The Fay-tapped

"Nice to meet you," Alyssa said with a dying smile as she turned away from Miyu. So far, she hated all the girls and wanted to cry.

There was one chance left and Alyssa recalled the warm girl who smiled back at her in the main hall. She prayed for one normal friendship before the night was over.

She lugged out her phone from her back pocket and the bright splash of a pink dolphin leaping out of the sea greeted her on the unlock screen. Alyssa sighed when she discovered the flat line of her cellular reception. Her thumb was a blur as she typed in her pass code. The camera app was still open and captured a live feed of her denim crotch. A tap of her index finger flung her into the gallery and she checked the picture she snapped from the car.

Slashed by sheets of black static and zapped with lilac distortions, the school house glitched into ungraspability. A flash of confusion rippled out from her eyebrows as her eyes hiccuped across the corrupted image. Alyssa shrugged and deleted the photo with an agile swipe of her thumb. She winced.

Alyssa stowed her phone and ogled the blinking cursor of a cut in the middle of her thumb's swirl. She scoured the baby slash with the point of her tongue, exhuming sour iron. The taste of a fresh blood pact was something new for Alyssa and she savored the naughty flavor of her first bondage.

Diana returned with the last young woman who owned a chestnut ponytail and mint eyes. She bounced a wonderful figure in a mauve bodysuit with high-rise jeans. Alyssa seized eye contact with her as they bridged smiles. She breathed easier as she watched Diana dangle the hands of her potential friend in the sink.

The professor finished with her and the brown haired girl swooped over to the table in a strawberry scented blur. She climbed into the chair next to Alyssa in a way that spread the gossip of her thriving cleavage far and wide across Alyssa's hazel towns.

"I'm Alyssa," Alyssa said, turning to the warm girl.

"I'm Sarah, are you a freshman too?" she buzzed.

Alyssa nodded, "that's Miyu, Riley, and Claire." She pointed to all the girls at the table, none of them paid any attention beyond a freckled glare from Riley.

Sarah thrust up her sliced thumb, "pretty weird, huh? Have you ever had to sign a blood oath for a class?" Sarah laughed.

"I know right," Alyssa said, showing off her thumb too, "I've heard stories about this school, ya know?"

Sarah tilted her head and tossed Alyssa her peppermint marbles.

"Stories, like what kind of stories?" Sarah said, "I didn't look into MU's history, I just liked the campus. And it seems like everyone who goes here is so pretty."

Alyssa laughed, "wow, you're right..." Alyssa took a survey of everyone in the room, remembered the four guys and the three professors. They were all beautiful creatures, weren't they?

"So what stories did you hear?" Sarah said, tugging on Alyssa's arm, urging her on.

"She heard," Riley interjected, "about how an unusual amount of students that attend this mysterious institution either end up dead, missing, or nuts."

"You know about that too?" Alyssa asked.

Riley swiped away one of her twin tails and dug her chin in the stormy sleeves of her over-sized sweater. She nodded and yawned, "everyone who lives around here in Squid Town knows about MU."

"I'm sure, like most things, it's overblown," Sarah said with a twist of her wrist that jingled her bracelets, "otherwise MU would've been shut down already."

Riley snorted, "you obviously aren't from Mistbury are you?"

Sarah crossed her arms and shook her head, "no, I'm from Greymore."

"Without MU, this whole area wouldn't exist," Riley said, "this place gets carte blanche, everyone turns a blind eye to whatever goes on here."

Diana entered the room again, pulling in the sensitive boy with dark hair and pale green eyes. He wore knit chinos and a caviar sweater over a navy button-up. The boy's body lacked the toughness extracted from physical exertion but possessed the awareness acquired from the years of constant mental anguish that accompanied sheltered wealth. The girls watched as Diana marshaled his hands into the sink and began scrubbing them with the squeezing vices of her own fingers. The young man didn't notice, but Diana was swallowing him alive with her eyes. Alyssa jabbed an elbow at Sarah and hiked an eyebrow. The professor's gaze bordered on inappropriate as she buffed the boy's pristine fingers.

"Ow," he said, closing an eye and squirming.

Diana gripped his hands, "is this too much for you?"

"You're scrubbing them raw," he said.

Diana channeled a covetous glare at him as she shut the water off. The boy caught on and analyzed the palpitating professor as she smothered his hands with a fluffy towel. When they were dry, she turned them over and examined them at great length before relinquishing them with a struggle. Diana glared something into the boy's eyes that caused his head to jerk back. Alyssa and Sarah looked at each other.

The professor pointed to the table in front of the young women's table and he sat down in one of the tall-backed chairs, facing away from them and towards the door. Alyssa watched him grind his oxidized stare into the white of his hands. He flexed his fingers and inspected the inky gash in his thumb.

Alyssa was about to introduce herself across the gap of tables, but studying the way he gazed into his fingers changed her mind.

After that, Alyssa and Sarah chatted some more while Riley slumped into a nap. Claire and Miyu kept tightly to themselves as the two budding friends frisked each other's minds for shared tastes.

"Are you from around here?" Sarah asked.

"No, I'm from the west coast," Alyssa said.

"Wow, and you decided to come to sleepy old Mistbury?" Sarah asked.

Diana brought in the two other boys, the sarcastic scrutinizer and the golden child, one after the other and they filled in spots around the other table. The professor assaulted the sensitive boy with cannon blows from her silver rings every time she entered the room now. Alyssa saw him pull at a dark curl on his head.

The last of the group to enter was the young man with the starving athlete physique and distant grey-blue eyes. Alyssa pursued him coyly as Diana washed his hands. Sarah caught on and observed him too while trying to keep up a cover of a conversation.

He wore a simple evergreen MU hoodie and jeans. Alyssa's hazel whirls dove after his broad back and slid down the curves of his butt as he as he drifted by and took a seat at the table with the other young men. Her heart was a pine bending in the hailstorm of his eyes. She had difficulty fathoming the source of what attracted her to him. Alyssa chewed on a corner of her lip, there was something fractured rattling around beyond the sturdy door of his body that she wanted to service. She had snagged plenty of beautiful boyfriends, but none of them wrestled with such complex looks. Even with his arms shoved into his clean hoodie, the fresh messiness of his short hair, and the way he reclined in the chair, all of which made him seem like a normal guy, the uncontrolled flicker of his eyelashes crackled out wailing claps of pain. Some experience had cleaved him, whole, from the world he still inhabited.

Alyssa atomized into a cloud of fantasy, catching the spears of his screaming blinks directly center the cushion of her heart. She inventoried her collection of feminine tools and converged on a conclusion that ripped a thrill down her spine. Her skills might be woefully inadequate to graft this lost boy back into the weft of the world.

The guys sat quietly at their table, all of them dark, except for the boy with the curly blond hair. He conversed with the sarcastic boy that Alyssa was sure didn't care for her. The sensitive boy looped his gaze endlessly from his hands to the doorway. And her new crush observed the two others talking, but never cared to enter in their conversation. The sarcastic guy tried including the two quiet ones at the table but soon concluded it was a pointless endeavor and kept the basket of discussion between him and the curly blond.

Alyssa scooped some hair behind her ear and, fondling a diamond stud, studied the strange reflection of her own table. The guys were dark, very dark. This school was weird and, so far, seemed to attract those with matching vibes. Did she even fit in here? She side-glanced Sarah, was there something dark caged beneath her new friend's warm exterior also? Sarah was checking her phone.

"Are you expecting a call or something?" Alyssa asked

Sarah turned her phone over, "no, I just thought maybe my parents would've messaged me. But, they're probably busy and the service sucks here."

Alyssa shifted in her chair, the twilight forerunners of the night dribbled in through the tall windows. Only the single lamp above the phone bolted to an alcove next to the entrance provided any extra light. She shifted again. If she focused all of herself in her ears, she could hear a kind of tune flirting along the rims of her mind. Her head tilted, it was a chorus of lusty giggles and maddening moans. The back of Alyssa's ears twitched and she perceived a cold trickle of excitement filling the cup of her yearning, one drop at a time. She swallowed heat and crossed her legs as a gentle misting of desire frolicked in between the gaps of all her thoughts.

There was a tap at the window and she jerked her head to see nothing. Alyssa intuited herself passing the uncanny membrane into numinous territory.

Patricia's heels echoed as she entered the room and clapped her hands with feminine grace once, "okay, all the paperwork is complete."

The kitchen or dining room, whatever it was, had descended into considerable gloom since Alyssa had first sat down. The lamp off to the side of Patricia made her the brightest spot of gold and red in the room and everyone was watching her.

She glanced out the windows, spotting the moon hanging in the lilac dusk. Smiling, she addressed the nine students, "now for the fun part. Follow me."

Diana appeared behind Patricia like a blizzard and smiled a smile that expressed an evolved understanding beyond Patricia's smile.

Alyssa was having trouble thinking as the bizarre chorus sprinkled her thoughts with a glittering of otherworldly perversion.

-

The two professors ferried the group of nine through the entrance hall and up to the double doors at the back of the main room. Alyssa stared up at the chandelier as she traveled below it. The crystals of light jittered high up and seethed with an expecting twinkle like an audience of voyeurs.

They crashed through the creaking sentries of wood at the back of the main hall and entered a hallway with red carpet lit by dim sconces. The group of them strode on the silent cloud of the carpet into another set of double doors that spilled the collection of them into a two story library.

Alyssa spotted another three chandeliers clinging from gold chains hooked into a wooden beam that was the apex of the rafters above. They sparkled lazy drips of amber that brushed the echoing room in light that strained against heavy shadow. The tallest shelves Alyssa had ever seen lined the walls of both floors in heaps of books. She peered through the wooden banisters lurching above the first floor into the second floor. Despite wrapping around nearer to the trio of dying stars, it was just as gloomy as the library's primary level.

The man Alyssa remembered as Professor Sea was already in the room. He stood ahead three displays of manifold things that stretched back a ways behind him.

"Looks like everyone is here," Sea said, gazing above towards the twirling balconies of the second floor, "let's begin."

A slam stormed out and Alyssa jumped, she whirled around. Diana was standing in front of the sealed doors, smiling.

"I want you all to browse the stockpile of relics behind me and see if anything grabs you," Sea said, gesturing to the three rows of objects glittering under showcase lights.

"I don't understand," Riley said, "are we supposed to pick something out?"

"Something like that," Sea said, pushing up his glasses, "come everyone, don't be shy. We are all going to be sharing a strange time together this semester."

Alyssa stepped forward. Sarah and Riley followed her. Eventually, all nine SCRAMBLED about the waist-level cabinets of wood and glass. Sarah and Riley stuck with Alyssa as she swept around the first row.

The sections of displays were lit with their own drooping lamps that sizzled a glow from case to case. The lids had been unbolted and peeled up, so all the objects that roosted in the violet folds of velvet were open to them.

All sorts of gleaming dreams hurled their wares at the three girls as they ransacked section after section with their eyes. Rings, necklaces (lots of necklaces), crystals of all shapes and sizes, fetishes, little statues of every material, mirrors (lots of mirrors), lace, scarves, bracelets, glasses, masks, earrings, bits of chain, hooks (of every material imaginable), tools, artwork, all kinds of enchanting conceptions pelted the windshields of their gaze. Some appeared brand new, others: ancient.

Around a section of gilded diaries the size of business cards, Alyssa had lost her two companions. She glanced up from a clutch of crystallized snake eggs and saw everyone preoccupied with their own perusing. Claire, she noticed, sweated at the first display and seemed to be waffling over a platinum ring pregnant with a giant sapphire or a vial of ruby goop that trailed a spiked whisper of a chain. Miyu had wandered off course, past the display cases, and traversed into the shadows of the library somewhere. Riley scrutinized a beaded bracelet. Alyssa spotted her crush admiring the sharp angles of an ebony dagger across from the pale boy hovering around a collection of pens.

A blossom of bafflement twirled Alyssa's thoughts as she approached the last row of lit containers. She passed by three sets of runes, nine ivory, mother of pearl, and lacquer boxes of different sizes, and a diverse cache of yoni wands. Alyssa rolled her eyes as she fingered a bulldozer of a moonstone wand. All of it was nothing she was really interested in. She had plenty of beautiful things back home in her room.

The end case of the last section dribbled a myriad of crystal balls and glass trinkets about its violet maw. Azure, chartreuse, saffron, and fuchsia liquids, gurgled, blooped, and bubbled in sparks of ornate glass. Alyssa knitted her eyebrows and poked a frozen tear of cerulean spit that whirred into indigo when she touched it. What the hell was all this shit?

A crystal sphere the size of a billiard ball glowered in the clutch of dusty bones. She beheld her reflection ballooning inside its clear depths and chewed on her lip. Alyssa spied around at the others who seemed to be securing their own selections. She picked the glass globe on a whim and ambled to the front of the library.

Riley sauntered up next to her with a black and white bracelet of beads in her hands.

"What'd you choose?" Riley asked, attempting to peek at the crystal ball she wielded at her side.

"Oh just this, I guess," Alyssa hoisted up the crystal ball married to the ivory stand.

"Who do you think collected all that fancy junk?" Riley whispered.

Alyssa shrugged.

Miyu, Claire, and three of the boys came back to the beginning of the room, all holding something.

Alyssa eyed her crush's object and discerned it was the triangular dagger that had him transfixed earlier. Claire clenched something in her balled-up fist. Miyu hugged a dusky tome to her chest. The sensitive boy rolled an obsidian pen with gold accents betwixt his digits. The sarcastic guy shook a deck of cards.

Alyssa glanced behind her and saw the curly blond and Sarah still pacing circles around the displays.

"Okay, everyone," Sea said, latching the lids shut as he strode down the rows of bizarre treasure, "something has chosen each of you."

"I didn't find anything," the blond boy said as Sea sneaked past him.

"Well the goal here, Luka," Sea said, latching two more glass lids, "was for something to find you and something has found you, so don't worry. Same for you Sarah."

The two stragglers joined the other seven at the front of the library while Sea secured the cabinets. Luka looked at the sarcastic boy and shrugged his hands wide. Sarah shuffled in next to Alyssa and gave her a disappointed look. She squeezed Sarah's hand with a smile.

Secretly, Alyssa sighed relief. She at least, had something in her hand. Gazing down at the crystal ball propped against the top of her thigh, she poked at the vortex of bones that bolstered the hefty bubble. It was so lame, maybe she should have just grabbed a pretty ring or something instead of this hunk of bone and glass.

Sea reunited with the other two professors and nodded at Patricia.

Patricia scoured them with her amber eyes and after three finger taps on her lips said, "Alyssa, Eason, and Riley, you three are with me." Alyssa and Riley stepped forward with the sarcastic guy. Alyssa glared at him and crossed her arms. Eason smiled. The three joined Patricia with their selections.

"Blake," Diana said without hesitation, "come here."

The pale boy probed the other professors before slinking towards Diana. He gripped his black pen and stood next to her. Diana molested him with eyes that whispered reams of ancient tongues incomprehensible to Alyssa.

Patricia turned from Diana to Sea and flicked one of her eyebrows. Sea whispered in Patricia's ear and her eyes scoped Luka and Sarah. She nodded and Sea left her ear.

"Miyu, Claire, and Devin," Sea said, beckoning them over to him.

Luka and Sarah looked at each other and shrugged.

"What about us?" Sarah asked, "Luka and I?"

"Your other halves will introduce themselves to you at a later time," Sea said.

Sarah turned to Alyssa and fretted. Luka held his hands out with a grin across the way at Eason standing next to Patricia. Eason snickered, shaking his case of cards, teasing Luka. Luka laughed to himself and shoved his hands in his pockets.

"Remember who're with," Sea said, "these will be your teachers going forward, if there's anything you need or if anything happens, you go to them first. Is that clear?"

All nine nodded out of sync and Sea continued carefully.

"Now, I have to warn everyone that from this point forward, things are going to go weird. So, if any of you have any troubles come talk to us, okay?"

Everyone nodded in sync this time.

Alyssa twirled her crystal ball and polished a diamond stud on her left ear lobe. What the hell was going on?

-

They all ate a quiet dinner in the dining room. Alyssa tried to chat with Sarah a bit, but she found thinking tiring. So, she spent most of the meal staring into her crystal.

In the silent hallway between the library and main hall, Sea and Patricia split the two sexes into separate dorms across from each other. There were two rooms on each side of the dorm doors, for six doors total in the hallway. The professors pointed out their three rooms. Sea was on the right hand side of the boy's dorm and the two women professors were in the two doors flanking the girl's dorm with Diana's room being closest to the library.

The women's room was a floor plan in the shape of a chanterelle cross section with deep burgundy carpeting. Antique couches, tables, lamps, chairs, and pillows coalesced about a shared living room in groupings of vanilla, gold, and pale pinks. The scalloped ceiling was lit along the recessed edges and bathed the room in a dim fog of light. Dancing above the bean-shaped center of the living room was a fresco of some fairy banquet in the woods under a crimson crescent. The room caressed the five women with opulence and the low ceiling and cozy furniture, promised utmost comfort. It wasn't anything Alyssa hadn't seen before, but it impressed Sarah and Riley. With Claire and Miyu, she couldn't tell what they were thinking.