Perion

At this relatively early evening hour--early for a college dormitory, at least--an excited pair of feet scampered along a carpeted corridor on the fourth floor of Howard Hall, until they reached the closed door of a dorm room. A tan hand reached out and turned the handle, and a curvaceous Latina beauty slid herself through the opening and shut the door behind her.

"Well?" Jacqueline demanded, jumping up from the bed. "Where is she?"

"Could you not get her out?" Kaykay added. "It looked clear on the laptop!"

Alexia Ramos's mouth hung open. It quickly became clear to everyone else in the room that the curly-haired athlete didn't have an adequate response for her teammates.

"I don't know!" Alexia finally offered. "She just...stayed!"

"But, like...something was HAPPENING in there."

"While I was at the door...Chris yelled something. He said something like, 'You don't ever have to do that!' And then I could hear him coming across the room...TOWARD her, I think."

"And then, the door...MOVED, just a little bit."

Jacqueline cocked an auburn eyebrow.

"Wait, you're saying he PUSHED her into the door?"

Alexia shook her head...as the hint of a smile crept across her lips.

"I don't think so...I think it was...maybe...something ELSE..."

"...And then it got really quiet..."

The three teammates stared back and forth at each other, their collective enthusiasm growing as mutual realization spread across all of their faces...

...And then Kaykay clapped her long-nailed hands together and practically shouted what they were all thinking.

"YES, KELSIE! GET IT, GIRL! CLAIM THAT DICK!"

Alexia lifted two sets of crossed fingers on behalf of her blond bestie.

"Let's just see how it goes from here..." she hedged, "But...I think...MAYBE!"

Alexia let out a massive exhale, as her hopes and dreams for her shy roommate threatened to overwhelm her. She staggered over to her bed and collapsed backward onto her sheets.

"Please, God, just let this work..." she whispered as her eyes closed.

For five minutes, the room was quiet, as everyone present allowed themselves to savor the apparent success of all of their recent effort.

The silence was finally broken by the freckled beauty who, hours earlier, had effectively commandeered the room to run a personalized beauty clinic for Kelsie McCollum.

"So," Jacqueline began, "Let's say that this DOES work..."

"Let's say that Kelsie and Chris actually DO fuck each other silly tonight. Now what? Where do we go from here?"

"I mean, this is all well and good in the short term...but Cooper is GOING to find out. I mean, whether it's days, weeks, months, whatever...This ends with her finding out. It has to!"

Alexia sighed from her prone spot on the bed.

"Fuck." she groaned. "I still don't know what the hell we're gonna do about that..."

A hush fell over the room once again as the frustrated friends labored to summon a solution.

"What about this?" Kaykay finally offered.

"What if we find a way, somehow, to PROTECT Kelsie?"

"Protect her SOCIALLY, I mean," the braided beauty added. "What if we somehow get it to a point where that bitch Cooper realizes that her little secret about y'all just doesn't matter anymore? Like, we find a way to make something ELSE about Kelsie and Chris matter way more to people?"

"And THEN," Kaykay concluded, "We go to that twat, right in Pi Shop, and we lay it right out for her. 'Bitch, if you fuck with OUR girl? Number one, no one will care! And number two, if you go around spreading some gossip about Kelsie, we will be on your ass, and the only one who will look worse is YOU!'"

Jacqueline rolled the idea over in her mind.

"Huh. That could work. It could definitely work...but we'd have to figure out what that thing would be that could become this big, public, social movement that everyone could get behind. But if we could actually FIND that thing...I think you might be on to something, Kay. I think you might just have a start of a plan."

"No. You DON'T have a plan."

The three boisterous Flag Football teammates each spun their heads toward a chair in the corner of the dorm room...and toward the quiet, unassuming figure who, it was often so easy to forget, had been right here with them this entire time.

Now the object of her surprised friends' full attention, Erika Lim softly repeated herself.

"You don't have a plan."

"Why not?" Kaykay protested. "I think it could work!"

Erika directed her shy eyes toward the floor...but she nonetheless shook her head.

"You have to think about it," she forlornly began. "This is Cooper Deering."

"She's cruel. She's conceited. She has to have her way, all of the time. But above all of that...she's vengeful."

"Look at what she did to my brother, just because he went to Pi Pi Pi and argued with her. Look what she did to Kelsie, just because she became the object of Chris's affection. Cooper Deering is a monster. If she perceives a slight, she will sit around thinking of a way to respond with something much, much worse."

"My point is: it doesn't matter if you come up with some great plan to insulate Kelsie. It doesn't matter if you go to Cooper and explain to her, perfectly reasonably, that spreading her gossip about Kelsie, Chris, and Alexia won't have any effect. It doesn't matter if you somehow find some ironclad way to keep Kelsie and Chris together."

"Cooper will have to have her revenge. No matter what. She is going to come back at Kelsie. She is going to come back at every one of us. As hard as she possibly can..."

The reserved Hawaiian's voice trailed off. The room was silent again, as the vibrantly shaded trio of football players around Erika confronted, then accepted, her sound logic.

Erika lifted her gaze upward and dared to address her confident friends directly.

"I don't know what our plan needs to be," Erika admitted. "I can't see it any better than you can."

"But I know THIS."

"Our goal should not be to protect Kelsie and Chris."

"And our goal should not be to stop Cooper Deering."

The Korean dancer's eyes shifted, with purpose, between Jacqueline, Kaykay, and Alexia.

"Our GOAL," Erika finished, "Should be to LEAD Cooper Deering."

"To lead her right to the one thing we KNOW that she will want."

"Revenge."

****************

"Can we pause, just for a second, and address how RIDICULOUS this is?"

The bluetooth earpiece in Jacqueline's ear soon transmitted a response.

"You're going to have to be more specific, Jacq," Alexia replied. "This entire thing is ridiculous, if you think about it for long enough."

"What I MEAN," Jacqueline muttered as she strode up the walkway, "Is that I actually get PAID, as a model, because I look a certain way. They want me because I DON'T just look exactly like all of the other girls do."

"And this plan, basically, depends on me throwing all of that right out the fucking window."

"Oh, BOO HOO!" Alexia chided through the earpiece. "Let's all feel sorry for the tall pretty fashion model! I'm sorry, Jacqueline, did you want to stop and have a quick cry before you go in?"

"Bite me," Jacqueline retorted. "Also, this wig fucking itches."

A second voice, unmistakably Kaykay's, joined the conversation in Jacqueline's ear.

"Damn, I didn't know my quarterback was such a PUSSY! Girl, put your damn game-face on!"

"Fuck you," Jacqueline dismissed. "You know I'm gonna CRUSH this."

"Then stop complaining!" Kaykay demanded. "Get in character! It's Basic Bitch o'clock!"

"Everyone SHUT UP!" Jacqueline hissed as she arrived at the imposing double doors. "Get out of the damn kitchen and let me cook!"

Jacqueline took a deep breath, and then rapped her pale knuckles against the wood.

A moment later, a house staff attendant swung open the front door of Pi Pi Pi...

...and beheld an extremely tall, extremely beautiful, extremely BLOND girl wearing an unbuttoned purple peacoat, purple heels, and an absolute maneater of a tight purple evening dress.

"Oh my GODDD!" Jacqueline apologized. "I am soooo STUPIDDD!"

"We all got ALL THE WAY to the venue, and RIGHT when I got off the bus, I checked my bag and realized I didn't have my phone, or my cards, or my key, or ANYTHING! And we're all going to go clubbing after the formal and be out ALL NIGHT! Cooper had to call an Uber just so I could get back here and find everything!"

For a split second, the attendant fixed Jacqueline with a quizzical expression...

...and the freckled model-quarterback was forced to wonder if there was a little voice, somewhere in the back of this woman's mind, telling her that...perhaps...she had never seen this tall blond girl before...

"Do you..." the attendant began.

"Do you...remember where you left them?"

"OMG, I hope soooo!" Jacqueline replied. "But we were getting ready in SO many different rooms that I'll have to go look! I hope it won't take too long!"

The attendant swung the door open and stepped aside.

"Do you need me to help you search for them?"

"Oh, no, but thank you SOOO MUCH!" Jacqueline declined as she briskly stepped past.

As the attendant swung the door closed, Alexia was quietly in Jacqueline's ear again.

"Get to the stairs as quickly as you can, Jacq...but don't strut away from that lady like Gisele or Kaia Gerber. You're not walking the runway; remember, you're a Pi Shop Basic B in high heels! Click, clack, click, clack!"

"I know that!" Jacqueline muttered under her breath...but she still made an effort to shorten her steps and adopt an uncertain gait in her heels.

As Jacqueline ascended the wide, carpeted grand staircase that led to the second floor of Pi Pi Pi, KayKay chimed in.

"Girl, did you just say...OMG?"

"FUCK OFF, Kaykay."

Jacqueline reached the second floor, stepped around a corner and out of sight...

...and immediately rifled her hand into her oversized purple handbag...

...which was filled, to the very brim, with an array of tiny digital cameras--each one disguised within an outlet cover, a usb wall adapter, or a fake carbon monoxide detector.

"Okay," Jacqueline declared.

"Time to go to work."

*********************

Kaykay hunched over in her chair, her elbows resting atop the desk, her fingers massaging her troubled temples.

"Day after day of staring at this shit...and I still have no idea what the fuck I'm looking for."

The ebony beauty turned away from the desk and towards Alexia's bed.

"Hey. Morpheus. Mr. Matrix. You're the fucking camera expert. Why don't you come over here and tell me what I'm missing."

Jason--his back propped up by pillows on the bed, his fingers massaging the curly-haired scalp of the bubbly Latina who had claimed him--ventured what was, for him, a characteristic response.

"You know, Kaykay...Morpheus didn't BUILD the Matrix. He ESCAPED it. He was trying to defeat it, actu--"

"Jason, DO I CARE?" Kaykay interrupted. "Just come sit here and find some shit!"

Jason, though, was clearly quite happy where he was currently positioned.

"I mean, if we're being honest..." the Korean programmer hedged, "...I kind of feel like...a little bit of a pervert when I watch those feeds? Those girls are coming in and out of their rooms all of the time, especially if they're getting ready to go out to a party, and half of the time they're only half-dressed..."

Alexia looked back over her shoulder at her man.

"You feel like a pervert, huh?"

The curvy beauty sprung upward, spun around, straddled her surprised beau, and pulled his face close to her.

"Is that what you are, Jason? Are you my dirty little pervert? Huh? Does watching all of those pretty girls walk around in their bras and panties get you so turned on? Does it make you want to do more nasty things to me? Am I going to have to teach you a lesson for being such a dirty little perverted b--"

"Can we please FOCUS HERE?" Jacqueline cut in with a roll of her emerald eyes.

The Irish warrior-princess was, herself, also propped up by pillows...on Kelsie's vacant bed. Her own freckled arms were tenderly wrapped around the shy Hawaiian dancer she was snuggling with--who, for her own part, was shielding her embarrassed eyes from the abrupt seduction of her twin brother on the other bed.

"The bottom line," Jacqueline sighed, "Is that we've been going at this forever, and we haven't found ANYTHING useful."

"This...might not have been the great idea that we thought it would be," the model-quarterback admitted. "I don't know what we were expecting to find in that house when we put up these cameras."

"Did we think that there was just going to be some secret treasure-trove of incriminating material? Like, we'd find out they were wholesaling fentanyl by the truckload out the back door of the house or something? This is PI SHOP. All it is, every goddamn day, is just basic bitches and their basic bitch drama."

"Amen to THAT," Kaykay concurred. "If lip filler and false-eyelash abuse were crimes, we'd have Cooper and every other bitch in that house locked away for life. But other than that...I don't know where we go from here."

Erika, lowering her hand from her eyes but continuing to attempt to ignore what was playing out on the other bed, quietly entered the conversation.

"Maybe we're thinking about this the wrong way," she offered quietly.

"Maybe it isn't WHAT we should be looking for. Maybe it's WHO we should be looking for."

Kaykay furrowed her tired brow.

"Erika, you know I love you...but is that supposed to mean something?"

"Wait, Kay," Alexia cut in, as she reluctantly tore herself away from her lustful assault on Jason.

"I think I get what Erika means. It's like city parking spaces."

Seeing that no one else in the dorm room was following her, Alexia elaborated.

"You're driving around, looking for parking," she explained. "You circle, time after time, block after block, looking for an empty space. But you don't find one. Because every time a space actually opens up, someone grabs it before you get there. So what do you do?"

"What you DO," Alexia explained, "Is STOP looking for spaces, and START looking for PEOPLE. People leaving their apartment buildings. People who look like they're headed somewhere. People with keys in their hands. You find a person who looks like they're going to CREATE an open parking space. And then you follow them to what you want."

"Okay," Jason offered, his eyes shifting between his sister and his seductress. "So, then, WHO are we looking for?"

Alexia shrugged.

"Well..." she replied. "We've been watching these girls for a while now. What have we learned?"

"I mean, we've learned that Cooper Deering is an APEX TWAT!" Kaykay returned.

"Day after day, it's her just bossing these girls around 24/7. She tells them what to do. She tells them their outfits are trashy. She pits them against each other and plays passive-aggressive power games. She sits on her throne, and they all just come begging for her fucking good graces. But then...we pretty much ALREADY KNEW all of that. We didn't need the cameras to tell us!"

"It IS pretty fucking ridiculous," Jacqueline concurred. "Yesterday, I watched this one blond girl follow her around for like two hours."

Kaykay blinked.

"Which girl?"

The blue-and-gold-braided beauty turned back toward the laptop.

"THIS girl?"

Jacqueline gently lifted Erika up off of her and rose to approach the screen.

"Yup," she confirmed. "That's the one."

"Well," Kaykay responded, "I guess she didn't get her fill. Because I've been watching her dote on Cooper in Cooper's room the entire time that I've been sitting here."

Kaykay and Jacqueline's exchange had piqued the curiosity of everyone else in the room. Alexia, Jason, and Erika slowly rose from the beds, gathered next to Jacqueline, and stared down at the screen.

"Oh yeah." Alexia concurred. "This is the girl who let us into Pi Shop...you know...THAT night. I've seen this girl plenty of times. She's practically Cooper's lap dog."

"Same," Jason confirmed. "Come to think of it...I think, anytime I've been watching...she's practically always around Cooper."

"Me too," Erika added.

"Okay...but WHY, though?" Kaykay questioned. "I mean, I can tell you just from watching today: Cooper treats her like SHIT. Half of the time she ignores her, and the other half of the time, she basically tells her that her opinion doesn't matter."

Jacqueline shrugged.

"Some people are just followers. Not everyone can, ahem, be the LEAD dog..."

"Oh, BOW WOW, Lead Dog!" Kaykay replied with a thunderous eye-roll. "Our team is so fortunate to be graced with the light of your glorious leadership!"

"What can I say?" Jacqueline grinned. "Every one of your TD catches this season came from the same magic arm, Kay!"

"ANYWAY..." Kaykay pushed on, "This girl is content to just take the abuse."

"Like, look here, right now."

"Here's Cooper, trying on all of these new dresses she just bought. And every single damn time, this girl, Tracey, is like, 'That looks soooo pretty on you, Cooper!'"

"And Cooper will reply with some shit like, 'I KNOW, Tracey. That's why I BOUGHT IT.'"

"That's right..." Alexia remembered with consternation. "Her name was Tracey..."

The curvaceous athlete redirected her attention from the laptop to her man.

"Do you like watching Cooper try on clothes?" she whispered in Jason's ear. "It's okay to say that you do. It's okay if watching her strip down again and again makes you hard, Baby. You're just a sick little perverted boy, aren't you? Don't you worry...Alexia has the medicine that will make you all bet--"

"JESUS, Alexia!" Jacqueline cut in. "His sister is RIGHT HERE!"

And then, at that exact moment, as one Flag Football teammate was chastising another for exposing one twin to another twin's seduction...

...they all saw it.

Every one of them.

Right there on the screen.

If any one of the friends had been watching the laptop alone, he or she might have dismissed it.

But they weren't alone. They were together.

And, together, they watched...as Cooper pulled one of the black dresses from her recent haul up over her shoulders and tossed it onto her bed. They watched her reveal her impossibly sexy body, adorned with a black lace bra and a matching lace thong. They watched her bend down to the bed to grab yet another dress from her collection...unwittingly presenting her unmatched ass to the false-carbon monoxide-detector camera on the ceiling.

As Cooper leaned down, Alexia, Kaykay, Jacqueline, Jason, and Erika each produced the same excited gasp...and then reacted to each other's gasps...

...as, behind an oblivious Cooper...the doting girl in the pink satin pajama shirt and shorts, with the blond, pageant queen curls, silently watched Cooper bend over...

...as she ran her hand up the inside of her own thigh.

*********************

"Cooper...you are one SELF-CENTERED BITCH."

Deering sneered back at Jacqueline, the cell-phone still lifted to her ear.

"Oh, I'd say it's a little late for insults, wouldn't you, Jacqueline?"

For a moment, the fire-haired quarterback continued to cast a furious glare back at the vixen in the black dress.

Then, Jacqueline--still standing at the doorway of the bedroom--shifted her focus to the naked couple who continued to spoon on the bed in the center of the room. After sharing a silent exchange with Kelsie McCollum and Chris Weathers, Jacqueline returned to Deering.

"That wasn't an insult, Cooper."

"If I wanted to INSULT you, I'd call you a sociopath. Or a lunatic. Or just an absolute fucking cunt. But that's not what I said just now."

"What I said just now was that you are one self-centered bitch."

Cooper, only half-paying attention as she directed her focus toward her phone, offered a distracted reply.

"Yes, fine, Jacqueline, whatever. Pick whatever insult you want. None of that matters anymore."