~Chapter 3~

It's the weekend before classes officially start—one last chance to relax and have fun before the homework and papers and midterm stress start piling up.

Rapunzel's roommates have been out until the early hours of morning every night since arriving on campus. At least, she's pretty sure they have. She usually goes to bed around 11 p.m., and they're never back by the time she's asleep. Mulan mostly hangs out with their floormates in the common area, while Rapunzel has a strong suspicion that Ariel has been partying at frat houses in the area. She invited them out with her once, but Mulan wanted to explore downtown Epcot City, and Rapunzel wanted to sleep (she always gets headaches when there are disturbances in her sleep schedule), although Ariel assured them the invitation remains open.

Not that Rapunzel plans to take her up on that offer. It's one thing to not make her bed in the mornings and to sleep in a little past 8 a.m. It's another entirely to be caught drinking illegally. She could get expelled—or worse, addicted to alcohol.

Instead, she resolves to start reading ahead through her new textbooks to prepare for her first day of lecture. She's here to succeed and get into medical school. That means stopping for nothing—school has to come before friends, before art, and before fun.

She cracks open her brand new, latest-edition physics book, ordered straight off of Amazon (Mother thinks campus bookstores are a scam).

Ah, that new-book smell…

With the exception of Christmas presents when Rapunzel was especially good, Mother rarely ever allowed to her have new books. Growing up, her homeschooling and leisure reading relied heavily on discounted hand-me-down books that Mother would buy in bulk for dirt cheap from buy-it-or-we're-throwing-it-out sales at the local public library, where they would sell books that were too old and battered as an alternative to simply trashing them. Sometimes, Rapunzel would use old books that Mother kept from her days in graduate school (which were a bit too dry and technical for Rapunzel's taste). For subjects like English literature, this was no problem because the first edition of, say, John Steinbeck's East of Eden is a rare and special find. But to foster a healthy sense of skepticism in Rapunzel's growing scientific mind, Mother would remind her that scientific knowledge has a half-life. That is, half of what scientists know as "fact" about a particular subject will be wrong or obsolete after a certain amount of time, as new discoveries are made and old ideas are debunked. If Mother felt that something in those old books was inaccurate or outdated, she would use the internet as a supplemental teaching tool. Not that it happened often. Everything Rapunzel learned up to now was what Mother considered "basic stuff"—things like classical mechanics, or calculus, or human anatomy, which have more or less withstood the test of time. Old textbooks were perfectly adequate.

But now that Rapunzel is in college, her professors get to call the shots on which textbooks to use, and most of them require students to purchase the newest edition of a particular book of their choosing. With no option but to comply, Mother had grumbled about how the university just wants to squeeze parents for every cent they're worth, and Rapunzel mentally added the cost of her new textbooks to the list of things she's one day going to have to make up to Mother.

It's a strange feeling, having a book in her possession that has belonged to her and only her. There's no highlighting, no underlining, no annotations scribbled in the margins, no coffee stains, no evidence of the lives this book has lived or the hands it has passed through. It's all crisp edges, and dog ear-less corners, and pristine pages of words that she will be the first person to ever read.

It's cold and impersonal and a little anxiety-inducing.

Even her notebooks and binders are brand-new. They're all color-coordinated and already laid out and ready for Monday: blue for physics, green for chemistry, and yellow for calculus.

It peeves her a little that she still has to take these basic introductory classes despite scoring 5's on all her AP exams. Her AP credits are applicable at WDU, and she did use the ones she'd accrued for the humanities. But when they were enrolling in classes, Mother had decided it would be best if Rapunzel didn't use her math and science credits. Her rationale was that re-taking those classes instead would lessen her first semester workload and allow her to acclimatize to college while earning easy A's.

And Rapunzel honestly can't argue with that. If she wants to be competitive when applying to medical schools, then she needs a good GPA. And a good GPA is pretty much guaranteed if she's already seen all the material before. (Plus, with the humanities out of the way, she gets 20 credit points for her electives and humanities/social sciences requirements for graduation. So as far as premed requirements go, she's basically done with both the writing and the full-year English classes, which gives her more time to focus on math and science.)

The one exception was calculus. (Technically, calculus isn't required for premed, but WDU requires all students who plan to major in a science field to take calculus before they can graduate.) After she scoped out WDU's math department faculty webpage, Mother went on Rate My Professors and discovered that the professor for Calculus I routinely fails most of his students. So it was decided that Rapunzel would use half of her AP Calculus credits to opt out of Calc I and enroll in Calc II instead. Better safe than sorry, right? Premeds usually have to maintain a GPA higher than 3.8 to get into medical school, and even an A-minus average will take her down to a 3.7, so Rapunzel really doesn't have much room for error here…

On Sunday, her fifth day on campus, she realizes that she hasn't actually done anything in her free time besides read. Her shoulders ache, and her neck is a little stiff, and there are only so many times she can solve for the coefficient of friction before her eyes start glazing over.

And it's eerily quiet. Ariel and Mulan are out (probably scared away by her nerdery), and the room next door is silent, too. Usually, she can hear one of the neighbors chatting on Skype with his parents back home—not that she's eavesdropping. The walls really are just that thin. Apparently, the suites in this dorm used to be larger, but when the student population started to grow, they put up partitions and divvied the rooms up. So technically, her room and the room next door used to be part of one big suite. Hence, every noise on their side of the wall sounds like it's happening in the same room she's in.

It makes for especially embarrassing situations at night. Just the other night, Rapunzel had jolted awake from a nightmare about an earthquake hitting Corona Woods and trapping her under the kitchen table, the little cottage falling apart around her. Mother was screaming at her to get out and join her under the doorframe because she was too close to the windows, but Rapunzel was too terrified of the chunks of ceiling raining down to move. The table sheltering her from the debris was squeaking, its legs threatening to give way from all the swaying. Someone screamed—she couldn't tell if the voice was Mother's or her own—and the ceiling caved in entirely. There was this big cloud of dust…and then she jolted awake to find that something was still squeaking.

Her head foggy from sleep, her initial thought was, Did I just dream through a real earthquake? But then she realized the squeaking was far too rhythmic to be of volcanic or tectonic origin…and it was coming through the wall from next door.

And accompanied by breathy gasps and incoherent exclamations.

It finally dawned on her what was going on.

(Despite her unorthodox upbringing, she does, in fact, know what sex is. She's a premed, after all. Most kids find out about "the birds and the bees" sometime in their teens, when their parents have to explain the…changes their bodies are undergoing. But Mother started teaching Rapunzel biology when she was seven, just to prepare her for the teen years and so they could move on to less awkward topics in science, like genetics and biochemistry.)

Anyway...

Sleep, sleep, sleep, she had screamed at herself. She tried rolling over and shoving a pillow over her head, but she could still practically feel the vibrations in the wall as her neighbors on the other side engaged in their nocturnal activities, the obnoxious squeaking occasionally punctuated by choice vocabulary.

Finally, she'd had enough. Rolling back over, she repeatedly banged her fist against the wall. Loudly. The squeaking stopped abruptly.

"Holy shit!" she heard. (The panicked kind of cursing, not the ecstatic, thankfully.)

And then there was dead silence. Maybe they went to a different room to traumatize another innocent kid—Rapunzel didn't really care. It was an ungodly hour of the night, so she just went back to sleep, after resolving to never, ever read the name tags on the suite next door. Imagine how awkward would it be if it was someone she knew! She would never be able to look them in eye again—

"Hey!" Mulan barges into the room just now, jolting Rapunzel back into the present. "We're watching a movie in the common area in five minutes!" she announces breathlessly. "You should come out and join us!"

A movie? That doesn't sound so bad right now. Physics is boring her out of her mind, and they'll probably all be too busy staring at the TV for Rapunzel to embarrass herself…

Rapunzel is never going to watch Bridesmaids again.

Sure, she knows that she's technically old enough to watch R-rated movies. And she's in college now, so Mother can't restrict what she's exposed to anymore. But when the opening scene is basically a replay of what she had to overhear from the next-door neighbor the other night, she really could have gone without.

She may know what sex is and how it works, but she definitely didn't need to hear it actually happening, let alone watch it unfolding on the screen. And the part with the food poisoning? When the one bridesmaid literally sat in the sink and—she definitely wasn't expecting to see that.

(In her defense, the only movies she grew up watching were documentaries about ancient history, or the life of Albert Einstein, or tutorials on how ion channels work. The least they could've done was warn her that moviemakers are legally allowed to put stuff like that on the screens! Maybe she should go around wearing a "Fragile—Please Handle With Kid Gloves" sign.)

The raunchiness wasn't the worst part, though. A majority of the movie is just downright depressing. Poor Annie gets dumped by her boyfriend, and her business goes under, and she has to move back in with her mom because she's broke, and she messes up with her love interest, and her best friend is replacing her with someone whose life seems perfect, and said someone is actively trying to sabotage her efforts to make her best friend happy…

It's just so sad.

How can Rapunzel not relate, when her own future is uncertain? What if she's just too much of a freak, and no one wants to be friends with her? What if she's not good enough for medical school? What if she can't find a job after graduation? What if she flunks out of college? What if she has a falling out with Mother and gets disowned? What if Mother's health takes another bad turn?

Needless to say, the movie puts her in a slump for the rest of the afternoon.

Ah, yes, her old foe. Integration by partial fractions.

She really shouldn't be this intimidated. She learned this stuff years ago. In fact, the last four years of her homeschooling has been repetition of the same material, drilling it in year after year so that she'll be able to get that 5 on the AP test and a perfect 4.0 in college.

She just has to factor out the polynomial, and then solve for A and B, and then work with the new integrand. She should be able to do this in her sleep. And yet, just the sight of the polynomial in the denominator is enough to set her heart racing…

Back home, her hesitation would have been unacceptable. Mother has always been a perfectionist. For as long as Rapunzel can remember, it was never enough for her to get the answer right. She also had to answer before Mother got tired of waiting.

Mother was also big on punctuality and time management. Because she had to work during the day, she would leave Rapunzel's daily schedule on the dry erase board they kept on the fridge.

6:45—Kiss Mother goodbye, have breakfast
7:00—Chores
7:15—History reading
8:15—Literature reading
9:15—Break
9:30—English essay writing
10:30—Math reading
11:30—Math worksheets
12:10—Lunch + break
12:45—Biology reading
1:45—Biology worksheets
2:45—Break
3:00—Chemistry reading
4:00—Chemistry worksheets
5:00—Make dinner

And after dinner, Mother would have her read ahead for the next day's assignments while she graded her worksheets. If she did well that day, Rapunzel would get the rest of the evening off to play guitar or paint. If she failed to retain the concepts from her books, then Mother would have to personally teach her the material, and she would have to repeat the same lesson tomorrow. And if she still didn't pass the next day, well… There were plenty of times when Rapunzel would be immersed in her read-ahead for the next day, when she would be jolted out by the back of a hand across her face.

"We've been over this three days in a row!"

"You have to rearrange the polynomial so that the terms are ordered by the exponent on X! How else are you going to figure out what A, B, and C are?"

"When I get home tomorrow, it had better all be perfect!"

"Prove you get it. Solve this problem right now!"

"You're already ten years old! Kids your age are already learning trigonometry and pre-calculus in public school—"

The tip of her pencil snaps off and Rapunzel blinks, the image of that little cottage in the woods instantly melting away. She's in her desk chair, in her dorm room, in Epcot City, and apparently working on autopilot through the practice questions in her calculus book.

Except for some reason, she's written "(d/dx)(sin(x)) = –sin(x)"

No no no no no! Stupid, stupid, stupid!

The semester hasn't even started yet, and she's already gotten rusty, already hit the metaphorical DELETE button on her forehead. These careless mistakes will never do. If she were a doctor, this kind of mistake could mean the difference between saving a patient and accidentally killing him! Mother isn't here to catch her mistakes now, so she's going to have to work even harder to maintain the work ethic she needs to succeed…

"Rapunzel, can you spell 'equal'?"

"Ee-kew-yoo…um…ay…"

"Yes?"

"Ee-kew-yoo-ay."

"Don't you think you're forgetting something, darling?"

"Ee-kew-yoo-ay…um—"

"Because we've been over this already, sweetheart. 'Equal' is spelled E-Q-U-A-aaand…?"

Even at three years old, before she could even understand the concept of "reading" or "the alphabet," Rapunzel knew she had to memorize the noises that Mother sounded out for her. Mother called them "letters." Rapunzel had no idea what "ee" or "kew" or "yoo" or "ay" were, but when she said them in that order, Mother didn't get angry. She just seemed to be forgetting the last sound.

She tried again. "Ee-kew-yoo-ay…" (Quick, what other sounds did Mother tell her were "letters"?) "Bee? Em? No—eff. Eff!"

She cowered back as Mother rounded on her, eyes blazing.

"'Equaf?' 'EQUAF?' If I put you in school and your teacher asked you to spell 'equal' and you gave her 'equaf,' you would be too stupid to keep up in school! You would be held back for an entire year! Maybe two! You would still be in diapers while other kids your age are already writing essays! If you keep lagging at this rate, you're not even going to get into community college! You'll be worthless, Rapunzel—just like your father!"

"Who's Aladdin Cassin?"

Okay, so maybe Rapunzel caved a little and asked Mulan to help her set up her very own Facebook account. But in her defense, holing up at her desk with only her textbooks for company on a Sunday afternoon is starting to get old, especially when she knows something is always going on in the dorm, just out of reach on the other side of her door.

For people who have been accepted to a world class university, her floormates are certainly a lot less serious about pre-reading for lectures and worrying about preparing properly. In fact, she recently overheard the guys next door talking about what classes they plan to take, and one of them even said he has "no idea what to expect from a class called 'Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics,' but hey, C's get degrees!"

So maybe she is a little over-prepared. Maybe it's time to relax a little.

She's not so sheltered that she doesn't know that the public school kids her age who volunteered at the Corona Woods Nursing Home weren't exactly spelling supercalifragilisticexpialidocious by the 2nd grade, or doing multidimensional vector multiplication by the 7th grade. She just…never really questioned Mother's teaching methods. At first, she figured that that was just how kids were taught back in the day, and given how kids in her generation were widely regarded as pampered and coddled, Mother would know best. It wasn't until one day when she was home alone and discovered the incognito browsing mode that she was able to look up Corona Public Schools' K-12 curriculum and find just how accelerated Mother's curriculum was.

She didn't confront Mother about it, either. She would gotten into major trouble for using Mother's computer to look up something that wasn't relevant to her lessons, not to mention using the incognito feature to get around her monitored internet activities. And it does make sense, when she really thinks about it, to prepare her that way as a premed, to optimize her chances of getting into medical school.

At any rate, her surreptitious Google searches are hardly the only secret she's ever kept from Mother. And she still has Pascal, her old plush chameleon that Mother thought she threw out years ago. And she hasn't made her bed properly since coming to college. And now she has this brand new Facebook account, and she's already "friended" Ariel, Mulan, Snow, Rose, Belle, and a few other people on her floor.

Someone named Aladdin Cassin is friend requesting her, and he's inviting her to join a something called a "Valley Tower 6-West" group. She hesitates over the "confirm" button, looking towards her roommate for confirmation.

There's a reason Mother used to monitor what she did on the computer back home. The internet is a dangerous place, especially social media sites, where high school students are bullied so relentlessly that they commit suicide and employers look up job applicants and decide not to hire them because their photos or posts are "unprofessional." The only surefire way to protect herself is to stay away from it altogether.

But on the flip side, for a site that's supposedly obsolete and "for old people," a lot of their floormates and new friends at college are still "friending" each other or using the platform to talk to high school friends. And if Rapunzel stays off social media, then she's going to miss out on school events and meeting people. Plus, Facebook has a messaging feature that could come in handy if she ever gets sick and misses class and needs to ask someone for notes.

She's (almost) an adult now. Surely she can handle it? She'll just use common sense with her privacy settings and not post stupid things. She and Mulan have already taken the precaution to alter the spelling of her name slightly to "Repunzel Gothell," just in case.

Her roommate rolls onto her back from her spot on the floor, where she's been scrolling through her phone. "Aladdin…as in the Aladdin who lives next door? The guy from Saudi?"

Oh yeah! The nice guy who held his umbrella for them when they were going to the convocation ceremony the other day. (Gosh, she's such a dummy with names sometimes.)

Wait. Next door?

Rapunzel tries not to think about it. For some reason, she can't quite reconcile Aladdin's friendly, easy-going, cheerful demeanor with her mysterious neighbor on the other side of the wall who woke her up in the middle of the night by having sex. She hopes it was his roommate, or his suitemate—or maybe he wasn't even there that night! Maybe some desperately horny random couple that doesn't even live next door took advantage of his empty bedroom.

It's quite convenient that Aladdin invited her to join the dorm group just now, because she can see that just about everyone else on their floor has been added to the group as well. She recognizes some first names and profile pictures of kids she's seen around the dorm: Belle O'Hara, Jessica Rabbit, Wendy Darling, Felton Jumbo Jr., Lily Tiger, Anastasia Tremaine, and the RAs, Tiana James and Maximus Welker.

(It's weird, but she always feels a lot more comfortable around people once she knows their last names. Maybe it's because only knowing someone's first name is barely a step up from being total strangers.)

She sends out a few friend requests to some names she recognizes in the dorm group and then shuts off the laptop. Mother always limited her computer time because she didn't want it to ruin her eyesight. It's a little less feasible to do that now that Rapunzel is in college, where students are expected to spend quite a lot of time doing homework or writing papers on their computers, but Rapunzel figures limiting her "leisure time" staring at a screen is the next best thing.

It amazes her how easy it is to make new friends when everyone is not too busy trying to make awkward small talk.

After dinner, Mulan convinced her to join their floormates in the lounge, where Ariel and a small group of other girls were playing some kind of icebreaker game called Never Have I Ever. And then after abandoning that one, they played Year of the Coin and Apples to Apples. Rapunzel had never heard of the latter before, but it seemed simple enough when they explained it to her and scooted over to let her join their game. She could definitely imagine the residents at Corona Woods Nursing Home having a lot of fun playing that one.

She's having fun. Her floormates are nice, and she's actually getting to know them in a way that doesn't involve feeling weird, like they're probing each other for information to file away for no reason.

Maybe that's why, when Ariel checks the time and announces that it's only about 9 p.m. and invites everyone to go out, Rapunzel agrees to tag along.

She should be frantically pre-reading in preparation for her first day of lectures tomorrow. But it's their last night of freedom before the start of the semester, and she wants to at least be able to say she did something fun while in college. It's college. If she's going to spend next four years working for an acceptance letter to medical school, she wants to be rewarded with memories of doing something besides poring over notes while hunched over a cluttered desk under her bed.

Maybe that's also why Rapunzel, who initially mistakes "going out" to mean "going outside to take a walk, get some fresh air," still agrees to go with them even after the other girls go back to their rooms to change and emerge wearing super short, skin-tight, cleavage-revealing dresses and stiletto heels that look impossible to walk in. None of them comment about her own outfit—a plain purple sundress and her wedge sandals—so she figures she's probably not too woefully underdressed. Mulan, who's waiting by the elevators, happens to be wearing converse, black jogging pants, and an old high school track team jacket, and no one has taken issue with her outfit, either.

Ariel is discussing plans with Jess, the other redhead who has chosen to wear a pink, glittery, super-revealing backless dress. Rapunzel catches snippets of their conversation, something about Ariel checking to make sure she brought the fake ID her older sister gave her, but most of it sounds like a Greek alphabet soup to her.

"We'll probably hit Phi Kap, or SigRho, or maybe even Beta Chi. I hear Beta's really lax with checking people's cards, even if the guys are a little more handsy…"

"Oh my god! Remember when that Louis guy wouldn't leave us alone until Ralph locked him in the bathroom?"

"He did what? Damn, I must have been totally wasted that night!"

"But you were sober when you were leaving with Flynn!"

"Seriously, you should have seen Louis! He was drawing on his own face with Sharpie, and singing French ballads at the top of his lungs at one point!"

At this moment, a group of guys from their floor shows up from down the hall and joins them. They seem to be talking a little too loudly and animatedly. One of them—a hefty-looking guy with big ears—is even trying to give a hug to everyone in the lounge.

From her lessons with Mother, Rapunzel recalls that alcohol is classified as a depressant, but it initially acts as a stimulant, which is probably why so many people drink for social purposes. These guys have clearly had some already. Rapunzel figures they probably have some stashed away in their rooms. She wonders if they at least hid them away so the RAs won't find them if they decide to do a room check…

"Hey, Jumbo!" Lottie, a blonde with her hair piled high in a messy bun, calls out to the guy who's still giving hugs to everyone gathered in front of the elevators. "I'm feeling like getting buzzed before heading out tonight. You got any more vodka stashed?"

"Jumbo" (Felton, if Rapunzel correctly recalls his name from Facebook) seems a little too drunk, though, because he immediately pulls a small, flat bottle of something out of his jeans pocket and tosses it to Lottie. She then unscrews the cap and starts to take a swig—

"For goodness sakes, Lottie!" Mulan hisses suddenly, snatching the flask away. "Right here in the open? Seriously? One of the RAs could walk out here!"

"Nah, s'all good," Jumbo interjects. "Tiana's on duty in some other dorm, and Max had to help take some kid to the hospital to get his stomach pumped. He prolly won't be back until tomorrow morning. He'll be pissed, but we're fine."

The elevators arrive on their floor then, and everyone steps in, Jumbo's indiscretion forgotten.

Rapunzel has never been to a party before.

Growing up, she had an old picture book of classic fairy tales. The book itself had passed through quite a few hands during its time with the local public library, where Mother eventually bought it for 50 cents when the torn spine and missing cover rendered it too damaged to continue in circulation. Rapunzel, four years old and barely literate at the time, fit perfectly into its target demographic. It was clearly intended for beginner readers, as the sentence structure was simplistic and the vocabulary consisted of short four- or five-lettered words, which were offset by the gorgeous illustrations. Her favorite was the scene where the witch tries to fatten up Hansel and Gretel by throwing them a luxurious feast with cake, and pudding, and pie, and cookies, and all manner of other treats that Rapunzel didn't even recognize.

The centerpiece of that scene, the detail that caught her eye the most, was the cake. It had multiple tiers, each layer embellished with pink frosting and red gum drops, with a bouquet of swirly lollipops on top. She remembers begging and begging Mother for a cake like that for her birthday, but Mother talked her out of it when she showed her just how much sugar it would contain and what long-term effects it could have on her teeth. And so Rapunzel's birthdays usually only warranted a "special dinner" of hazelnut soup.

(She did finally get a chance to try cake when she started volunteering at the nursing home. But those impromptu birthday parties don't count because they're just brief interludes where a resident is presented with a half-hearted, out-of-tune rendition of "Happy Birthday to You." If the resident wasn't diabetic, then they would also get a small, cheap cake from the supermarket that tasted the way Rapunzel imagined sand tasted.)

So basically, Rapunzel has never been to a party before.

She has no idea what she was expecting from a frat party, but this definitely isn't it.

They end up going to the "Beta Chi" house about five blocks east of campus, nested in the middle of a row of townhouses that look like they might be rented by WDU upperclassmen or graduate students. There's no sign out front advertising that a fraternity lives here. Rapunzel would have overlooked it entirely if not for the people on the porch who raise their beer bottles at their group as they make their way up the front steps. No one bothers to check for IDs as they walk in.

Once inside the house, it only takes Rapunzel two seconds to realize she wants out. She loses sight of her floormates in the crowd almost immediately. The lights are dimmed, and there's the dull thrum of a bassline coming from…somewhere on the other side of the living room. (She thinks it's a living room. It's hard to tell with all the writhing bodies around her.) And there's an overwhelming smell…pungent, like hand sanitizer, but also strangely fruity, which she deduces must be alcohol.

"Ariel?" she tries shouting over the din. "Mulan?"

Well, that was pointless. She can barely hear her own voice. (Don't these people know that blasting music at high volumes can damage their hearing? How can anyone enjoy this without worrying about bursting their eardrums?)

And it's so crowded, too! Every step she takes seems to land on someone's foot. She's not even trying to get deeper into the crowd. It just seems to swallow her up and jostle her around, pushing her deeper into the house like the steel ball in a pinball machine.

She tries pushing past a few sweaty bodies, hoping to catch a glimpse of Ariel, Mulan, somebody, but it's no use. If she hangs around on this dance floor, she's going to get trampled, and then someone's going to want to know which middle school she escaped out of.

This was such a stupid idea! She has no idea what possesses people to want to get together and collectively inebriate themselves. The music is too loud, the people too sweaty, and she thinks she really would rather just go back to studying in her room after all.

Too bad she's too deep in the crowd and can't remember which way the door is.

What was that saying again? "Don't knock it until you try it?" Well, Rapunzel's tried it now, and she definitely doesn't like it. So there.

The partygoers around her are jumping up and down now. She winces as one girl's stiletto heel lands just a tad shy of spearing her foot.

Well, this is just great. She's going to die here. Someone is going to step on her, and then she's going to go down in a sea of stampeding revelers, and then the wound in her foot is going to get infected, and she's going to die of necrotizing fasciitis, and they won't realize she's missing until the next morning when she doesn't show up to class, and then some hungover frat boy is going to find her body after the dust clears, and Mother's going to be so, so disappointed—

Somebody bumps her from behind, and she falls forward, the crowd parting at that moment, just enough for her to stumble through a doorway…and nearly fall down the stairs to the basement.

She catches the railing just in time and pauses to calm her frantic heart. The roar of raucous laughter and the buzz of conversation drift up the stairs, indicating that the party is in full swing down in the basement, too.

The smell of alcohol is even stronger down here than on the dance floor, mingling with another scent that's both revolting but also kind of stale. Like someone drank too much and puked on the stairs, weeks ago, but the frat was too lazy to clean it up. And the railing is sticky. With her clean hand, Rapunzel pulls the top of her dress over her nose and tries not to gag.

Well, she really doesn't have a choice here. There's no way she's braving that dance floor again. That exit's cut off. But now that she's found the basement, maybe there's a back door down here…

"Rapunzel! There you are!"

At once, Ariel appears in her field of vision and engulfs her in a bear hug. Her suitemate seems even bubblier than usual, clearly having located the alcohol already.

"Punzie, Punzie, they're setting up for beer pong! You should come play with me!"

Catching sight of Jess and Lottie, Rapunzel extricates herself from her suitemate's octopus-grip and steers her toward them. "Hey, that sounds great, but why don't you ask Lottie to be your partner instead? I have to go…anywhere but here."

She turns around to take her leave, only to run smack into a wall. Something cold and wet and definitely alcoholic-smelling splashes against the front of her dress.

Because of course! If Mother had a quarter-kroun for every time Rapunzel has stubbed her toe, or walked into the doorjamb, or jerked backwards and fallen because her hair got caught on something, she would never have to work another day in her life.

…Wait a minute. Walls don't usually go, "Oof!" when you walk into them.

She starts to mumble an apology, then freezes.

Oh, no. She knows that voice, too. No no no no no.

Of all the people at this school to run into! The universe must hate her!

"Whoa, are you okay?"

He thinks she's injured. She should make her escape while he doesn't expect it. Run back up the stairs and let the dance floor crowd swallow her whole.

But that would be rude. And Mother would be doubly disappointed when Rapunzel not only dies by being trampled at a frat party but also crashed into someone and ran away without apologizing.

Maybe if she doesn't look up, doesn't acknowledge him, it won't be true. Maybe if she closes her eyes and counts to ten, he'll magically turn into someone else. A total stranger that she didn't try to pummel with a saucepan and accuse of distributing child pornography.

She takes a deep breath and looks up.

Flynn visibly relaxes when she meets his gaze. "Hey. Sorry about your dress." He pauses, tilting his head to one side as he peers down at her in the dim light. "Have we met before?"

Is it too late to defer her enrollment? Go into the witness protection program? Cut her hair and dye it brown? Start over with a new identity?

He's still saying something.

"…sure you're feeling okay? That girl over there, Mulan, is waving at you. Is she your friend?"

"I have to go find my friend," she blurts.

Then she turns and runs.

Underage drinking is bad. Rapunzel knows that. She's fully aware that the legal drinking age in Epcot is 21. She's also fully aware that underage drinking is against WDU school rules and the law.

Alcohol is bad too. Rapunzel also knows that. It's literally poison. It destroys brain cells and increases the risk of cancer in the liver and breast, to name a few. The body converts it to acetaldehyde, which causes nasty things like flushing and hangovers. Alcoholism is also mentally harmful. She would know—when Rapunzel was a baby, her father would often come home in a drunken rage late at night after wasting all the money Mother earned (he didn't have a job of his own) on liquor. He physically abused Mother and threatened Rapunzel's safety. Mother eventually took her daughter and ran away from him, and they've lived in the little cottage in the forest at the edge of Corona ever since, as far from him as possible.

So what was she thinking?

She could have been caught! Someone could have taken a picture of her at the party and put it on social media. Even if she didn't drink any of the alcohol, she was still there. The university housing code of conduct clearly states that if a student in the dorms is caught with alcohol, everyone in the room gets written up, regardless of whether they were actually drinking. It's not a stretch to extrapolate that the same policy applies to underage drinking in frat houses, since they're still on university property. If an RA or campus security had shown up at the party, she could easily have been rounded up with everyone else, and they would have found her ID and written her up for being underage at a party with alcohol. Or an RA could have caught her on the way back to the dorm and smelled the alcohol on her dress. And then that mark on her record will haunt her forever, and she'll never get into medical school!

What on earth possessed her to go along with this?

She did want to speak up, back when they were still at the dorm. Wanted to get on her soapbox and proclaim the evils of alcohol—how it affects the body, how it tore her family apart—for all to hear. But no one else seemed to take issue, not even the people in the lounge who declined to partake. Even Mulan only saw fit to intervene when it looked like Jumbo was going to get himself in trouble with the RAs.

Clearly, there's some kind of unspoken social agreement going on here. Nobody rats anybody else out, and anyone who speaks out is too uptight. Too self-righteous. A killjoy.

Rapunzel is no snitch. If these people want to get together in large groups and disorient themselves, that's their choice, as long as they're not hurting anyone else. None of them have cars, so drunk driving isn't an issue. And Epcot is a pretty safe place for a city, despite Mother's claims to the contrary, so they probably won't get mugged or kidnapped as long as they stay in a group. And this clearly isn't the other girls' first time at a frat party, so they probably have some kind of buddy system in place. They have their safeguards, so who is Rapunzel to stop them from having fun, even if she doesn't understand why they enjoy it?

Besides, her floormates have dirt on her, too. If she gets them in trouble for underage drinking, there's always a chance one of them can track Mother down and inform her that Rapunzel has not once made her bed, that she's not spending every waking hour studying, that she's wasting study time on Facebook…and then she'll be dead meat.

Yeah. Live and let live and all that. She'll take her cues from Mulan if someone actually needs to speak up. In the meantime, she just won't go anywhere near the stuff again.

It's nearly midnight by the time she returns to Valley Tower with Mulan, peels off her ruined dress and stuffs it into the bottom of the pile in her laundry hamper, showers, and drags herself into bed. Too late to call Mother for their nightly chat.

Surprisingly, she has no missed calls on her phone. She briefly debates whether to send Mother a "whoops, sorry I forgot to call, I went to bed early last night" text tomorrow morning.

She has told Mother plenty of little white lies in her life. This shouldn't be any different.

Except it is. It's one thing to lie about being asleep when she wasn't. It's another entirely to tell that lie to cover up the fact that she went to a frat party, where people were drinking illegally, the night before classes start.

But nothing happened. She didn't touch any of the alcohol. And she's never doing that again. Mother doesn't need to know, if it's never going to happen again…right?

Her mysterious neighbor returns some time later with a new paramour. Too tired to do much more than bang her fist once against the wall, Rapunzel rolls over and promptly falls back asleep.

Disclaimer: I do not condone underage drinking. I'm just trying portray college dorm life realistically.

End note (Sept 12, 2018): For anyone who isn't in the loop, I've been re-writing this story because my writing style has changed a lot since I was 19, and this was too cringey to reread after 4 years of hiatus. This chapter was particularly bad and way too short the first time around, so I made it longer in my rewrite and changed a lot of the details.