The basement reminds Gillian of a dungeon from an old fable, a carefully hidden place to hide a dragon or a knight or a slowly decaying rose. Walls covered in smears of old paint and what may or may not be mold entrap her, the laundry machine quietly whirring in her ears. The line for the bathroom feels interminable, group after group of drunk girls in bright blue and yellow sweatshirts impatiently waiting for relief. The bathroom—which is really just a toilet in an empty, concrete room—lies lurking in the corner, the holding cell for young women purging their previous two hours, friendships made with fingers down each other’s throats. 

Gillian pulls the sleeves of her sweatshirt down to cover her hands, concealing the blood trickling down from her pointer finger. The raw, aching skin around her cuticles pulses as she continues to peel further, deeper, pressing the fabric into her exposed vessels. A smattering of Greek letters sprawl across the wall beside her, an inescapable reminder of who is in charge here. Blood drips from her finger and onto the ground, creating a small, dark spot next to Gillian’s matted fuzzy boots. She curls her hand into itself, attempting to contain the flow of blood exclusively to her own skin. 

“Hey, I think you’re bleeding,” a voice says behind her. 

She turns around, pressing her nails further into her palm; she could hear the gravelly ignorance of his voice. 

“Oh, just a paper cut,” she smiles, reflexively pulling out the same rehearsed response she’d been using since middle school, when this all began. 

“Um, I think there’s some on your mouth, too. Sorry,” he whispers. Gillian touched her fingers to her lip, the sore from weeks ago still healing, blood dripping across her teeth.

“Shit,” she mutters, turning back to the endless bathroom line. 

She wipes her mouth with her sleeve, smearing red onto the pale yellow sweater she had been saving for precisely this occasion. She found it in an enormous pile of discarded clothing at the ValueWorld in the town over, a vital establishment roughly overrun with sorority girls searching for a new variation of the same outfit, dying to be interesting and insistent on remaining mostly uniform. The sweater, knitted with a small teddy bear embroidered in the spot where Gillian’s heart raced persistently, was four dollars. Mary insisted it was perfect; it aligned with expectations while slightly subverting them. Great for photos they would post later, the dried blood on Gillian’s chin dutifully edited out.

“It’s chill,” he shrugs. “Halloween vibes.” Drool drips down his chin, exhaling remnants of plastic-bottle grade vodka into the air between them. 

“Are you, um, a brother?” She asks, the verbiage alone sending her into a spiral of discomfort. 

“Pledge,” he says. “I’m rushing a few other frats, so this is kind of a backup. Don’t tell anyone I said that,” he smirked, running his hands through his greasy, unwashed hair. 

“Oh, cool,” was all Gillian knew to say, the intricacies of becoming a part of this mess unbeknownst to her. She heard rumors about the beatings and the binging and even the forced consumption of goldfish; more than that, she knew the cute albeit exhausted freshman wearing a Michigan-themed onesie and Timberland boots was not going to share much more. 

The bathroom line finally moves, a sigh of relief emanating from the crowd. The boy moves closer to her, out of rhythm with the rest of the line. 

“Sam,” he smiles. 

“Gillian,” she looks up at him, her eyes locking with his through her glasses. 

His eyes immediately widen, taking a step back and stumbling into a group of girls in identical sweatshirts with their collective logo embossed on their chests. 

 “Oh shit,” he laughs, shaking his head. “It’s you.”

Gillian freezes; Sam could have been referring to a multitude of identifying incidents since she first walked through the doors of the crumbling green and white house above. She presses her jagged nails deeper into her palm, creating small, moon-shaped dents that would sting for the hours following. 

The decaying wooden floor upstairs creaks, the noise drifting down into the dingy basement. The same few songs play in a loop from a speaker in the kitchen, lyrics about champagne and cocaine and bitches rattling the house full of barely post-adolescents. A girl, wearing a bikini top with a knit sweater draped over to account for the chilly Michigan Octobers, turns to the wall and vomits. A bright pink smears across the wall, concealing small notes written in Sharpie from fraternal generations prior. 

“Sorry, I’m so sorry,” she stumbles, tears streaming down her face. “You’re so pretty,” she weeps, facing Gillian. 

“Oh, sweetie, it’s okay,” her friend coos, wiping the girl’s mouth with her sweatshirt. “It literally happens to everyone.”

Gillian smiles halfheartedly, unable to look away but too preoccupied to get involved. Sam clocks his head, mustering the little brain power he held at that moment to consider his options. He moves even closer to her, following the path of yet another group of girls shuffling into the bathroom and attempting to lock the splintered door. 

“You know Josh,” he laughs. “Well, used to.”

She sighs, wishing he had known her for the time she threw up on the DJ stand or peed herself dancing. 

“Um, a little, yeah,” she shrugs, the three tequila shots from earlier pumping through her body, slowing the response she had practiced in the mirror countless times. “I think we took Intro to Sociology together, but it was on Zoom.”

Sam laughs, grabbing a half-empty beer from the floor and taking an unabashed sip. 

“Whatever you say,” he whispers, taking another step towards her, their matching boots nearly touching. 

Gillian twirls her hair nervously, the blood from her fingers streaking through her pale blonde locks. She shuffles backwards, moving towards the bathroom as another hoard of sloppily identical outfits stumble out the door and up the concrete stairs. One girl, the only one wearing earmuffs instead of the prescribed navy winter hat with a yellow pom-pom, stops her tracks at Gillian’s feet. 

“Hey wait,” she peers up at Gillian. “I know you,” she says, as if she’s asking herself and Gillian a question. She points at the blood on Gillian’s chin as her friends drag her away, rolling their eyes.

“Sorry, she’s just really drunk,” another girl smiles, linking arms with her friend as they collectively stomp back to the backyard. 

“You’re good!” Gillian chimes, a familiar, exaggeratedly friendly exchange. “I get it.”

She turns back to Sam, his bright blue eyes glossed over with consistent drinking since six that morning. A night game, she remembers, the weekend before thousands of young adult-adjacents would mine their collective digital culture and parents’ Amazon Prime accounts to assemble a last-minute costume. Gillian loved the holiday as a child, looking for excuses to communicate her imminent desire to be absolutely anybody else. She felt safest in haunted houses, cloaked in a shared understanding that on this particular day, everybody was as terrified as she was. 

“You know,” Sam hesitates. “You’re actually kinda cute.”

Actually, Gillian assumes, is the result of her name’s passage around the majority of low-tier fraternities on campus. Actually, she thinks: I never asked for this. She smiles smugly with the same profound insincerity she typically reserves for the mirror in her bedroom.

“I’m a junior,” she whispers. “If you don’t mind.”

Sam shakes his head, grabbing her hips as the laundry machine grinds to a stark halt. The music upstairs crescendoes, the amateur DJ’s half-hearted attempt at creativity. She puts a hand lightly on his waist, gentle enough to remain suggestive without seeming overly eager. They move together to close the gap between them and the increasingly horrifying bathroom, their shared desire for each other superseding the unseemly combination of human excrement pooled outside the door. 

A scrawny boy in a basketball jersey, impossibly young enough to be in high school, knocks into Gillian as he exits. 

“Be careful in there, bro,” he nods at Sam, peering over at Gillian as she nervously wiped the crusted blood off her bottom lip. Sam hands him the half-drunk beer, the can mostly crushed by previous passersby as they, too, waited in line for nothing. 

Finally, Gillian thinks. 

Sam unlatches from her to open the door, immediately darting over to the stained, seatless toilet. He unzips his onesie, the sound of a stream echoing in Gillian’s ears as turns around to close the door. She quietly twists the lock on the door, jiggling the handle to ensure its effectiveness. She wonders if she is the first to even attempt the lock, the unabashed shamelessness of drunkenness feigning ignorance. 

Sam zips his onesie back up, ignoring the knocked-over soap on the grimy sink and immediately turning back to Gillian. He cups the sides of her face, wiping the blood off gingerly with his fingers.

“You’re really sexy,” he grins, leaning in towards her ear. 

“Have you ever told someone that before?” she whispers.

He shakes his head. “Only in my dreams,” he sighs, leaning in to kiss her. 

Their lips brush against each other, flecks of dried blood floating through the air. Gillian places her hand on his cheek, the raw underlayer of her skin burning against the grain of his juvenile stubble. He immediately presses his tongue into her mouth, pushing through her with a force unbeknownst to anyone who has legitimate romantic or sexual experience. 

“You like that,” he whispers, a statement rather than a question. She pulls him closer, opening her mouth wider to make space for him. She allows him the illusion of pleasure, pressing into him with the mimicked intensity of somebody who knows what they want and where to get it. She unzips his onesie, revealing a stained Brentwood High School Class of 2020 t-shirt. 

She pulls away slightly, locking eyes with him as she gleams with artificial adoration. There is a small pimple above his lip, teeming with blood as it threatens to pop. She doesn’t know if she’s ever seen anyone this young, his naivety dripping from his every pore. 

She hates this part. 

She kisses his cheek softly, sorry for his irresistibility. She moves down towards his pale, veiny neck, blood still crusting over the edges of her mouth. She presses into his skin, a small purple mark forming at the very top of his chest. Her thirst overtakes her draining sensibilities, his quiet moans only another reason to go deeper. 

She pierces the skin slowly and precisely, so as not to make a mess. Though if this bathroom were covered in blood, she doubts a soul would notice until the first person, early to the next pregame, came down here partially sober. 

Sam’s eyes widen, his unkempt eyebrows stretching towards his temples. 

“What the fuck are you…” he drifts off, already in and out of consciousness over the edge of his last beer. 

Gillian is uncharacteristically discrete today, self-aware enough to avoid further damaging her reputation. With Logan she was messy, with Zack she was sloppy, even with the rarity of Annabelle she assumed stupidity from her shockingly cognizant peers. Sure, it wasn’t particularly easy to get into school here, but Gillian believed she could spot dim-wittedness from anywhere on campus. Sometimes, when it got particularly lonely, she snuck up to the bell tower to watch from above, the overgrown haircut of boys like Sam blatantly obvious even from the sky above. 

Her body presses into him further, her mind racing with the consequences of her inability to just stop. His thick, dark blood rushes onto her tongue, a rush of satisfaction streaming through her veins despite her quiet resistance. Her teeth ache as they stretch out further, their sharp ends covered in a concoction of their combining blood. Where Sam ends and Gillian begins, she no longer knows. 

Sam, the confidence of a future fraternity brother coursing through his limited mind, pushes Gillian against the wall. The two small holes in his neck drip forcefully, his blue onesie now stained with a perverse, ugly purple. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, tears forming at the corners of her eyes. 

She shoves Sam off of her, slamming his head against the wall hard enough to keep him quiet for a while. She moves her way back down to his neck, sopping up all she missed in the few seconds they were separated. He groans halfheartedly, his body exhausted by their collective, tyrannical raid against it. 

She takes just enough from him to feel satiated, knowing he will later wake up with only a faint memory of her existence. His eyes roll back towards his forehead, a small foam forming at the intersection of his lips. She grabs a paper towel roll from the floor and presses it into the pierced skin, hoping to stop the bleeding from further incriminating her. She was numb to the minor isolation her condition required, but the destruction of her reputation would leave her desolate, unable to fulfill a twisted promise to herself she never asked to bear. 

She drags him over to the toilet, his head hanging nearly into the bowl if not for her hands holding his cheeks once again. She sticks her fingers down his throat, the forcefulness shaking him awake. His throat burned as he slowly awoke, a sickly brown substance pouring out of his mouth. He croaks as she presses her fingers deeper into his mouth, her bloody nails now covered in that morning’s orange juice and vodka. He breathes heavily as she retreats, slowly reawakening into a semi-purgatorial state. 

“What…” he begins as she moves him away from the toilet and against the wall. The staccatoed flush jolts his eyes roll into awareness as Gillian dabs at his onesie with a wet paper towel, hopeful the blood will be perceived as the normal result of gameday drinking gone too far. She stuffs the paper towels into her sleeves, curling her hands shut to keep them from falling through the cuffs. 

“It’s okay,” she smiles, holding the side of his face. “You’re okay.”

And then she stands up, quickly washing her hands before she silently unlocks the door unscathed. 

“He’s fine,” she waves at the girls next in line. “He’s just blacked.”

They nod knowingly, pushing through into the bathroom unbothered. They step over his legs to get to the toilet, unzipping their jeans before the door is fully closed. Gillian walks past the line, even longer now, and heads upstairs, for the first time that day, to the party. 

Dozens of boys, appearing too prepubescent to be actual college students, trip over the shoes of girls who spent hours shaping their appearance to their twisted hunger. Gillian grabs a beer from the counter, her first of the day nearly six hours after the rest of the crowd had begun. She smiles politely at acquaintances, Brians and Lucys and Rachels, drawing minimal attention to her appearance as she licks the leftovers off her teeth. 

“Gillian!” Mary smiles, waving her over to a corner mostly overtaken by a U-Haul, girls posing on its roof for a constantly flashing digital camera. They shift—one sitting, one standing, one hands up—between poses, their effervescent innocence radiating through the empty truck. Gillian stares up at them longingly, inexperienced in the liberation of simple, unwavering contentment. 

“What, you want pictures up there?” Mary asks, taking another sip of her seltzer as the previous one bubbled up in her throat.

“No, no,” she smiles. “You know I’m scared of heights.”

The combined music from each house on Church Street bleeds into the air, an intoxicating potion of songs everyone knows the words to but nobody can truly decipher. Gillian squeezes Mary’s hand as she steps onto the wooden elevated surface at the center of the backyard, the DJ transitioning into the song famous for its use at the third quarter of every Michigan football game. 

Hoards of students sing loudly around her, engulfing her in the sound of a shared joy she has no genuine knowledge of. She mouths the words, she knows them well, but no sound comes out. She throws her hands up in the air, feigning the appearance of someone who has the capacity to love this place. 

As the song intensifies—it started out with a kiss, how did it end up like this?—a potent anger boils up inside the deepest pockets of Gillian’s psyche. She breathes heavily, her hand beginning to shake as the beer can slips out and slams onto the ground. She looks up at the sky, an ominous, overbearing gray, and begins to scream.

It is the loudest she has ever attempted to communicate with the world, her throat searing with an uncontrollable mental exorcism. She reaches her arms out, her screeches getting higher as they pierce the air unceasingly. Her body aches, the high Sam provided starting to wear off. She jumps up and down to the bass, screaming to the tune of a song she never learned the words to. 

Around her, crowds of friends and lovers and acquaintances chatter on, protected from the monster living and playing among them. A couple drunkenly fights about something they won’t remember, a group of freshman boys give overly touchy hugs to everyone in sight, a clique of senior girls cry at the thought of this experience belonging to someone else one day. Nobody can hear Gillian as her own sound forcefully knocks the breath out of her, heaving in between shrieks. She turns her gaze back to her peers, screaming in faces that cannot—or will not—perceive her. 

The back door opens, swinging to ricochet back into the kitchen. Out stumbles a boy, found passed out in the bathroom, leftover blood streaking his Adult Small onesie. His eyes pierce Gillian’s with conviction, small trickles of blood spilling out from under his t-shirt. He walks towards the DJ stand, grabs the shoulders of two other boys dressed identically, and joins the party once again.