There was more? “I know there may be some of you who were not involved in the keg party, and I’m sure you think this is an unfair punishment.” A murmur of agreement went up and Marymount quickly continued.
“However,
to be aware of rule-breaking and to do nothing about it is, in the administration’s eyes, comparable to rule-breaking itself.” He looked directly at Brett as he said this, and her face flushed with anger. Not ratting on your dormmates for having a kegger was as bad as actually sneaking a keg into a dormitory and getting plastered? He had to be kidding!

For the first time, Miss Rose spoke up, her small voice surprisingly authoritative. “The committee has decided that in addition to the house arrest, the girls of Dumbarton must each hand in on Monday morning a written report on what you’ve learned about being a responsible Owl.” Ryan Reynolds, who’d been gazing affectionately at Miss Rose the whole time Marymount was talking, was now busy trying to hold back the smirk on his face, clearly amused by the whole thing. He met Brett’s gaze over the fat bowl of white carnations sitting in the middle of the table and gave her a wink. He was always skeezing on her during meetings, and he was probably all turned on by the fact that the class prefect was suddenly one of the delinquents.

But Brett was too busy being pissed off to be grossed out by Ryan. This was insane. Not only was her weekend ruined, but now she had to sit down and write some crap about what it means to be a responsible Owl? Fuck that.

“I don’t want anything like this to happen again.” Marymount stood up, looking more disgusted than Brett had ever seen him. It was like he couldn’t bear to look at them anymore, and suddenly Brett felt ashamed. Dean Marymount was a dork, of course, but she wanted him to think highly of her. Now it seemed like he thought she was just like everyone else, and she hadn’t even done anything! “You are dismissed and may return to your classes.”

A
responsible Owl?
Brett thought bitterly.
A responsible Owl shits all over Tinsley Carmichael
.

Instant Message Inbox

CallieVernon:
Ugh. This sucks.

TinsleyCarmichael:
Hey, don’t get all depressed. HF brought over six mini-kegs … they only found the tapped one on the roof.