"I can't remember what happened that night. I'm not talking slippery details or fuzzy-edged visions; I mean a complete and utter blackout. Like I wasn't even there. Except... I know I was."
Since the death of her boyfriend six months ago, Morgan Cai...
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As I fumbled with my key in the lock, there was laughter on the other side of the bedroom door.
At first, I thought maybe Hanna had someone over and wondered if I'd be interrupting something—but by then my key had made a noise and it would've been weird to walk away. Also, this afternoon had turned unusually cold for early April, and I didn't want to spend any longer than I needed to outside in this thin jacket. The warmth of my slightly stuffy dorm room had never been more appealing.
So I reached for the handle and stepped inside.
The laughter dried up quickly, as if it escaped through the open door. But I could still see it etched into Hanna's and Josh's faces from where they were sitting on her bed. Both of them, side by side on one mattress, Josh leaning slightly over her shoulder as they peered at something on her phone screen. Maybe even close enough to touch—although I didn't have time to get a good look before they shifted on the spot.
"Morgan!" came Hanna's shrill cry—suspiciously excitable?—as she threw her hands up in the air. "You're finally here!"
"I am," I said, a little confused. I hadn't been keeping them waiting; if anything, my final class of the day had finished ten or so minutes early. "And so's Josh, which I wasn't expecting. What's the occasion?"
He stood up from Hanna's bed then, making his way over to me and planting a kiss on my lips. It was hard not to analyze his every movement, searching for traces of guilt or shiftiness, and I couldn't tell whether it made me feel better or worse that there weren't any. "Thought I'd stop by and treat you to my face after class," he said smoothly. "But maybe I have stumbled on a real occasion, because it turns out Hanna's celebrating."
Dropping my backpack on my bed, I glanced over. "You are?"
"We finally did it!" she said, waving her phone at me. "Issue six of GXRL officially has more readers than this week's Daily. David Stephenson can suck my dick."
"You're kidding."
"Nope." She shook her head gleefully. "The circulation figures for the print edition are in. For the first time in over a century, the Daily isn't the most-read publication on campus. And that's without even mentioning our record-breaking website stats."
"Oh my God," I said. "That's insane."
And it was true. The Davidson Daily was only a couple of years younger than the university itself, and after securing its position as the main campus newspaper had stayed there ever since. Sure, there were a couple of other niche publications, plus a handful of online-only outlets that tended to fizzle out after a few years, but nothing had ever come close. And certainly none of them had ever set out to rival the Daily. It would've been impossible.
For anyone except Hanna Griffin.
"Right?" she said, almost vibrating with energy. "It was definitely the undercover feature about discrimination in sorority recruitment practices. Frat boy David wouldn't dare write a word about his beloved Greek life that wasn't licking the assholes of everyone involved. Well, he's missing a trick, because I'm telling you: everyone wants to know the kind of shit that goes on behind those fancy doors. People love an exposé."
