“A bunch of our friends will be there. We’ll stick close to them. We’ll be fine. But look out for more guys like Rod, they litter the ground.”

Mia looked down at her watch. “It’s been going on for a while now, so we’ll have some catching up to do. Good grief, listen.” They were a block away from the Delta Rho Phi house when they heard the music—a heavy metal band playing on the frat house sound system at a gazillion decibels, crashing through the air. Mia would bet the frat house was shaking from the force of it. They heard voices shouting to be heard over the music, and the manic laughter of people well on their way to being drunk, or high on something.

They wove their way through dozens of students from the hallway into the large common room of the seventy-five-year-old Delta Rho Phi fraternity house. It was a huge old colonial that housed a lot of horny boys who studied only when they were shackled to their desks by looming deadlines. A frat house for academics it wasn’t.

All the furniture was shoved to the edges of the room, and about forty boys and girls with beers or glasses of gin or the house specialty, the recipe known only to Delta Rho Phi, vodka-laced lemonade, in their hands were gyrating to the deafening music provided by a DJ who looked like he’d been feeling no pain for quite a while already. Mia smelled the lemons as she slipped into the chaos, spotted friends, and accepted a beer. She and Serena stuck close to them for about thirty minutes, but by ten o’clock, most everyone had sailed past drunk from the specialty of the house. The music seemed to get louder and louder, the dancing wilder. At least seventy-five close-packed kids were on the dance floor, going crazy.

Mia was drunk, maybe not as drunk as most of the others, but she was getting there, laughing, dancing in place with whatever student was getting close, slurping up a delicious deadly drink the frat boys called a Crazy Mary. The boy next to her was glassy-eyed he was so drunk, and even that made her laugh. She’d kissed off two frat guys she’d seen on campus because she could tell they were jerks like Rod only out to score. She admitted to herself it’d be nice to meet a guy who wasn’t as drunk as the rest, but good luck with that.

Serena was talking with a guy she’d met, a bit older, probably a grad student. He was another gamer, Serena told her as she hugged Mia on their way back from the bathroom. He was smart and funny, and “how lucky is that?” she said.