Chapter 6 Ro

Ro was a drug dealer. He was also a bartender at Applebee's. Umu, his lifelong best friend, had been sitting at his bar when she invited him to the ritual a week earlier.

"You know, if you started a community college course in graphic design in September, you'd be done before I was through grad school," she'd said when she mentioned the event was on the eve of the college's graduation ceremony.

"Don't be boring," he said, pouring her a Coors Light.

"An apprenticeship in carpentry, then." She had beer foam on her upper lip. "Either way you'd be making better bank than me and my classics degree."

It wasn't the first, second, or fifth time they'd talked this through. Classrooms were for the birds. The only smart person Ro wanted to hang out with was Umu, and he could do that without paying anyone tuition.

If he'd made a list of two hundred things he'd have liked to be doing the evening of the twenty-fourth, the ritual wouldn't have made the list. Umu called it a party, but no party he'd ever gone to required twelve hours of fasting before the going got good.

Umu and Ro were crouched under a big wooden table in a side room of the massive library basement. The room was far enough out of the way that they'd been sitting on top of the table talking about all the things they wanted to eat until the sound of the elevator opening sent them into hiding.

When they were hiding under the table, he kept thinking of them a week ago back at the bar—Umu rattling off the names of the people who worked at the library and trying to make them sound interesting. She was never going to convince Ro, as she talked about Kip's research interests or Mary's social media presence, that they were anything shiny he might want as a plaything. At some point she mentioned that the library even employed a scientist who might come, an undergraduate student. Even a man who doesn't care for science can appreciate a little variety. About Faye the scientist, he'd even asked a couple of questions. Had he met her before? Had she come to the ridiculous roller skating party Umu had thrown last year when she'd been trying on the role of collegiate society planner? Umu told him no, she'd been invited but hadn't come to the disastrous roller skating day. He'd poured Umu another drink and lost interest in the girl and her science.

Anyway, now that it was the day of the event, Ro liked overhearing the self-important douchebag who was giving a tour of the library because it gave him ammo about the type of person Umu had been spending her time with. Try as she may to make them sound interesting, none of these people were cool.

Davey, the douchebag giving the tour, wasn't the one who invited her, Umu whispered, but she was willing to concede that he was just as bad as Kip, the grad student who TA'd for one of her courses and who had extended the invitation.

Ro had jumped to the most obvious conclusion first—that Kip invited Umu because he wanted to fuck her—but hearing this joker go on and on about fore-edge painting and vellum, Ro knew that no man who worked at this place would ever stand a chance with his best friend. They probably knew it, too. No, Umu was right when she told Ro that she'd only been invited because they needed someone to bring drugs. Ro had charged them twice what he would charge a high school student, and he'd rolled the cost of his own dose into the fee. These guys may have had more education than Ro, but he was no one's fool.