The party was already loud by the time Justina pushed through the front door of the Delacroix house, a sprawling place two streets over from campus that some junior with more trust fund than sense had decided to fill with strobe lights and a fog machine for the third weekend in a row.
Bass rattled through the floorboards. Someone had spilled a drink near the entrance, and nobody had bothered to clean it, so the tile by the door was faintly sticky, and Justina stepped around it in heels she'd changed into in the back seat of her car three blocks from the house, after telling her mother, with a completely straight face, that she wasn't going anywhere near this place tonight.
She told herself she only wanted to pass through. Show her face. Be seen for ten minutes, maybe fifteen, long enough that word would get around she'd been there, and then slip out before anyone noticed she'd left, back to Lucy's dorm and the biology notes that were, in fact, real and waiting for her on the desk.
