Spencer woozily pulled her cotton dress over her head, feeling naked in her slip. They followed a string of students through the library, the dining room, and then the kitchen. There were pots and pans all over the floor in the kitchen, an upturned tray of nachos on the table, and, for some reason, a roll of toilet paper was strung around the chandelier over the prep island. Her tray of brownies was almost empty. Spencer grabbed the last square and popped it into her mouth.
When they got back to the parlor, even more kids were making out, and a group was playing a version of Strip Twister, using the large rug in the center of the room as the board. Spencer flopped back on the couch. “Is it me, or has this party suddenly gotten really wild?” she asked Harper.
“Isn’t it awesome?” Harper’s eyes gleamed. “Everyone is flying high, right?”
Uh, isn’t that the point? Spencer wanted to say, but Harper had already whipped around and was staring at the windows. “Hey, you know what I want to do?” she said excitedly. “Make myself a dress out of the curtains just like Scarlett O’Hara did in Gone with the Wind!”
She leapt onto the windowsill and ripped the curtains from the poles before anyone could stop her. Then, grabbing a letter opener from the nearby desk, she slashed the fabric into long strips. Spencer half-giggled, half-winced. Those were probably valuable antique curtains.
Quinn pulled out her cell phone. “This is amazing. It should be our film for the festival!”
“And I want us all to be the stars!” Harper said sloppily, stumbling over the syllables. She looked at Spencer. “Can you record us on your phone?”
“Okay,” Spencer said. She called up the video function on her iPhone and started recording. Harper yanked down more curtains and pulled the stuffing out of the pillows on the leather couch, looking crazed.
“Yeah!” Daniel, the boy who’d hosted the party on Friday, grabbed a swath of curtain fabric and wrapped it around his naked body—he’d been part of the streaking parade—like a toga. A few other guys followed suit, and they all marched around in a circle chanting “To-ga! To-ga! To-ga!”
As they paraded past, Spencer caught a glimpse of a guy with longish dark hair. Was that Phineas? She hadn’t seen him since before her run-in with the law at Penn last year. But when she blinked, he’d vanished, like he’d never been there at all. She pressed her fingers to her temples and made several slow circles. She was so high.
Spencer turned back to Harper. She had seemingly grown bored of ruining the curtains and was now lying on the carpet with her legs up in the air. “I just feel so . . . alive,” she trilled. Then she eyed Spencer. “Hey. I have something to tell you. You know that guy, Raif—Reefer? He has a crush on you.”
Spencer groaned. “What a loser. How’d he get into Princeton, anyway? Is he a legacy?”
Harper’s eyes grew wide. “You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
Harper put her fingers to her lips and giggled. “Spencer, Reefer is, like, a genius. Like Einstein.”
Spencer snickered. “Uh, I don’t think so.”
“No, I’m serious.” Suddenly Harper looked dead sober. “He got a full scholarship. He invented some chemical process that, like, converts plants into renewable energy really cheaply. He received a MacArthur Genius Grant.”
Spencer snorted. “Um, are we talking about the same person?”
Harper’s expression was still serious. Spencer leaned back on her elbows and let this sink in. Reefer was . . . smart? Ridiculously smart? She thought about what he said yesterday at his house. Don’t judge a book by its cover. She started to laugh. The giggles came so fast and furious tears started to stream from her eyes and she could barely breathe.
Harper started laughing, too. “What’s so funny?”
Spencer shook her head, not even sure. “I’ve had one too many pot brownies, I think. I’m a lightweight.”
Harper frowned. “Pot brownies? Where?”
The muscles in Spencer’s mouth felt gummy and loose. She studied Harper carefully, wondering if this was a hallucination, too. “I baked pot into the brownies I brought,” she said in an isn’t-it-obvious voice.
Harper’s mouth made an O. “No way,” she whispered, slapping Spencer five. “That’s the best idea ever.” She started to laugh for real. “No wonder I feel so bubbly! And here I thought someone spiked the punch with absinthe!”
Spencer laughed nervously. “Well, it’s not necessarily my brownies, is it?” Harper had eaten all kinds of other dishes, after all. Who knew what they had baked into them.
When she noticed the puzzled look on Harper’s face, everything turned upside-down. Maybe none of those other dishes had illegal substances inside them. What if Spencer’s brownies were what was making everyone so crazy?
She looked around the room. In one corner, a girl was feeding another girl a bite of something gooey and brownie-like. Two guys by the window chowed down on the brownies like they were their last meal. The brownies were everywhere. On plates left on side tables. In people’s hands as they swigged back sips of punch. On cheeks and under fingernails and ground into the fibers of the carpet. A half-eaten tray sat on the coffee table. Another tray was balanced on the radiator. Spencer peeked into the kitchen. Her three trays of brownies were still there, the bottoms scraped clean. Had someone else brought brownies, or had she brought five instead of three? Her mind felt so cloudy right now she couldn’t think clearly at all.