Though blue shirts were as common at Eli as diamond solitaires in the Junior League, I nodded. The man she meant was impossible to miss. To start with, he was at least 6′5″. And then there was the fact that the particular shade of blue in his polo shirt precisely matched the icy hue of his eyes. They stood out like laser beams in his deeply tanned, attractive face.
Also, he was staring at us.
“Mmm.” I ate a bite of Spanish rice.
“He’s my ex-boyfriend.”
“Sheesh, you, too?” I murmured. “I just ran into mine.”
“Yeah, well, if I run into mine, we’re in big trouble. So will you walk out with me?”
I looked down at my uneaten lunch. “Now?”
“Right now.” She suddenly hunched down in her seat. “Too late.”
“Shelly.” The voice boomed above our heads. I looked up to see Michelle’s mountain of an ex standing over the table. Michelle stared down at her plate. “What are you doing in Commons, honey?”
Michelle was silent.
“It’s strange to see you down at this end of campus.” His voice was perfectly friendly, but if Michelle could have slid under the table, she would have. “Especially on days that you don’t have your Art History class.” He looked at me. “Who is your friend?” He stuck out his hand. “I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you yet.”
“I’m Amy Haskel,” I said, looking from Michelle and back to him. Something was wrong with this guy’s eyes. A shiver passed through me. I did not want to take his hand.
“Amy.” He smiled down at Michelle. “Nice to make new friends, isn’t it, Shelly?”
He’d positioned himself directly behind her. She couldn’t push her chair out with him standing there. Her hands pressed against the edge of the table like she was ready to bolt.
“Please go away, Blake,” Michelle said in a small but firm voice.
“Yeah, I bet you have to be getting back to your apartment anyway. It’s such a far walk from everything. Sure you don’t need me to give you a ride out there? I’d be happy to.”
“Please go away Blake,” Michelle repeated.
“Come on, Shelly, I’m just trying to help. Why do you always have to be so difficult—”
“I think she told you to go away,” I said.
His eyes shot to me and I froze like a squirrel in the path of a runaway bike. “I don’t care what you think,” he said, tone calm as ever. “Jesus, Michelle, looks like your taste in friends hasn’t improved at all. You still like hanging out with people who think they know what’s best for you.”
“Can you back away, please?” I asked. “Michelle’s trying to push her chair out.”
Blake didn’t move.
“I think the lady asked you to back up,” Brandon said. He was standing in the space between the table rows, tray gripped in both hands, smiling serenely up at the behemoth in our way. “And since you’re blocking the aisle, I’d say it was time to move along.”
Blake stared daggers at Brandon, whose expression didn’t change a bit. Blake had two choices here: cause a scene or back down.
He chose the latter. Michelle shot out of her chair and headed for the doors at the end of the cavernous Commons. I cast a guilty look at our unbussed trays and started to follow.
“Amy,” Brandon said. I turned around and he opened his mouth to speak, then waved me off. “Later.”
“Agreed.” That was the new trend with me and guys: file under “later.”
I went after Michelle as she burst into the marble-and-granite memorial hall outside Commons and booked it toward the exit. As always, the sculpted dome and the hundreds of carved-in-all-caps names lining the walls resounded with the thunderous echoes of the students who passed through on their way to and from the science side of campus. Legend had it that the names of Rose & Grave members featured special carvings to tip off their Digger status, but I’d never bothered to confirm it.
“Wait!” I increased my pace to just below a sprint and as my cry bounced around the dome, several students looked up and Michelle slowed to a stop by a column and a metal stand filled with yesterday’s copies of the Eli Daily News.
“So,” she said, folding herself into the space behind the column, “I guess you know now why I should have picked Jamie.”
1*No wonder she and Jamie had gotten along so well. They both had an inordinate fondness for soy products.
2*For which the confessor is profoundly relieved, because, seriously? This secrecy thing? Profoundly tiring.
“Thanks for letting me come here,” Michelle said as Clarissa handed her a mug of tea.
“Don’t even think about it,” said my fellow knight, patting Michelle on the shoulder and returning to her seat across the room. She curled her feet up underneath her on the buttery, cream-colored leather love seat, and picked an invisible bit of fluff off her white silk slacks. “As I said last time: Any friend of Amy’s is a friend of mine.”
Michelle nodded in understanding. “That’s how it works, right?”
Clarissa smiled in a much better imitation of the Madonna than I’d ever been able to pull off. “If you like.”
“I was just worried that if I went straight home …” Michelle shuddered. “He’d follow me.”
“Has he done that before?” I asked.
She nodded. “I had to change apartments once this semester already. This one’s got a doorman, but …” She shrugged. “People aren’t always militant about making guests sign in, you know?”
“True,” Clarissa said, and I imagined the kind of riffraff she had experience keeping out of her Park Avenue place.
“The last time …” Michelle began, then hesitated. “I sound like an idiot whenever I try to explain this. It seems so reasonable at the time, and then afterward, I think I must have brain damage or something.” She stood up and crossed to the window.
“What do you mean?” I scooted over and Clarissa started straightening up the bookshelves, as if pretending not to pay attention would help the poor girl relax any more. It was clear she didn’t trust either of us enough to tell this story. If she would only sit still. Not even the tea seemed to help. Was she even in the frame anymore?
Michelle played with the tassel on the edge of the cream brocaded curtain. “He’s not like that always, you know. Sometimes he cries, and says really sweet, sweet things, and tells me that it’s just the way I disappeared, it was so unfair to him, he needs closure, if he just had closure … he’d leave if he just got closure.”
Clarissa’s hands stilled on a digital picture frame showcasing shots of our Spring Break Habitat for Humanity team. In the current photo, George was grinning as he and Harun wielded their paintbrushes like light sabers.
Michelle laughed mirthlessly. “Do you know how many times he’s gotten closure?”
I held on to my own mug of tea as if for balance. It’s a very, very good thing that Jamie wasn’t here. I couldn’t imagine him listening to this with anything approaching composure.
“I don’t understand,” said Clarissa, though we both understood far more than Michelle knew. “Why don’t you go to the Strathmore dean? The college deans are supposed to be our advocates.”
“The dean was the one who got me into this mess,” Michelle said, and returned to her seat. Luckily, Clarissa was still by the bookshelves. “I went to her last year. Told her everything that was going on. I told her about the time he wouldn’t let me leave my room for a day and a half. I told her about why I’d really failed that Organic Chem lab—how he’d taken my notebook as punishment because I wouldn’t drop the class. He was convinced I was having an affair with the professor. I even told her about how my PhysChem T.A. had found his car smashed in the parking lot. And that was after I’d switched out of his section and into a female T.A.’s.”
“Not that I’m countenancing his behavior in the slightest,” Clarissa said, “but why did he always suspect you of cheating on him?”
Michelle and I exchanged glanc
es.
“Because she was,” I said, staring resolutely into my tea. “With Jamie.”
“Oh.” Clarissa’s tone was even more clipped and proper than usual. Her pink phone began to buzz on the table. “Excuse me,” she said. “That would be my friend Demetria.”
I rolled my eyes. Forget Jamie. It was Demetria who wasn’t capable of listening to this without going ballistic.
Clarissa read the text message and pursed her lips. “She’d like to, uh, come over. Do you mind, Michelle? It might be good. Demetria’s got a lot of experience at the Eli Women’s Center and—”
“I’d prefer not to have to talk in front of an audience, if you don’t mind,” said Michelle, in what had to be the greatest irony since I’d first brought her to the party. “This is hard enough in front of you two. I know I can trust you, Clarissa, because you’re Amy’s special friend, but …” She trailed off, no doubt remembering that Demetria had also been at the party and was therefore also likely a special friend. “I just … can we keep this between us?”
“Sure,” I said, and raised my eyebrows at Clarissa. Oh, well. Too late for that. She shrugged and shut down her phone. “We’re great at secrets.” As long as we could share them with the whole club.
“And it wasn’t really cheating,” Michelle said. “I want to be clear about that. The end of—whatever I had going on with Jamie sort of overlapped with my relationship with Blake. A little. Not that Blake ever knew. Jamie was a junior who pretty much kept to himself; Blake was a freshman already in charge of half the college activities … I don’t think they even knew each other.”
Good thing. Otherwise, he’d probably have gone after Jamie as well. “In other words, he was just naturally a jealous lunatic psycho bastard?”
Michelle smiled a bit. “Yeah. He suspected every guy in the Chemistry department of wanting to be with me. I know I sound like a moron for dating someone like that for a year. I mean, I’m smart and modern and independent and all those things. I’m not supposed to be with a guy who tries to control me. I’m supposed to recognize all those warning signs and avoid men like that.”
Now my phone went off. Text message from Jenny. Of course.
ITS A LOT HARDER WHEN THEY DONT HIT U.
“So what happened with the dean?” I asked, trying to get back on course before the rest of the Diggers blew this whole thing with their stupid text messages.
“She said she’d help. Planned a disciplinary hearing. Said all this stuff about how Blake was going to have to stop living in Strathmore College, maybe even be rusticated, how he’d have to stay a certain number of feet away from me, how he couldn’t take any of the classes I was in … I felt kind of guilty.” She picked up her mug again, though the tea was likely cold by now. “I mean, it was his college, too.”
I thought of my mother’s friends who lost their social circles in their divorces, of my high school buddies whose popularity and lunch table placement were determined entirely on the basis of their boyfriends’ status. Why did women let themselves do things like that? Give and give and give. We were withholding our love, at least let them have their turf? Was that a reasonable strategy?
“But at the same time I was relieved. I hadn’t come to Eli to be tormented. To be told what classes I was allowed to take, what professors I was allowed to have. Who I was allowed to be friends with …” She took a sip of tea and made a face. Yep, cold. “Every time I think of it, I can’t believe I let myself get in that position. Like, I must have been some other person. It couldn’t have been me organizing class schedules around the ugliest professors I could get. Me not joining a study group because there was a boy in it.”
“Or dropping out of a research project?” Clarissa slipped. I shot her a look.
But Michelle seemed lost in thought. “It couldn’t have been me letting some guy trap me in my room. He …” She paused, squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then went on. “He promised to kill himself if I left. What could I do? I never even had Psych 110. I skipped all those lectures they made us take freshmen year about safe sex and alcoholism and depression and unstable roommates and boyfriends and went with my suite to get fake IDs instead. It seems so crazy, but when I was there, it made perfect sense to listen to him, to do whatever he wanted in order to keep us both safe. Just like it makes perfect sense when he tells me that if I would only have sex with him one more time …”
She took a deep breath and shook herself free. “There was a phone, a window—I could have called for help. I should have gone for help as soon as I did get out. But I was so exhausted by that point. I’d missed a mid-term, spent hours crying on the floor with him—I wasn’t thinking straight. It wasn’t me. I was a different person. He made me into a different person. Slowly, but inexorably. By such tiny increments that I hardly even noticed what I was giving up.”
The words fell into the lush carpet and rich furnishings, and I absorbed their meaning in silence. I imagined Jenny, who despite her brilliant, logical mind, had let the boy she thought she’d loved talk her into betraying folks she’d known had done no wrong. I imagined Demetria, who couldn’t stop expressing her disappointment about her inability to change the fabric of Rose & Grave, and who was more than a little worried that it had changed us instead. She was proof that it wasn’t only boys that could seduce you like that. Little by little we’d sold out to the society’s archaic value system, placed its need for secrecy, pedigree, and blind loyalty above the things we knew to be right.
Like reporting Darren to the police. Maybe we as a society had screwed up, but did that honestly account for his actions?
Why was I even giving in to the concession of Topher Cox? To keep one patriarch happy out of the hundreds who thought we were the ruination of everything they held dear? Would Topher be enough consolation for them, or would they keep complaining and being disappointed until we were exactly what they wanted us to be? And would we and the clubs that came after us give in, little by little, bit by bit, until the world changed around Rose & Grave so much that the society no longer held any relevance at all?
Had it already happened while we played dress-up with our robes and pins and secret songs?
“I don’t understand,” Clarissa was prompting Michelle. “You’re the one who is living off campus now.”
“Yeah,” Michelle said. “Funny thing. The dean got the time of the discipline hearing wrong. Can you believe it? How silly of her! We missed it. So of course the charges were dropped. And when I went to her to reschedule, it was a whole different tune.” Michelle’s expression turned sour, as if she was holding back tears. “‘Really, don’t you think you’re being a bit too dramatic?’ ‘Sometimes relationships just go wrong, and no one is to blame.’ ‘Well, I understand if you don’t want to live in our college anymore. It’s too late to transfer, though. You should consider moving off campus.’” She looked away. “I don’t know if there was ever any disciplinary hearing planned. It was … humiliating. I trusted her and it was like all of a sudden I was the one to blame for all of this. She was so closed off. Like someone had gotten to her.”
Maybe someone had. We should do more research into Blake … and his family. He’d slipped away from due punishment despite Michelle’s attempts to prosecute. It made me wonder: If I did press charges against Darren, would anything really happen to him?
“The college deans are supposed to be our advocates, all right. But the thing is, we’re both in Strathmore College. She was obligated to advocate on both our behalfs, and I guess she didn’t want the scandal.” Michelle bit her lip.
“I was so defeated. I canceled my classes that semester and went home. Personal break, all that. Went stir-crazy after a month and found a job interning at a research lab near my parents’. Once I got my act together, I contacted this professor I’d worked for freshman year. He helped me get a gig assisting a Geochemistry team in the Ring of Fire. I loved it.”
“So you switched to the Geology department?” I asked.
“Not
right away. I sneaked back to campus last semester and did some more independent research. Just wanted to see if I could be here on the DL before enrolling again. It wasn’t perfect, but I really, really wanted to put all that stuff behind me. So I decided to come back to school. I gave it one more shot with Strathmore, but my old dean had left, and it turns out, she’d left no records of our chats at all. Go figure, right? The new dean had nothing to pin on Blake; he was pretty much a model student. Even my old friends in Strathmore were on his side. I had bad grades and left, he stayed and was on the dean’s list. Who was the unbalanced one when you looked at it like that? It was the previous year’s humiliation all over again.”
On paper, Blake would be a more likely candidate for a Rose & Grave tap than Michelle. I wondered if there was another society on campus looking at him.
Michelle went on. “So I did what they said. I moved off campus. I avoided him. Or tried to. I even transferred into the Geology department so I wouldn’t have to see him in the Chemistry labs. He’s pre-med, you know.” She sighed. “But still … I like Geology. And the guy I studied under last fall was really helpful, hooking me up with a professor who needed a new teaching assistant, stuff like that. So it worked out.”
“Worked out?” I blurted. “A pariah in your own college? Sneaking around Science Hill because you’re worried about running into him? That scene in Commons—”
“How about sleeping with him to get him out of your apartment?” Clarissa added. “I’m pretty sure that’s coercion, which means it’s rape.”
I was pretty sure Demetria was frothing at the mouth by this point. Clarissa clearly hadn’t skipped her freshman orientation sessions. I can’t believe the dean of a college at Eli would put reputation above a student’s safety. How often did something like that happen on this campus, and no one ever knew?
“What can I do?” Michelle said. “It’s his word against mine, and because the old dean screwed me over, it’ll just sound like I’m making up stuff that happened over a year ago to excuse my own bad academic record. Who would believe me?”
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