Austin set up the speakers and docked his iPod. “Requests?” he called.
“Make us feel young and tragic,” Cassidy said, sitting cross-legged on one of the beds. She was sipping something that looked like Sprite but probably wasn’t.
The opening bars of some Beyonce disaster drifted through Austin’s speakers, and everyone groaned.
“I’m joking!” he assured us, switching it to Bon Iver.
Toby passed me a whiskey on the rocks, and I tasted it cautiously. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but there was good music playing, and a baguette on the ironing board, and Cassidy sitting cross-legged on the duvet in a schoolgirl outfit, so I tossed it back, because I was sick of being cautious.
Sam refilled it instantly and I downed the second glass as an afterthought, not realizing what I had done until my head began to spin from the combination of pain medicine and liquor, a combination the little prescription labels had warned against. I sat down next to Cassidy, who was talking with a cute blonde girl from Wentworth.
“But you’re here.” The girl frowned, and I got the impression that they were talking about Cassidy’s old school.
“Haven’t you heard?” Cassidy smiled tightly. “I go to Eastwood now.”
The girl laughed, skeptical.
“I’m serious,” Cassidy insisted. “We have pep rallies and everything. It’s adorable.”
“Yeah, adorable.” The girl glanced at me for a second, her lips twisting into a knowing smile.
“Have you met my baby brother Cassius?” Cassidy asked, slinging her arm around my shoulder like we were actually related. “Hard to believe he’s only fourteen.”
For a second the girl believed her.
“I thought—” the girl began, frowning.
“I was kidding,” Cassidy interrupted coldly. “God.”
“I’m Ezra,” I said, offering a handshake since it seemed to go with the suit.
“Blair,” the girl said with a toss of her hair. She glanced up at me through her eyelashes, and I realized that she was the kind of girl who enjoyed competing for a boy’s attention. “God, you’re charming. Come on, charming, let’s dance.”
I couldn’t dance. Not before, and certainly not then, with two tumblers of whiskey warming my veins and a decided lack of balance.
“Honestly, I can’t,” I protested as she pulled me up.
And then the lights went off, plunging us into darkness.
“Hey, I’m uncorkin’ a bottle of wine here,” Sam complained, his accent even thicker after a few drinks, like a parody of itself.
“Shh!” someone said.
The door to the adjoining room opened, and Toby stood there holding a candle.
“All rise for the team captains,” someone said.
Austin cut the music, and everyone stood.
The candlelight flickered as Toby and the other team captain, this preppy-looking guy in his grandfather’s old Rolex who’d introduced himself as Peter, made their way to the two chairs in the corner. Peter was carrying a gavel (of course he had a gavel), which he banged against the padded armrest, I suppose for the ceremony of it.
“A toast,” he cried, raising his drink. “To the virgins, to make much of time!”
Everyone laughed and drank, whether or not the term applied to us personally, although I rather thought it applied to the vast majority, considering we were in a room filled with high-school debaters. I could feel Cassidy standing at my side, and when I glanced at her, a bit unsteady on my feet from the liquor, I sensed an unsteadiness inside of her, a different kind.
Luke turned the lights back on, leaving them dimmed, and Sam shut the door to the balcony. And thus began the meeting.
It was the most bizarre meeting I’d ever been to, like some sort of sarcastic secret society. Toby and Peter took turns choosing different members of their teams to debate each other on ridiculous subjects, like whether the president of the United States should be chosen by lottery ticket, or if the Pope could defeat a bear in a fistfight. We all voted on who had won each debate, and the loser had to take a shot of gin.
Essentially, the whole thing was one elaborate drinking game.
To my surprise, I won my debate, on whether Truth or Dare was an effective alternative to a criminal trial. But my victory was short-lived, since they made me drink anyway, because I was new.
Cassidy’s debate was after mine, and when she flounced to the front of the room to face off against Blair, everyone got quiet. For a moment, I thought Cassidy was going to refuse, or be terrible on purpose, but she didn’t do either of those things.
Instead, she stood there calmly sipping her drink while Blair argued that vampires shouldn’t have voting rights and then she straightened her tie, grinning.
“My admirable opponent argues that vampires do not deserve suffrage, as many great yet misinformed politicians have done before her while calling for the continued marginalization of women, or other minorities,” Cassidy began. “Yet vampires were, at some point, human. At what point can a man’s voting rights be revoked, if he is proven to be of rational mind? And who here would agree to such an egregious breach of liberty? No, the real threat to our electoral system is the werewolf! Can the werewolf cast a vote in wolf form, or only when he appears to be a man? And can we ensure that he is not merely casting the vote of his pack’s alpha wolf, rather than his own?”
It was both hilarious and intelligent. And it was completely Cassidy. I wouldn’t want to follow that, and apparently neither did Blair, because, when it was time for her rebuttal, she shook her head and drank from the gin bottle, conceding defeat.