As vast as it was, the place was packed, humming with the reverberations of live music, prattle, and the distinct sound of clinking glasses.
Taylor grabbed my hand as soon as the crowd thickened around us and began towing me through the swaying bodies. We found a spot next to a banquet table filled with purses and personal effects, and of course, that one lone girl—the designated purse sitter. Satisfied with our location, we hung back as people trafficked around us, back and forth to the main bar stationed just a few feet away from us.
Taylor searched the dance floor for the friends she ditched when she came outside to meet me, though she didn’t seem particularly concerned with finding them and was mostly just dancing to the music. I stood idly by her, leaning against a brick pillar watching all the faces in the crowd.
It was a sea of uninspiring mugs. Some I recognized from school, but the majority were just nameless strangers I never met before with too-happy faces, glazed eyes, and gyrating body parts that only every so often matched the beat of the music. The whole thing was hard to watch, in an annoying sort of way, because they were all having a great time. And I wasn’t. I was just some outsider looking in on them.
“There they are,” said Taylor, ticking her head into some non-specific part of the crowd. “I’ll be right back, I’m just going to let them know where we are.”
I nodded, and went back to contemplating my overall discomfort level when I thought I heard my name being called. It was too loud to really hear anything, and yet, it was as though the entire room had quieted down just long enough for me to hear it. A few moments later, I heard it again:
Jemma.
I looked up into the crowd searching for the source; a waving hand, a raised eyebrow, something—anything that would indicate somebody was trying to get my attention, but I saw nothing like that.
And then everything came to a dead-stop.
Without any warning, the entire room appeared to freeze right before my eyes. The music cut, the light-changes stilled, and every single person in the room stood motionless, completely immobilized as though I were looking at a life-size picture of them and not actually standing in the room myself.
The only sound I could hear was my own ragged breath as my eyes circled the room, frantically trying to blink everybody back to life. It was as though time were actually standing still for them—for everyone. Except me.
“What the—”
My voice was swallowed up by the sudden reanimation of the room. Everything around me resumed without missing a beat.
So, apparently, I was losing it, and for real this time because I was certain that what I had just witnessed wasn’t actually possible, and therefore could not have happened, which would mean I just hallucinated the whole thing. Perhaps my little stint in the hospital left me with some long-term side effects...like actual insanity.
Or maybe I was just suffering from some kind of sleep deprivation by-product from the night terrors, mixed in with first-day-of-school hysteria. It definitely sounded like a recipe for disaster. I decided I was holding fast to the latter and thinking maybe it was time for me to get home and get some rest.
“Looks like you picked your first apple,” said Taylor, appearing beside me again. “And what a yummy pick he is.”
I looked back at her, blank-faced.
“Directly across from us.” She spoke into my ear without gesturing, her voice soft as honey.
I redirected my eyes and saw him right away, leaning back against the wall just across the way from us. He was impossible to miss in his head-to-toe black clothing and contrasting short blond hair. There was something about the way he was watching me—unapologetically, without reserve—that threatened my inhibitions and jumbled my ailing thoughts.
“Who is that?” I asked her, never taking my eyes off of him.
“That’s Dominic Huntington,” she said, leaning into me.
“He’s so—”
“Smoking hot?” she cut in, beaming. “I know.”
“Does he go to Weston?”
“I wish,” she laughed. “He just moved back a couple weeks ago. Heard he got kicked out of college,” she said and then tweaked her eyebrows mischievously.
Her implications were understood—bad boy.
He looked about nineteen, maybe twenty. I was about to ask her why he got expelled when the girls suddenly appeared beside us, jumping up and down around Taylor as some bubblegum pop song came on that apparently meant something to the lot of them. It only took a few seconds before they were all latched onto her and collectively floating back to the dance floor together.
My eyes went back to Dominic who ticked his head sideways, signaling for me to go over to him. My heart raced at the idea of meeting him, of losing myself in the distraction. Maybe that was exactly what I needed to get my mind off my troubles.
“You don’t want to do that,” said Trace, crossing his arms over his chest as he rested his back against the column beside me. I hadn’t even seen him walk up.
I turned to him slowly, remarking his arm lightly touching my own. “Why not?” I asked, dragging my fixated eyes away from the pulsating link.
“He’s trouble.”
“He’s trouble? What does that even mean?” I scoffed, my eyes darting back to Dominic who was gliding through the crowd.
“It means, he’s trouble,” he repeated impatiently as he locked eyes on mine, making no attempts to explain his warning. “If you were smart, you’d stay away from him.”