Pony Play Racing. Lana and Caleb had decided on their room concept with a bizarre amount of triumph, considering. Calling in actual advocates of pony play that they’d sought through Craigslist, all of them were buckled in and hoofed up, ready and raring to go. The game was simple: two students had to compete against each other to ride the ‘pony’ of their choice towards the finish line, and the loser had to down a full beer in one as a punishment. You could enter in pairs or in a group, like the strangest take on beer pong the world had ever witnessed. The room was done up in fake grass and model trees, trunks thin and tall like the kind you’d find scorching in the Wyoming sun, and across the far wall there was a banner that read ‘WELCOME GUNNER PAXTON. THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME’. Over the sound system, remixes of Lil Nas’ Old Town Road played back to back, slowly getting worse until, at the very end of the night, it would just be covers that Lana and Caleb had personally recorded, reciting verses in awful impressions of random celebrities or characters like Goofy. “Round up, round up!” Lana called out, grin on her lips flame bright before she raised the riding crop in hand, using the end to gently lift the chin of the next person in line. She felt like a swordsman that had just forced their competitor to surrender mid battle, eyebrows furrowing like she was trying to X-Ray scan with her eyes. Danny had been released on bail, but she was trying not to think about it -- trying not to think about anything, really. “Helmet or no helmet? Can’t decide what kind of rider you’d be. Unreadable, I guess. Tu est une...” trailed off, freckled nose scrunching before she abandoned searching for the correct French, doing a great job of butchering the accent, anyway, “...enigma!”
