300 Frat Brothers

The first thing Bree noticed about the party was the smell — a cocktail of cheap beer, someone's very optimistic body spray, and what she was pretty sure was a live oak tree on fire somewhere nearby. The second thing she noticed was the sheer number of men.

"Maya." She grabbed her friend's wrist and turned her around slowly, like showing someone a sunset. "Do you see this?"

Maya took one look at the sea of broad shoulders and red cups stretching from the front porch all the way back to what appeared to be a functioning trebuchet in the yard. She blinked once. "I see a public health violation."

"She means it's beautiful," Dani said, already three steps ahead of them both, her gold hoop earrings catching the string lights as she tilted her head back to take in the full scope of the situation. "Like, genuinely, spiritually beautiful."

This was Kappa Alpha Sigma's end-of-summer blow-out, and the house — a three-story antebellum nightmare on Jones Street that had survived Sherman, Prohibition, and at least two hauntings — was absolutely losing its mind tonight. Savannah in August meant the air itself was warm and wet and sweet, draped in Spanish moss and the distant sound of a brass band carrying up from the river. It meant everyone wore as little as socially acceptable and called it fashion. It meant that the night could go absolutely anywhere, and you just had to decide whether you were the kind of person who let it.

Bree was absolutely that kind of person. Maya was not. Dani existed somewhere in the quantum space between.

They had been friends since freshman year of SCAD, which gave them three years of shared history and one ironclad rule: nobody leaves without the others. Beyond that, it was chaos by consent.

"Two hours," Maya said, accepting a red cup from a passing stranger with the blank politeness of someone who had no intention of drinking it. "I told Professor Harland I'd have the motion brief outline done by Sunday, and it is currently—"

"Saturday," Dani said. "Which means you have all of tomorrow. Which means tonight is free." She plucked Maya's untouched cup from her hand, took a sip, made a face, and handed it back. "Yikes. Drink it anyway."

They pushed through the front door and into the main room, where the bass was loud enough to feel in your chest like a second heartbeat. The crowd shifted and folded around them. Somewhere nearby, a group of guys in matching boat shoes were doing an extremely committed bit involving a canoe paddle. A ceiling fan pushed warm air around without meaningfully cooling anything.

Bree was scanning the room — not obviously, she told herself, just architecturally — when she saw him.

Dark hair, laughing at something his friend said, sleeves pushed up, standing near the back wall like he had no idea the entire party had rearranged itself into a composition with him at the center. He looked up for exactly one second, caught her eye, looked away.

Bree felt her stomach drop approximately four floors.

"I need to go stand near that wall," she announced.

"The structural wall or the man-wall?" Dani asked.

"Both. The second one."

Maya opened her mouth to say something sensible. She didn't get the chance.

That's when the music cut out.

It didn't fade. It didn't skip. It just stopped, mid-bass-drop, with the abruptness of a power surge — except every light in the house stayed on. The crowd murmured, looked around, collectively reached for their phones.

And then, through the back hallway, walked an old woman.

She was small and unhurried, dressed like she was on her way to a funeral that she'd arranged specifically to upstage. White linen. Jewelry that looked like it came from a different century. A wrap around her shoulders that smelled, even from ten feet away, of something smoky and floral that had no business being at a college party. Her silver hair was twisted up high, and her eyes — dark and sharp and deeply unbothered — moved through the crowd like she was reading a menu.

The crowd parted for her without quite knowing why.

"Who is that?" Bree whispered.

"I have no idea," Dani whispered back. "But she has incredible energy."

"She just walked in," Maya said, which was factually accurate and somehow insufficient.

The woman stopped in the approximate center of the room, looked around once with the air of someone confirming a reservation, and then looked directly at the three of them.

Not in the general direction of. At.

"Oh," the woman said, with the comfortable certainty of someone finishing a sentence they'd started thirty years ago, "there you are."

She walked straight to them. The crowd, inexplicably, let her through.

"I'm Celeste," she said, when she was close enough that they didn't have to shout over music that was no longer playing. "Some people call me Madame Celeste, but I find that a bit much." A small smile. "You may call me whatever you like."

"I'm going to call the host," Maya said.

"Maya," Bree hissed.

Celeste looked at Maya with an expression of gentle, experienced amusement. "You're the skeptic," she said. Not unkindly. "That's fine. Skeptics always come around. It just takes them a little longer."

She turned to Dani. "And you're the funny one. Which means you're also the scared one, but you've made your peace with that." Dani stared at her. Celeste turned to Bree. "And you just saw someone across the room and felt something in your chest you're trying very hard not to call what it is."

The silence between the four of them went tight as a held breath.

"I'm going to tell you something," Celeste said, her voice dropping low enough that it was only for them, "and you're going to want to dismiss it. That's fine. I've said what I've said to a lot of people who didn't believe me, and they always come back." She looked at each of them in turn. "Your soulmate is here. Somewhere in this house, among these three hundred men."

Bree's heart did something embarrassing.

"Each of yours," Celeste continued. "Different men. But I can't tell you which one — that's not how this works." She said it the way someone says it's going to rain — certain, practical, not particularly invested in whether they believed her. "You'll have to find him yourself. Could take a while." A small pause. "I'd start tonight."

The music snapped back on.

Not gradually. Not with a fade-in. Full volume, mid-drop, like it had never stopped.

Celeste looked at the three of them one last time, then turned and began moving back toward wherever she'd come from, easy and unhurried, the crowd folding apart for her again.

"Wait—" Bree started.

But she was already gone. Not disappeared-in-a-puff-of-smoke gone. Just gone, the way people are when you blink in a crowd and the specific person you were watching simply isn't there anymore.

The three of them stood there for a moment.

"That was insane," Dani said finally.

"That was a performance," Maya said. "She was clearly—"

"Your person is here tonight," Dani mimicked, in a pretty solid impression. "Each of yours." She turned to Bree. "Okay but she said that before you even told us about the guy by the wall."

Bree had, in fact, not said anything about the guy by the wall. She thought about that.

"I'm getting another drink," Maya said, and walked away.

Bree looked back across the room toward the wall.

He was still there. Same spot. Talking to the same friend.

But this time, when he looked up and their eyes met again, he didn't look away.

He smiled.

And Bree, who had been to approximately forty-seven parties in her three years at SCAD and had never once been rendered speechless by a man at any of them, felt her entire ability to form words quietly dissolve.

Her phone buzzed. A text from Maya: I hate that I'm already looking for him.

Then, immediately after: Do not tell Dani I said that.

Bree was still smiling at her phone when she felt a hand on her shoulder, turned around expecting Dani —

And found herself face to face with a man she had absolutely never seen before, tall and a little sun-worn, with the kind of easy confidence that only exists in people who have never once had to work hard to enter a room.

"You look lost," he said.

"I'm not," she said.

He grinned. "I know. I just wanted an excuse to talk to you."

Across the room, thirty feet away, Maya was standing very still near the drinks table, staring at a man she'd accidentally made eye contact with — and who was now walking directly toward her with the calm, purposeful stride of someone who'd already decided how this conversation was going to go.

Maya, for the first time in recent memory, had absolutely no idea what she was going to say.

The night, it turned out, was just getting started.