NINE
Ozzie
My quest totrack Mila tonight led from her sorority house to their favorite bar, where her sisters told me she went outside for air and never returned.
They and two of the boyfriends join me as we stalk through the crowds, keeping an eye out for Mila while heading in the general direction of Beta Beta Psi.
For acting so protective of her, they’re doing a piss-poor job of it.
I stop near the entrance to a dark alley, where a gaggle of students is gathered, highly interested in something going on a few feet away. One of the bigger students is trying to get the rest of the assembled, drunken crowd to back up, back up, back up into the street, where car traffic is already jammed due to jaywalking pedestrians. I inch my way through the crowd to see what’s happening. Moments like this, it helps to be my size. People tend to make way, not knowing that I feel about as threatening as a hummingbird on the inside.
It takes a few seconds for my brain to register what I see. Mila is aiming a handgun at a fellow student.
What. The. Fuck.
She’s stone-cold sober, and a few feet away, there’s a girl with smudged makeup, cowering against a Dumpster.
“Stay the fuck away from her, Pudding.” Holy shit, her accent got super prominent. Not gonna lie; I’m terrified and inexplicably aroused all at once.
Mila cocks the gun, and then the entire picture becomes clear.
The guy who’s evidently called Pudding is going to catch it.
“Go on, get out of here,” Mila tells the girl with streaked mascara, who sprints from the alleyway and sits down on a bench to cry. I think one of Mila’s sisters—Cassandra—sits down next to her and puts an arm around her. Leela sits on her other side, and Meghan runs up to the scene with a water bottle.
I kind of don’t want to step in. I can guess what was happening here, and a part of me wants to let Mila shoot the guy for doing whatever she caught him doing or trying to do. Bile rises in my throat.
“Hold still while I shoot your balls off, asshole,” she hisses.
Instinctively, I say her name. “Mila.”
Startled, she turns to face me, her eyes vacant with rage. Finally, she sees me, and her soul returns to her eyes. “Ozzie. What are you doing here?”
I’m about to tell her when rough hands push me out of the way, and I slam into the corner of the brick wall. Handcuffs clap around Mila’s wrists. Men and women in uniform swarm the area, and one of them is peppering her with questions.
The handgun has disappeared into the ether, and Pudding and his friends are pointing and hurling accusations. There is no small amount of spittle flying.
Oh shit. Shit! The cops are arresting Mila, but they aren’t reading her her rights. I follow behind them, shouting, all the way to the patrol car, where I watch them trundle her into the back seat and drive away.
Her face in the window is embarrassed and resigned.
My mind flashes back to what I’ve read about this, and it hits me. What’s going to happen to her? Is she about to be interrogated? Will they find out her real name? Who she is?
No. No, it can’t end up like this.
Mila didn’t do anything wrong.
She will get kicked out of this school and saddled with a criminal record. All because, clearly, she was trying to help somebody.
This is why we met. I’m convinced of it. She may not be as crazy about me as I am about her, but I can help her.
She’s just going to have to let me.