No one else was at the house except Vic Billings, in bed with a terrible cold, and the freshman pledge everyone called Ansel Adams. Ansel lived in the dorms still. There were no rooms for freshmen at the house, but he seemed to be there every minute anyway. He was already on academic probation, which meant he was banned from parties until his grades came up. Some of the brothers hoped they wouldn’t. The general consensus was that this mandatory legacy was a dork, pretentious and sniffy.

Ansel drooped disconsolately in the rec room with Spence and Trey, not studying, bemoaning the loss of the party until they threw a barrage of crushed empties at him. He shut up and busied himself taking pictures of the raindrops on the basement’s high-set, narrow windows.

Trey and Spence were both halfway to blasted by the time Lexie showed up. Trey hadn’t known she was coming over, but Spence’s Cheshire-cat grin, the way he said, “Oh, look. It’s Lexie,” made it clear that he was not surprised.

She accepted a beer to hold and gave Trey her tip-tilted smile, lips closed. She always smiled like that because her teeth were a little crooked and the canine on the right was chipped. Her musty clothes were damp with rain and her blond hair had darkened with it. She was so pretty.

The three of them sat on the sectional talking. Trey was too drunk to feel awkward, even though Lexie was between them, and whenever she turned to Trey, Spence flashed that devil hand sign over her head. Across the room Ansel was snapping shots of the crushed beer cans they had chucked at him. When that got old, he drifted closer, but he was smart enough to keep his mouth shut; they had accumulated quite a bit more ammo.

Then Spence asked her, “Did you bring us a present?”

When she nodded, he went rummaging in Lexie’s jeans pockets, making her giggle. He pulled out a Baggie of dried mushrooms, and he and Lexie each ate a couple. Trey, whose entire drug experience was limited to three bumper snorts of coke, was drunk enough to eat one, too. Spence, who’d hit the magnanimous stage of his inebriation, even offered one to Ansel. He turned them down.

The colors in the room grew brighter and louder and more luminous. Trey had never seen so many colors. He couldn’t quite remember the names of some of them. Lexie set her beer aside—she’d barely touched it anyway—and started swishing her hands through the air, dancing them, leaving trails of a thousand hands, all rainbow-colored. She smiled that tilted, closed-mouth smile, eyes shining.

“I like your hair,” Lexie said to Trey. She touched it, tentatively, then petted it, then let her fingers ripple through it. “It’s so gold. It feels like something Rumplestumpskin spun.”

“Rumblestilskit,” Trey corrected, then realized that was also wrong.