I wanted to ask him how they would know if we stepped off campus. Surely, there weren’t enough security guards and cameras to watch our every move all of the time. But I decided it was just best to take his word for it. So, I shrugged and didn’t bother giving the brutish man any sort of verbal agreement.
He wasn’t worth the energy to form the words in the first place.
So, the henchman continued. “David said that each of you are assigned to a floor in the building. You’re free to stay here on this floor together if you’d like, but you’ll be responsible for the upkeep of the students on your assigned floor. So, make sure you’re there at least enough to watch over them.”
He handed out papers to each of us that listed our assigned floor number and a student roster of names for those that would be inhabiting the floor we were in charge of. I pitied the students about to flood this place. How they were unknowingly getting themselves into something that would turn their worlds upside down and fuck their lives over for good.
Reading that list of names made me blood boil.
“What are we supposed to do with these people?” I asked as I looked at all the names on my ‘Third Floor list.’ I recognized some of the last names. Actually, several of the last names. They were all names of prominent and elite members of the community in Charlotte. The police chief’s daughter was on my list, as well as the son of the head medical director at the hospital. I even saw the name of the local district attorney’s nephew.
Now it made sense why we were all assigned to floors in the same building.
This dormitory was the hotspot for all of the most important people, the kids of all the highest and most connected people in the city. David’s plan was transparently obvious. He was going to get the kids of all the high officials hooked on his drug. Then he would not only be in control of them, but essentially in control of the city.
Smart. Devious and disgusting, but smart.
“You’re supposed to keep them alive and keep them supplied,” the guard answered. “Drugs will start coming in a day or two. Until then, make all the prissy little pieces of shit feel welcome.”
He smiled before he walked out of the room, and the sight of his yellowed and crooked teeth made me feel sick.
“This is a really, really bad idea,” Julian said nervously. “Getting all of these high-profile kids hooked on illegal drugs? Do you know how badly we’ll be implicated if this whole thing goes sideways?”
“We don’t have a choice,” I reminded him. “It’s either this or we end up like my father with a cake knife in his throat.”
“I could have done without the visual reminder,” Julian grimaced. “But thanks.”
I wrapped my arm around his back and gave him a hug on the side of his body. None of us wanted to do this, but none of us had a choice. It was either this, or death, and so long as we were alive I knew we could find a way out of this. I knew we could find a way to rat David out to the authorities, bring this entire operation down, and restore what once had been the former glory of two prestigious universities.
We simply had to play the game for a while.
“I think we should all continue to stay here on this floor together,” Michael said. “We can spend time on the other floors as needed, but we shouldn’t stay apart for long.”
“Of course,” I agreed. “I thought that was a given.”
“It is,” he said. “I just wanted to reiterate it.”
I could tell that even Michael was feeling nervous about this. We all were.
“How do you suppose he’s going to get them all addicted at the start?” Adam asked. “I mean, I know a thing or two about addiction. There’s not that many ways you can sneak someone a drug without them noticing it. And in order for his whole plan to work, even if the drug is highly addictive, he’ll need to give everyone enough of it to trigger the body’s dependency on it. It would have to be something large scale, something that pushes the drug out to everyone at once on a continued exposure level that would last at least a day or two.”
“We’ll keep our eyes open,” Michael said. “If anyone notices anything unusual, report it right back to the rest of us. Agreed?”
Everyone nodded in agreement, and our plan was ready to unfold.
Well, at least the first leg of it.
I sat down to look at the other lists of names while the boys tossed their papers onto the coffee table and went to get some food and wine out of the kitchen area. I had no idea how to even act like a resident advisor. I was about as non-welcoming and non-cheery a person as you could get. The lists of floors were all coed and it looked like there was a pretty even mix of males and females on each floor. David had designed the perfect petri dish for his drug experiment right inside this dorm building, and in a couple of days all of the unsuspecting lab rats would walk right into it with smiles on their faces.
When Adam returned back to the couch with a glass of wine and a plate of cheese and crackers for me, I looked at him and sighed.
“This is going to take a really thick skin,” I said.
“Yeah,” he replied. “But fortunately, you’re the thickest-skinned girl I know.” He smiled and put his arm around me. “You got this, Lisette. It’ll be okay.”
And for the first time since this bullshit kicked off, I actually believed in the hope his words gave me.
5
“Okay everyone, follow me!” I shouted over the noisy and excited chatter that rose from the group of new students that I led into the third floor common area.
All four of us had taken our lists in hand this morning after we sat for coffee, and then split up to our various assigned floors to get through “Day One” with the incoming student residents.
“We’ll just look at it like a job,” Michael had said just before we walked out of the door of our floor. “We’ll go to work, do our job, and then come back to each other at night once it’s over.” He kissed me on the forehead and held me for a minute before we went into the stairwell to go and pick up our assigned student groups from the main floor lobby.
It was a good plan, I thought to myself. Just treat it like a job.
I walked in front of the line of about two dozen incoming freshman and gave them a brief tour of their dormitory floor. A few of them had stupid questions that I tried not to roll my eyes at, like “when does the maid come to clean the rooms” and “what’s the policy on how many people can share a bed”. It made the job easier actually, to know that these kids were probably some of the most entitled and useless humans on the planet. Most of them had been hand-fed throughout their lives by their wealthy, arrogant parents and coddled by mistreated nannies who didn’t care what kinds of humans these kids turned out to be. Still though, I wouldn’t wish the fate that was about to befall them on anyone.
After I had given the group all the instructions that I could think of, I sat in the common area and waited while I let them all choose their roommates and bedrooms. I would have made a completely shitty real resident advisor under any other normal circumstance because I didn’t care at all about any of it. I let the sounds of their conversations and giggling and complaining drone out as I sat on the sofa and waited for all of them to get settled and re-congregate back in the common area once they had finished.
“Do you have a room on this floor too?” one of the more attractive looking guys asked as he came to sit down across from me.
“No,” I answered. “I stay on a different floor with the other advisors.”
“Oh, okay,” he said looking a bit defeated and disappointed.
He seemed like a decent guy, one of the few that probably really deserved better than what was about to happen. I tried not to let myself think too much about it or get to know any of these people very well. It would just end up making things harder for everyone involved. I stuck around a bit longer just to make sure that everyone was situated and that I wouldn’t be getting any surprise visitors or phone calls later in the evening when one of the girls realized she had forgotten to bring shampoo or some stupid shit like that. David had given us all dummy phones that we would use for our jobs here only. That way any of the students that were assigned to us could call us any time they needed something.
I gave all of the people under my watch a strict warning that if they called me for a non-emergency that I would never answer the phone again.
Most of them looked a bit shocked by my demeanor, but I had already warned everyone that I made a crappy welcoming committee. When everyone was done asking questions and getting settled, I left to go back to our floor and hoped that the other guys were already there as well.
“Hey,” Michael said as soon as I walked through the door.
I was super relieved to see all three of them there, and gladly accepted hugs and kisses from everyone. I sat down on the couch next, sandwiched in between Michael and Julian with Adam sitting just across from us as we all recounted the experiences from our day. It seemed as though things had gone similarly for all four of us and that tomorrow would be more of the same. But tomorrow wasn’t the same at all, it was strange.
The first thing I noticed when I got to the third floor in the morning was that all of the girls seemed to have simultaneously decided to indulge in makeovers before breakfast. It was completely foreign to me to see so many girls with makeup brushes and eyeshadow palettes as they sat around painting each other’s faces into things that looked more like they should have been in a performing arts troupe than a college campus.
“Uh, what are you guys doing?” I asked as I walked up to a cluster of girls sitting on the floor near the large widows that overlooked the campus grounds.
“Makeup, duh,” one of the girls said with an open mouth that was framed by artificially filled lips. “Doesn’t she look so pretty!” she squealed as she gestured toward the girl whose face she was applying blush to.
I looked at the girl and thick black eyeliner lines that made her look more like a raccoon than a student. Her cheeks had so much blush on them that she looked feverish, and the eyeshadow seemed to miss her eyelids completely.
“She looks a bit like a circus clown,” I said bluntly.
