Page 65 of Out of Bounds

"You can hang out down here," I assured him. "You can romp and play and make friends with the broken furniture. I’ll be right back."

Ryan gazed at me for a long moment. He didn’t say anything. He just picked up the button for the elevator and pressed it in until it glowed faintly. "I’m going upstairs."

"No. You’re not."

"I have to see your dorm eventually," he pointed out, like there was ever any reason he needed to walk into the place thatIdidn’t even like going into.

"It’s better for your spiritual well-being if you don’t."

He didn’t say anything. He just waited for the rickety elevator doors to open.

I breathed out through my nose and stepped inside with him. "I need you to understand something. It’s not dry-cleaned jerseys and pristine locker rooms."

"Okay."

"I live with all art students."

"Alright."

"Oh, lord," I muttered, and when the elevator doors opened, I made my way across the hall, fishing the keys from the pocket of my overalls. This was not going to go well. "I’ll be in and out, okay? Just wait outside. All I need to do is find my book."

It was like talking to a brick wall. Ryan stepped next to me and I fumbled with the keys, embarrassed. If I had known that he was coming up, I would’ve done something crazy like steal a key for an empty room in the dorm and just played it off like Zariah and I slept on the floor. Because nothing could prepare Ryan for this.

26

Ryan

A Glittery, Fucking Nightmare

The door swung open and I restrained the anticipation. While Kassie went hunting for her book, I wanted to scan the dorm and get all the information I could out of it. This was better than the memory packet. A grin crossed my face as the door creaked and bumped against the wall.

The grin disappeared. I held out a hand and stopped the door from swinging back at me.

"What the hell?" I muttered under my breath, stepping inside.

This place is a fucking nightmare.

The locker rooms, the lounges at the training center, myowndorm, were all things I prided myself on for being presentable. It was part of keeping everything together. It was part of being one of the top football teams in the nation and part of how we would win the Birchwood Bowl.

Their dorm was about as far as you could get from that.

Zariah sat at the kitchen bar with her laptop. She leaned over the column to look at me. "Hey, Ryan! Welcome to hell."

There wasn’t a better description.

Stuffed animals hung off the tallest part of the wall, halfway held up by nails as long as my thumb. Rusty stop signs and road signs were tacked on the other side, lopsided. Every electronic device either flickered or made a noise it shouldn’t have been. The door to the guest bathroom had a huge, gaping hole punched into it where a door knob used to be, a slight burning smell was emitting from the TV with half of a black screen, and a unicycle was propped up against it with its tire blown out.

Beyond that was the paint. Paint everywhere. Paint tossed on the walls, splattered on any of the thousands of things that’d been taped up, paint sloshed out to the floor and dried over time. And the papers. The fucking papers all over the place, stuffed in every crevice imaginable.

"Kassie and I are innocent," Zariah told me while I walked into the kitchen.

The sink had two enormous tubs of what looked like clothes getting dyed. Every cabinet hung open on broken hinges. Empty. Not even dust in there. The fridge light sputtered when I opened it but the only things inside were boxes of craft supplies.

"It’s month-to-month rent," Zariah tried to explain. "New people come in all the time and fuck it up. We tried to keep up with it but Kassie was working so much and I’m not taking my dad’s money right now. We’ve given up. But the rent’s cheap."

One of the drawers was named ‘knives’ and when I tugged it open, it crashed to the ground, empty. I glanced up at Zariah, beyond words.

She winced. "Don’t touch the ‘knives’ drawers. That’s our code. That means they’re not working right."

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