Whistleblower ✓

44 | pollock (part one)

Miraculously, my white shorts still fit. There was no logical explanation for it, but I'd learned not to question miracles when they landed in my lap (or squeezed over my hips).

Hanna and I turned on some pregame tunes and pulled open the kitchen window, letting cool evening air drift in while we readied ourselves for the evening's festivities. The flat iron was hot, our faces were primed, and every article of white clothing we owned was laid out on our beds.

Pollock was always a wild night. Freshman year, when Andre and Hanna and I were bright-eyed and naive, we'd chugged so much Bacardi that we'd woken up in Hanna's dorm room with five stolen traffic cones and an unmarked styrofoam box of waffle fries, the origins of which haunted us to this day (none of the restaurants near campus did waffle fries, and there were no Uber receipts indicating we'd ventured off-campus to find them—not that an Uber driver would've taken us anywhere, drenched in blacklight paint as we'd been).

Sophomore year, we'd been older and wiser. We'd paced ourselves. And still, Hanna and I had ended up on the roof of the Jewish House—on the other end of the Rodeo—cheering on paint-splattered streakers. Meanwhile, Andre had smoked pot for the first time. He'd eaten an entire stick of salami and then passed out in soaked clothes on the couch in Mehri Rajavi's room.

Tonight, it was time for Pollock, round three.

Woman's intuition drove me to spend a solid four minutes brushing my teeth before I popped a handful of mints. Just in case.

"Han?" I asked when my breath was almost unbearably minty fresh. "Can you help me with hair and makeup?"

I pulled one of our dinky IKEA chairs into the bathroom so I could sit in front of the mirror while Hanna fluttered around me, using whatever clips and scrunchies we could find to aid her in the battle to tame my hair.

"You smell like a toothpaste factory," Hanna mumbled as she worked.

"Thank you?"

"No, no. It's good. Bodie will like it."

I made a wheezing sound like a horse choking on an apple.

Hanna met my eyes in the mirror and beamed at me.

"You haven't kissed him again, have you?" she asked as she sectioned off another chunk to be straightened.

"No," I admitted quietly, twisting a hair-tie in between my fingers as I watched steam rise from the flat iron. "Remember that time I told you about? When he said he was working on it. Like on making me his girlfriend?"

"Oh, I remember."

"So he said that, but then I feel like there've been opportunities, and he hasn't made a move. That has to mean something, right?"

"Yeah," Hanna said, dumping the flat iron back on the counter with a flourish. "It means you're both little bitches."

I turned, pulled back the hair-tie, and shot it at the mirror. It ricocheted and hit her in the forehead.

Our laughter was interrupted when my phone buzzed on the cluttered bathroom counter, momentarily muting our pregame tunes.

Andre had texted: Just parked!!! We got the goods

"Boys are back," I announced.

Plural. Ugh. It felt weird.

I ducked back into the bathroom for a final once-over.

"Do you want a shot before they get here?" Hanna asked, appearing in the doorway with a handle of Fireball in one hand.

"No," I said on a heavy exhale. "I think I'll take it easy tonight."