Page 6 of The Golden Receiver

“Do you like your roommates?” I asked Charlie Hensen, one of my pack members.

We were laying in the middle of a grassy patch of campus between buildings, letting the sun bask down on our bare skin. Charlie had been the one to send the text, and a few members of the pack had joined us. Serena Wright had already announced that she was only there to escape her roommate in Poe Hall. She’d spent a good five minutes bemoaning her choice to go for a traditional dorm instead of the suite style.

Then again, only me and one other person in the pack had lucked out and gotten single rooms in our suites.

Charlie wasn’t one of them. He just wasn’t one to complain unless you poked and prodded it out of him. Lucky for me, I was very good at poking and prodding things out of him.

“They’re okay,” Charlie said in the most noncommittal tone I’d ever heard in my life. I nudged Serena who reached over and poked him in the ribs. He let out a squeak that caused Nick Wright, Serena’s twin brother, to snort in laughter. “Fine, fine. There was a fuck up in the system, and I’m sharing my room with a human. He’s interesting, I guess.”

“Are you sure it was a fuck up?” Nick asked as he rolled onto his side. “Maybe the school is trying to integrate things further. Mixed rooms in the dorms. A werewolf would be a safe place to start.” Nick grinned. “Unless the werewolf is Evie. Evie would probably chew his roommate’s slippers.”

“I would not eat slippers!” I exclaimed, popping up into a sitting position and looking around for something to throw at Nick. Unfortunately, there was only grass, and if I threw grass, then dirt would get on Serena. Serena would probably kill me if that happened. I wasn’t in the mood to be killed today. There was a bonfire that night, and I had loved the welcome bonfire the year before. It would really suck to miss it because one of my pack mates shifted and ripped my throat out with her teeth. Better not to throw the grass.

Instead, I opted to flip him off. It was the safer option.

“I think you’d eat slippers,” Serena piped up.

I regretted not throwing the grass. It would be worth the risk to my safety, and I was faster than Serena. Usually. Sometimes. Okay, I wasn’t faster than Serena, and I was a lot more easily distracted. It wasn’t a good idea to throw the grass.

I laid back down and decided to change the subject. “Are you all going to the bonfire tonight?”

Nick and Serena shouted yes immediately. Charlie took more prodding. We spent the next fifteen minutes convincing him to go, but in the end, he agreed. Then he told us a little more about his human roommate. “You should bring him,” I suggested. “Maybe it’ll be less weird living with a roommate if you get drunk with him.”

“That’s a good idea,” Serena agreed. “Maybe I won’t want to kill my roommate if I get drunk with her.”

“What’s even wrong with your roommate?” Nick asked.

Serena began regaling us with a tale from the year before. She and her roommate were the same major, and they’d clashed. A lot. I had a feeling that this arrangement was going to end in violence. While she talked, I wondered if I should give Kali, our pack leader, a heads up. She was one of the only people who could keep Serena in check when she really got going. I wasn’t sure if it was because Serena viewed her as a mother figure or if it was the whole leader of the pack thing. It didn’t really matter.

I decided I’d make that decision if and when the time came. For now, I’d just enjoy the time with my pack.

A few hours later, I was back in the dorm with my roommates. They’d all moved in the day before while I’d been at practice. I’d left behind an empty suite, and when I’d returned, I had three new friends. Two of my roommates, Ryan and Benny, had requested to be in the same room or suite or anything. They were both from Philadelphia, and they’d become close the year before. They were the kinds of friends that had a nonverbal shorthand. My last roommate was a guy named Preston. He was a pre-law major, and I’d found him reading a physical newspaper that morning when I’d come into the common area.

I loved college.

I probably never would’ve known someone my age who read the newspaper first thing in the morning if it weren’t for college. I didn’t even know people my age still read a physical paper. I never had, except for the comics when I was a kid. My dad would bring them to the warehouse when he and my mom would visit me on the weekends, and I always read the funny pages.

Preston wasn’t reading the newspaper now. He was sitting in the armchair reading a very boring looking textbook. He had an array of highlighters lined up on the thin arm of the chair, and I’d watched him swap them out while he read. He must have had a complicated system for reading his books. (I hadn’t even opened my textbooks yet, but classes weren’t even set to start until Monday. It wasn’t like I needed to read anything yet.) Ryan and Benny were sitting on the couch playing a video game on the television. I was sprawled out on the floor because I liked to sprawl out and it was hard to do on the hard dorm couch.

“Does anyone know what time the bonfire starts?” I asked.

“No idea. Dark?” Ryan or Benny said from the couch. I wasn’t looking at them, and I hadn’t learned their voices enough to tell them apart yet. I should probably figure that out, but that seemed like too much work.

“Probably before dark,” Preston countered. “Humans don’t have great night vision, and there are many monsters who don’t either.” He had a point. I could see Preston from where I was laying on the floor, and I watched as he fished a phone from his pocket and began navigating the screen, an open highlighter held in his mouth. A few moments later, he put down his phone and popped the highlighter out of his mouth. “The event online says it’ll start at seven.”

“We were going to grab food first. You guys wanna come?” Ryan or Benny asked from the couch.

I thought for a moment. There’d been a bit of food at the bonfire the year before, but it hadn’t been good. Not that the food in the school dining halls was any better, but it had to be better than barely cooked hot dogs and burnt hamburgers. “I’ll come.”

Preston agreed too.

At five, I got changed, and by five-thirty, we were walking as a group toward the dining hall. It wasn’t crowded, even though the humans had moved in that day. I would have thought there’d be more people in the dining hall. I noticed two members of the football team sitting together. They waved at me, but I didn’t go over. I was with my roommates, and I didn’t want to be rude. I’d talk to them that night at the bonfire assuming they were going.

If not, I’d talk to them in practice on Monday.

It wasn’t like I wasn’t going to have a ton of time with them.

After dinner, my roommates and I made our way across campus to the bonfire. There was a steady stream of people walking through the woods toward the clearing. I could hear the music from a distance, but I wasn’t surprised that no one else in my group could. I had werewolf hearing, even when I was in full human form. The closer we got to the clearing, the louder the music got. Other noises started to join it too: conversations and laughter. Nothing was clear enough for me to make out actual words, and I fought the urge to partially shift. Just enough to whip out my good ears so I could hear better.