Chapter 6 - Framed

WARNING: This chapter contains some mild/brief nudity (back side!).

“Savannah?!” Kenzie couldn’t help but shriek. “What the hell?!”

Savannah whirled around and glared at Kenzie accusingly. “What are you doing here, Mindy?” she hissed.

“Seriously.” Renata added. “Can’t my girl go anywhere without you?”

“You guys are vandalizing the building. That’s illegal, you know.”

“It ain’t illegal,” Renata countered. “It’s art! We’re just expressing ourselves. Me, Savannah, and Warner over there.”

The guy dubbed Warner gave a sarcastic wave before going back to his mural.

Kenzie shook her head in dismay. First Savannah gets stupidly drunk (after first losing her virginity to a random stranger), and now this? She was more corrupted, had fallen farther, than Kenzie had originally thought.

“What do you want, anyway?” Renata continued. Savannah was staying quiet.

“I was told to go talk to the sorority to get some sort of pill to help me get through finals,” Kenzie finally admitted, remembering what Addison had said. How odd that she’d be listening to a prissy sorority girl rather than her best friend’s little sister. “But the president swears she doesn’t have any.”

“Of course she says she don’t have any,” Warner interjected as he joined the girls. “Those preppy bitches wouldn’t want anyone knowing they did. They have an image to uphold of being stuck-up. But half the girls on campus have gotten these from that sorority, and half the guys from the fraternity.”

And then Warner pulled a bottle out of his back pocket and popped the lid off. He shook some circular white pills into his palm and held them out for Kenzie to see.

“So, these are the things I keep hearing about?” Kenzie inquired.

“The one and only,” Warner confirmed. “You need help getting through finals, these are what you want. Hell, you probably don’t even have to sleep if you take enough of ‘em. And you don’t just need them for finals – you can use them for whatever you need, just to mellow out or get some rest. You name it, they do it.”

“Think I could have a few?”

“Sure, for three hundred Simoleons each.”

Kenzie couldn’t restrain a sigh. Three hundred Simoleons for each of these tiny pills? And students were actually buying them, only to later end up in the hospital in critical condition (or dead)?

“What about all the rumors I’ve heard about them making people sick, or killing them?” she challenged.

Warner frowned. “There’s no proof it’s these things causing all that shit.”

“Well, I value my life more than my grades. So what do you say we make a compromise? You give me one of them, I pay you one hundred Simoleons, and I don’t tell anyone that I know who sprayed graffiti on the library wall.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Renata growled.

“I would, and I will.”

“Just do it,” Savannah said, surprising everyone. “I don’t feel that great, and I have to get back to the dorm anyway. I don’t have time for this. Just do it.”

Warner cursed under his breath but handed over a pill after Kenzie handed him some cash she kept on her for emergencies. Then, she headed back to the dorm.

Once there, she saw that it was too late to call the dean or the science lab to do an analysis on this pill, but at least she had it. She was one step closer to finding out if this pill was responsible for so many innocent students getting hospitalized or dying.

Kenzie collapsed onto the bed in deep contemplation. Even though she had the pill, she was in quite the predicament with Savannah. She was involved with vandalism, which was a crime in and of itself. Plus, she’d lied to Kenzie about only the sorority having these pills. All along, it had also been her friends who’d been supplying them. They were most likely not making them and getting them elsewhere, but it still made no sense why Savannah would lie to her about that.

Or perhaps it was simply to protect her friends, Renata and Warner. They were obviously the ones who’d supplied her with the pill all along, if she was even telling the truth about taking it in the first place. She undoubtedly told her that the sorority was responsible for harboring the drugs because she was angry at them for kicking her out of the sisterhood in an attempt to frame them. Or perhaps they really did have some as well, but Savannah had left that part out of her story.

Suddenly, there was a scream heard outside the window. Kenzie bolted up and stared outside. She saw nothing out of the ordinary, until a young woman with short red hair ran across the lawn stark naked.

“Oh for crying out loud,” Kenzie groaned. So the scream she’d heard hadn’t been one of agony – it had been one of, well, either amusement or stupidity, she couldn’t ascertain which.

Making her way toward the dresser, Kenzie accidentally kicked over a trash can.

“Damn it,” she mumbled. She wasn’t having a good day. She scooped up the trash and its contents, but stopped short when some papers and one particular object caught her eye.

“What the hell?”

She held onto the object and stood up to survey it. She knew what it was, but she wasn’t prepared for what it indicated.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she blurted out, as though someone would hear her.

Because on the tiny screen of the test, one word was illuminated, and it changed everything:

Pregnant.

She did not see that coming.

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