A slight raise in the upper lip, his handsome face had the expression that could imply tiresomeness or disgust, she wasn’t quite sure. “Some guy got too drunk and tried to grope a girl on the dance floor. His friends wouldn’t budge when confronted, so I tossed them out.” 

“A dedicated host, I see,” she teased. 

“And an upstanding man,” he laughed, “I hope I have made a good impression on you.” 

“Desperately.” 

“Hey, don’t judge me over this alright? Just found you to be an interesting gal, and I like making interesting friends. I think they are in the last room. That’s where Whelk likes to stay. She always said ‘rooms closest to the stairwell would be the first one the mass shooter shoots into.’”

The second floor featured a barely furnished living room and a hallway leading to a couple of rooms, some of which came with their doors surprisingly intact. This was where sobriety came to die. Everyone they ran into was either piss-faced drunk, speech-impedingly high, or unconscious on the floor with profanities and crudely drawn genitalia all over their face. Loud music and disco lights were replaced by slurred speeches and the orange ambient glow emitted from the knocked-over lamps. Multiple ongoing board games were scattered across the room, but one needn’t be afraid of interrupting any of them; Son just walked past a Katan table where all four players were just laughing maniacally to each other while fruitlessly trying to figure out who had just won the game.

As they walked further into the hall, the now long sought-after quietude finally set in, relieving Son's eardrums just enough for her to hear her own voice again, and her voice was shouting with terror. She started to re-evaluate the situation she found herself in: walking further and further from the crowd with a stranger whom she just met not twenty minutes ago into some dingy room at the end of the hallway. The horrible stories she heard of what boys would do to a girl on her lonesome crept into her consciousness, and the fear of manhood aggressing and choking the feminine life and sanctity out of her took over. The process of catastrophization was quick and relentless, her body hair stood up on its own, and the panic of fight-or-flight instinct kicked in. The only thing holding her in place was the drink in her hand; she wouldn’t want to spill the liquid. 

“And here they are…” The door opened and fear dissipated into a wisp of thin smoke, “Aw, Joy! Why would you bring your guinea pigs here for the love of Christ? Some drunkard is gonna trample poor Mr. Robinson here and we gotta have ourselves another dead pet on our hands!”

“Mr. Robinson ain’t going nowhere? Where will the tramplers be coming from? Under the bed?” Said the fair-haired boy named Joy sitting on the edge of the mattress. The boy’s most significant feature was his two bulging eyes. Two rotund guinea pigs sat serenely on the boy’s lap chewing on some hay. “Pretty please, it’s almost as if I know how to take care of my darlings, and by the way! Mr. Moo Moo died on you people’s watch!”

“Ugh… don’t ever bring up that ferret again please,” groaned the black tomboy lying on the bed with a blunt in her hand, whose name Son would later learn to be Whelk. Her cheeks were freckled and her eyes were slanted, making a fairly unique and recognizable appearance when combined with her unusually braided hair. “Choking on its own hair, nasty way to go, but how useless can you be as an animal to die on your own hair? Goddamn it, now you got me thinking of this crap it’s gonna ruin my high!” 

“Wait… it was you people that killed Mr. Lenor’s ferret?” Asked a blondie sitting on the floor by the bed eating a bag of chips. 

Son would have never guessed that she could be smitten twice in a night, but here she was, dazed by this blonde girl’s extraordinary feminine beauty; the wavy hair with color reminiscent of postmeridian sunshine, the long lashed eyes glimmering with youthful curiosity, the spotless skin that looked like porcelain or the finest china, the straight bridge above the plumb red lips, and a slight upward curve on the edge of his mouth. The girl looked exactly like the opposite of Mark, each occupying an extraordinary end of humanity’s contemporary beauty spectrum, each carrying the purest and most appealing essence of masculinity and femininity, and they were both in one room, swirling and mixing amidst the lime green fog of inebriation. Son felt dizzy, happy even. 

“We didn’t kill the ferret, alright? It just… died on our watch… holy hell can we move on from the ferret? Mark, where is the damn charger we asked you to… wait, I’m sure I can still recognize people while I’m baked… who is this gal?”

“Mark… someone followed you in,” muttered a person hugging their own knees in the corner, whose nose was droopy and eyes equally bulging. Son failed to determine the person’s gender nor their age as the voice was too weak, the attire too neutral, the hairdo too androgynous to give any indicator. 

“Introducing a new friend I made!” Exclaimed Mark, whose excitement was met with middling reactions, “Son Syun.” 

“I remember you, you are the new girl from class,” the gorgeous blonde offered her a handshake, a toothful smile, and her own name, “Fluorite Tanning. So glad to meet you.”

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“And you returned to your apartment by your lonesome?”

“Yes. I couldn’t find Blue amidst the chaos, so I returned home by myself.”

“Didn’t stay late, didn’t attend the after-party, didn’t socialize with many, no substance consumption of any kind, just straight back home?”

“Yes. I’m not good at parties.” 

“Anyone that could collaborate on your statement?”

Son found her own brows rising. “Am I being interrogated?”

“No, not really,” the principal said, adjusting his bow tie as if to loosen its grip on his throat, “if you were, it would be a cop sitting here, not me.” 

The man sitting in the corner didn’t say a thing. He must be a cop. 

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