Seventy-eight students graduated in Kelsey Martel's senior class. There was a moment there, where the biggest dream her grandparents had for her was to marry the mortician's son. Old fashioned.

Her parents hadn't the decency of leaving her an orphan. Not like a princess or a fairy tale. They had lingered. Like persistent, parasitic narco lampreys, they circled. Opiate-thirsty jackals, snapping at each other as much as their own beleaguered parents. It had taken all four, Mawmaw, Pawpaw, Gramma, and Grampa to fend them off long enough for her to make it to university.

Kelsey sets down her mobile phone, one of the exciting touch-screen models which delivered her email and sent photographs by message. Her bank has managed to identify and close an account her mother had opened in her name; a relief and an irritation. She is concerned she'd have to spend her whole life on guard like this. But judging how bad mom has been shaking lately...

Kelsey is more frightened she wouldn't have to be checking her credit much longer. She claws at a red plastic cup, intent to fill it with comfort-lite.

Lo calorie self destruction, for a girl on the go. Keepin' shapely while gettin' smashed. BAC without the BMI, baby.

In a fair world, Kelsey wouldn't need to count calories. She's a shorter girl, healthy and handsome. But her size is astray of contemporary fashion, so she's taken measures - the most bold of which is her hair, by nature nut brown but now blonde bleached. Back home, folk would have had a fit. Here though? Not even here but here tonight? Tepid rebellion.

The party is a lesson in relativity, stranger than she's used to. Euro-trance meets world beat pumping out of the den, house built in the tangled pre zoning code lunacy of converted student rental property. Too many hallways, all too narrow. A luxury of square footage partitioned so every square inch feels hard to breathe in.

The other girls intimidate her. They have vivid dyed monochrome hair and stories of overseas travel. They all seem to personally know the person who made their jewelry. She is afraid someone will ask and she will be forced in shame to admit her lip stick is named after a film celebrity, her bracelet came from a mall. The boys aren't much better. They're all so... narrow. Willowy and droll. No small proportion have sharp bits of metal punched through parts of their face Kelsey generally considers important.

Migrating conversation, from cluster to cluster she finds a pervasive undercurrent of fetishism for late 60s film. Talk seems so very hard tonight. It would be easier if she hadn't lost track of her friend Ashli, but true to her name she had right away wrapped herself up in someone called “Mark” with a facile urgency. The bitter truth: there is no depending on an 'Ashli' with an 'i'.

“Yea, I don't know him. No. Right, sure. I'm sure he was real famous. Haven't seen it. Nope. I guess I just haven't lived then,” Kelsey works to keep exasperation out of her voice, but it isn't a long listen before she can't convince self or speaker she gives enough shits to see his sentence through. Graciously, the young man peels off nearly mid-syllable, allowing Kelsey to circumnavigate an avid denim cluster of freshmen who seem convinced they were the first to discover Kant.

An empty loveseat beckons, insomuch as fuzzy avocado rayon can be considered inviting, but a yellow duckie cotton towel drips spilled drink when she moves it from the cushion. She sets the towel back down grimly, and pulling on her drink upgrades a sip to a slurp.

It's funny how, in a crowd so meticulously decorated to be noticed, the one standing out is the one trying the least. Bruce Caleb Anderson is a stocky young man but not overweight. He has a broad face, and small bright eyes which tend to squint. The thin wisps of his sandy hair betray warning signs of recession, but it is early enough to allow for a last few blessed years of denial. He wears a staid beige polo under a thin orange parka, and battered grey boots. He is the square peg, shouldn't but easily, fit into the star hole.

A shift in the tide draws most attendance either into the fenced back yard or down to a cellar of beer sport. With room to breathe, Kelsey huddles closer to Bruce's circle in espionage. She is assessed as inconsequential, no immune response yet. Trepidation, she realizes she's in the heart of the artiest of the artsy, the seething bowel of aesthetic and philosophical theory. She angles for a geometry to get herself adjacent, but none opens. The longer she hesitates, the greater danger her opinions may be solicited; yes, the risks are high.

“Constructivism is pretty tight,” says Marry-Him Beige into a pause. It's the shortest sentence she's heard from the gaggle, but they all nod like he'd used thrice the syllables and dealt ninefold the sage.

Kelsey decides this is her best chance, and drops a tactical giggle. It burns her cover, but serves as calculated feint. Besides, she needs to put her piece on the board, there's something more at work here than mere snobbery. She sifts through the light salvo of casual disdain, sounding for a malicious actor. Ah! Her enemy reveals herself.

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Bangles MacFrizzyhair locks eyes with Kelsey, Saladin's first parley with Lionhearted Dick. Bangles' leans closer, touches the back of her hand lightly against Bruce's. A 'Cafeteria elbow oopsie'? What a strangely subdued escalation, is this misplay or an advanced defensive open? Kelsey can only trust herself, responds with an 'Airheads Gambit'. It leaves her vulnerable to a 'Queenbee Kneecap' or a 'Scholars Scoffsplanation', but Bangles doesn't manoeuvre in time. Bruce is caught in the 'Pedants Homily', which counts as a valid point score for Kelsey.

Frizzy frazzles. She resets the board with the 'Hypemans Cordon', but everyone knows it plays poorly into any boy who's got some Norway in him. Amateur move. Kelsey slides past the picket and into a “Humblepie Bakesale” leaving the defense reeling.

“I think I want another beer, do you want another beer?” Laurel asks Bruce. It's a legal timeout call - so the field recesses for the redistribution of ethanol.

Kelsey takes this moment to approach a neutral party, a girl dressed and painted solely in black. Veronica, or 'Vonnie', is brighter in outlook than her maudlin single tone palette. Meanwhile Laurel counsels discretely with a fatter boy on the other side of the ring. She bares a vexed dimple, but not a temper furrow, and her cornerman's generous hand gesticulations are contemplatively measured.

“So Bruce, huh,” Vonnie says, cutting across idle chat to the bleeding of it.

Kelsey stiffens a shade, but obvious is and as. “He seems close with, ah...” she trails towards an incomplete question mark.

“Laurel. No they're not a thing yet. It's none of my business, but she's taking her sweet time.” Vonnie swishes at her liquored cola and touches at her face, eyelashes, brow ring, lip stud.

“She's pretty,” Kelsey whispers into her own red plastic cup. It puffs back the air of her breath like a hug at 4.2% by volume.

“He's not,” laughs Vonnie. “I got a drafting class with him. Most boring fuck I ever met to walk in skin,” she reaches out and grips Kelsey's shoulder, gently to comfort and gently not to hazard her long smoky nails. “But serious too, fuckin' wizard with sculpture, honest to the fault of stupid. As good a guy as any I know.”

They share a moment that isn't quite friendship; more a soldier's commiseration, the soul who doesn't hope you win, but you survive the contest. It ends.

The court reconvenes, by now all parties present party to the present (contest). All but the goalpost, poor boy, but what does he matter except in of the winning?

“Does the new girl not like me?” Laurel asks Bruce in confidence. She's pulled him aside, and her voice is strained in a way that tugs at his primal, thuggish need to protect.

“No, no way. I mean, she seems nice, I mean, what do you mean?” Bruce reaches strenuously for a tone and tact which might comfort his friend.

“She's being really mean,” Laurel says, in stress but not surety. “I think. I mean... I can't even tell. It's like we're having a fight but I'm not sure over what or why.” Her right eye glitters like it's considering a cry but hasn't committed yet.

“We're just talking... fighting?” Bruce loses twenty percent of his brain to reassessing the last twenty minutes, but still is coming up empty. He doesn't know what to think of the new girl either. Is she in the department? Who did she come with? Christ, what's her name? “I think... we should be nice to her. She doesn't seem too smart,” Bruce wagers.

Laurel's head tilts with a pitying condescension. “Oh Bruce,” she admonishes kindly.

“What, she asked me what pottery is made out of,” he tries out a chuckle for size, but Laurel clearly doesn't like the fit.

Laurel lowers her voice, closes in and taps his shoulder like it's morse code. “Exactly, Bruce. Nobody's that dumb. Of course she knows what clay is. She's playing us, but I just can't figure out why.”

Some kind of base obvious is firing an alarm deep in his lizard brain, but it's been so long since Division Fuck has gotten budget, the light's not proper labeled.

“Huh,” he noises, slowly coming online through the lager fog. Problem is, some traitor hidden in his allocated twenty keeps sending back images instead of sentences. The new girl's small fingers sweeping her hair behind her weird lobe-less ear. The trace of butt in her jeans, with just a hint of muffin-top over the edges. Her narrow nostrils and thin eyebrows. It's a distracting malfunction, dragging down either end of what oughta be his party smile.

“Hey Vonnie,” Laurel acknowledges as Veronica von Spooky joins them.

“What's up guys?” “Why we looking so glum? Glumceratops and Poutasaurus Rex over here.”

“Did you meet the new girl?” Bruce asks. “We're trying to figure out what her deal is.”

“Oh it's way more fun if I don't tell,” Vonnie gleefully evades.

“Not ominous,” Laurel sighs. “Is she a friend of yours? Is she cool?”

“Naw, but I like her,” Vonnie leers toothily, “She's like a Russian mail order bride. Smiles on the outside, knife-fight on the inside,” she lets out a whuffing Maxim-gun cackle.

Bruce frowns. “Play nice. Maybe I should just go talk to her, what's her name?”

“Kelsey,” Vonnie responds.

Laurel takes the frown baton. “No, you don't have to -”

But Bruce reassures. “I'll just say hi. Be right back.”

Vonnie grabs Laurel's wrist eagerly. “Oh this is going to be a train wreck.” She winks at Laurel. ”I'm excited.”