“This is the shed,” Sloane says, walking me over to a little wooden shack at the edge of the property. “It connects our backyard to Kappa Nu’s. It’s the quickest way to get over there.”
She opens the double doors and a blast of musty air hits me, a combination of smells fighting for attention. I recognize the metallic tang of rust; the cold damp of fresh dirt. But there’s something else, too. Something different: earthy and sweet-smelling like barrels of hay or freshly mown grass. It isn’t until I peer over the edge of the door that I see what’s inside: tight rows of leaves dangling from ropes on the ceiling, each of them swaying gently like hundreds of hangmen in the breeze.
“They’re drying tobacco,” she explains, reading my mind. “Don’t ask.”
I’m momentarily speechless as I stare at the maze of leaves in front of me. They’re absolutely massive, the size of my head, bunched in clusters of three and five. I can barely see past them, the inside of the shed much deeper than it appears, though Sloane forges on, pushing the leaves out of her way like a stage curtain as she moves farther away. I move in quickly behind her, a swirling scent of moss and wood and sweet vanilla making my eyes water. Most of the leaves are yellowing, but some of them are brown, and before I can think twice, I reach up and touch one, its sticky consistency making me think of a spoiling corpse: juicy and putrefied.
“Here’s the frat house,” Sloane says as we make our way out the back doors and into the Kappa Nu backyard. I’m strangely relieved to be out of that place, though I try not to show it. There’s just something about it that makes me uneasy: the ropes and the leaves hanging from the ceiling, obscuring my view, like someone could come up behind me and I’d never even know it. The long, curved blades I had glimpsed dangling from hooks on the wall, dried animal blood caked to their edges. The way the scent of gore and tobacco seemed to mix in my mind, creating something sweet and unsettling like looking down at a rare steak on your plate, stomach roiling as you lick your lips and watch the blood pool.
We stand there for a second, right outside the open shed doors, an uncomfortable quiet relaxing over us as we stare at the side of the house. I realize now that it isn’t the shed that’s strange, or even the things in it. I’ve seen my share of shotguns and hunting knives, fishhooks and fillet blades. We’re in South Carolina, after all. Rutledge is a tiny little town in the middle of nothing but forest and fields: thirty minutes to the water in one direction, thirty minutes to the woods in the other. What seems strange to me is the unrestricted access we have to someone else’s property. How easy it was for us to simply let ourselves into their space … and by that logic, how easy it would be for them to let themselves into ours. I don’t want to say anything, though, knowing that a full year spent living in Hines probably just made me too sheltered. I never got to experience the co-ed dorms. The shared living between us and them.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Sloane asks suddenly, the bluntness of her question taking me by surprise. I turn to face her, realizing too late she’s already looking at me.
“Do what?” I ask, wondering how long she’s been doing that: staring. Taking in my expression as I tried to work through my thoughts, a jumbled coil in my brain I still can’t untangle. “Meet the boys?”
“This,” she says, gesturing vaguely around us. “Live here. All of it. You seem … I don’t know. Too nice.”
I have a sudden flash of Maggie in my mind: too nice. What she really means is too boring, too bland, masking the bite of her words with a pinch of politeness in hopes that I won’t taste that comment for what it truly was.
“How do you know Lucy?” she asks again.
“Remember, I lived on your hall—”
“No,” she interrupts, shaking her head. “How do you know her? How did you meet?”
“Well, I don’t know her,” I say, suddenly embarrassed. “Not really. We didn’t actually meet—”
“Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but you seem like her flavor.”
“Her flavor? What does that mean?”
“You’re very vanilla.”
“Thanks,” I say, not bothering to hide the sarcasm.
“That’s not a dig,” she says.
“Kind of sounded like it was.”
“I just mean that’s what Lucy looks for,” she says, resting her arms on her hips. “You can turn vanilla into anything, right? It’s a blank slate. It’s malleable.”