Page 25 of Snitches and Serpents

Hope flares in my chest. A drug test. Yes. That will clear me.

I nod enthusiastically. “Yes, of course.”

That only seems to make Davidson more suspicious, but he doesn’t comment on it. Instead, he just jerks his chin at me to get going. I flick a glance down at my flimsy pajamas. Heat sears my cheeks again.

Clearing my throat, I look between Davidson and his colleagues. “Can I please put some clothes on first?”

It looks like Davidson wants to refuse, but the woman nods and replies, “Of course.”

She waits in my bedroom with me while I change into proper clothes. As if they’re worried that I’m going to try to flee. The thought of it is so absurd that I almost laugh. What do they think I’m going to do? Climb out the window and scale the side of a building?

Once I’m wearing a skirt and a button-down shirt, I feel better. This will all be resolved in no time. They will do the drug test and realize that I was telling the truth. And then they will apologize and let me go. No problem.

Giving myself a nod, I walk out the door and into the corridor.

The moment I have left my bedroom, my newfound confidence crumbles like a castle made of sand.

Brandi and half of the other girls are standing there in the hallway, watching me.

Suddenly, it’s difficult to breathe. I try to swallow past the desperation clogging my throat, but it barely works.

“This is just a misunderstanding,” I say to Brandi while Davidson starts us down the hall.

Brandi says nothing. Only looks back at me with hard blue eyes.

The other girls watch me with expressions varying from confusion to disappointment to wariness as I walk past them and continue down the stairs with three members of campus police around me. I have never been more embarrassed in my life.

“It’s a misunderstanding,” I call back up to them as panic shoots through me again. “It will be cleared up in no time. I promise.”

Turns out that it was in fact not cleared up in no time. I spent most of the day sitting at a table in an otherwise mostly empty room while Davidson stared at me from the other side of it and tried to get me to admit that the drugs were mine.

Even when the drug test came back clean late that afternoon, he wouldn’t accept that I was innocent. It almost felt as if he had a personal vendetta against me. Or against people like me, at least. He kept insisting that I was at least guilty of owning drugs.

Since I’m pretty sure that I know who the drugs came from, though I still can’t figure out how he got them into my room, I wanted to just scream to the whole world that it was Tristan Kane. But I couldn’t. Because I don’t have any actual proof of it. It would just be my word against his. And the moment Davidson asks me to explain how Tristan managed to plant the drugs in my room, my whole argument would fall apart. Because I have no answer to that question.

But I know that it was him.

Somehow it was him.

So I latched onto that anger and used it to sustain myself while I kept repeating over and over again that the drugs weren’t mine.

In the end, I was released with a warning.

The fact that I now have a drug incident on my university record makes me want to throw up. But at least they didn’t report it to the actual police.

Now, I just have one more awful thing to do before I can go to bed and pretend that this mortifying day never happened.

Face my sorority.

I draw in careful breaths to calm the panic pulsing inside me as I close the final distance to our front door. I have barely eaten anything today, and right now, I’m glad I haven’t. Because my stomach is rolling.

After taking one more moment to compose myself, I push down the handle and open the door.

My heart drops.

Ice spreads through my veins as I stare at the items waiting for me in the short hallway beyond.

My suitcases.

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