Page 27 of Night Shift

When I get home from my women’s literature seminar the following evening, there are clothes draped over the couch and an open bottle of pink lemonade on the kitchen counter. Rap music drifts from Nina’s open door. It sounds like she’s doing that phone-in-a-cup thing, which means her portable speaker must be out of charge again. The whole apartment smells of perfume, extra-strength deodorant, alcohol, and hair that’s been pulled through a straightener.

This can mean only one thing: my roommates are already pregaming for Vincent Knight’s birthday party.

“It’s not even seven!” I holler into the apartment. “You guys have zero chill!”

Nina pops out of her bedroom in her fluffy pink dressing gown (pausing to strike a pose in the doorway) and comes padding into the living room. She has a child’s paper party hat on her head. It’s way too small, and the elastic band looks like it’s strangling her, but there’s a delighted smile on her face and a flush to her cheeks that tells me she’s already too drunk to care about something as trivial as breathing.

“Zero chill, yes,” she says, “but mucho tequila. How was class?”

“Violently feminist, as usual. Where’d you get the hat?”

“They had them at the liquor store!” Harper calls a split second before she pops out of her own room in jeans and a bralette.

Harper is also wearing a party hat, although hers has had the string cut off and is held in place with an aggressive number of bobby pins. Her corkscrew curls have been painstakingly straightened into one long, silky, jet-black curtain. I’m so distracted by how gorgeous she looks that I don’t notice the enormous handle of tequila cradled in her arm like a newborn baby until she hoists it up onto the kitchen island. I’m not exactly a connoisseur of wines and spirits, but I recognize this particular brand as one that’s usually kept high up on a locked shelf at our local grocery store.

“Holy shit,” I say. “Why did you guys buy the good stuff?”

“Because it’s your boy’s birthday,” Harper says.

“He’s not my—”

“And because your virginity deserves a proper send-off,” Nina adds.

Rather than argue the second point, I steer the conversation elsewhere. “I’ve never been to the basketball team’s house. What should I be expecting there? Is it more of a wine and weed sort of kickback vibe, or a little tailgate party, or should I expect, like, fifty people?”

“Fifty?” Harper repeats with a laugh. “That’s cute, Kenny. You should expect half the fucking school to show up. Knight’s turning twenty-one. People go fucking feral when starters turn twenty-one. The basketball team dropped two grand on alcohol for tonight, and I know for a fact that every student athlete at this school is gonna be there. Also, I heard someone invited the slam poetry club, and you know how those artsy kids go wild.”

Nina nods. “True. We’re heathens.”

“The slam poetry club?” I repeat, my fingertips tracing the hollow of my collarbone.

That can’t be a coincidence, can it?

“Wait, who’d you hear all this from?” Nina asks.

Harper shrugs and picks at the label on the tequila bottle. “I may or may not have matched with Jabari Henderson on Bumble.”

Nina and I both gasp.

“What?” Harper demands, instantly on the defensive.

“Don’t girls have to message first on Bumble?” I ask.

Nina gasps again, louder. “What was your opening line?”

“I’m not talking to you right now.”

“Ooh, I like it. Keep him on the hook. Show him who’s boss.”

“I meant you, bitch.”

Harper storms back into her room with a shouted declaration that she’s taking off the hat and it better not have left kinks in her hair, because she doesn’t want to go to the trouble of heating up her flat iron again. I slide up onto one of the stools at the kitchen island. Nina shuffles to the other side and grabs a hand towel off the oven handle, draping it over one shoulder before she reaches for the plastic bag of red cups by the sink.

“What do you want, Kenny?” she asks. “I’m playing bartender.”

“I might as well just have a shot. We’ve got the good stuff, right?”

We turn on a pregame playlist that has Harper’s favorite dance music (and Nina’s favorite Spanish rap that she knows all the words to) and we each have a shot (and then another) before we move the party to Nina’s room. She lets me borrow her lucky going-out shirt—a long-sleeved black bodysuit with a plunging V-neck that dips right down to my sternum—and Harper gives me free rein over her extensive collection of makeup (except the foundations and concealers, since those are nowhere near my shade). I swipe on winged eyeliner and red lipstick like it’s battle armor, because I meant what I said to Vincent Knight the night we met.

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