He laughed, which earned him dirty looks from at least three other people at my table.
Malcolm straightened then, but continued beating that tattoo on his shoulder strap. If you ask me, the rhythm, more than the whispered conversation, was what was distracting about his presence. And now we were up to two dozen words.
“The final’s a breeze,” he went on. “So don’t worry about it.”
“Thanks.” I guess. Thrum, thrum, thrum.
“Just don’t work too hard. You’ll need your energy.”
Huh? My eyes shot to his face. “What are you talking about?”
He grinned then, showing me a set of gorgeous white teeth. “Oh, I almost forgot.” He stopped thrumming for a second, reached into his messenger bag, pulled out three books, and set them down on my desk. “This might help you out when you’re stuck in class.” He pointed at each of them in turn. “Said was a post-colonialist critic, Levi-Strauss advocated structuralism, and Aristotle…well, he’s the oldest critic in the book. None of them is a New Critic. Get your facts straight, or I’ll think you deserved that B—in Ethiopian Lit.”
I stared up at that all-too-familiar smile, then down to his hands, which had started tapping on his shoulder strap again. Right next to the little gold pin stuck through the canvas that showed a rose inside an elongated hexagon.
Malcolm Cabot was the Shadow-Who-Smiles. And he was in Rose & Grave.
Which meant…
“Hey!” I said. Loudly.
“Shh!” The harsh rebuke came from a girl at the next table. I craned my neck around Malcolm’s torso to see Clarissa Cuthbert glaring at me over the rim of her Louis Vuitton bag. Clarissa’s gaze ping-ponged from me to Malcolm and back again, and then her ice blue eyes narrowed. Little wonder. She was probably wondering what Governor Cabot’s son was doing talking to me. Like Malcolm, Clarissa was part of the school’s über elite.
And Malcolm was taking advantage of my distraction. He ruffled my hair. “See you soon, babe.” Then he turned on his heel and walked off.
Ignoring Clarissa, and completely forgetting about both the society books and Malcolm’s favorite literary critics, I snatched up WAP (with both hands, of course, since the stupid thing weighs two hundred pounds) and dashed after him.
By the time I got into the main hall of the library, he was nowhere to be seen. Stacks? Exit? Ugh! I walked as quickly as possible to the front doors, all the while scanning down each bay for any sight of his green shirt or blond hair. No luck.
At the door, I went through the usual No-This-Is-My-Copy-of-War-and-Peace-That’s-Why-It-Doesn’t-Have-a-Library-Bar-Code-on-It rigmarole, then sprinted down the front steps onto the Cross Campus Green. No sign of him there, either.
What, did Rose & Grave members have a secret entrance to the library, too?
Fine, I’d beard the lion in his den. “CC” stood for Calvin College in Eli shorthand, and green was the college color. I’d follow him right back to his dorm room. I tried to look dignified as I power-walked across the Green and back onto High Street, but the weight of WAP kept throwing off my stride.
THOUGHTS THAT WENT THROUGH
MY HEAD ON THE WAY
1) Malcolm Cabot knew I’d been bullshitting at my interview but tapped me anyway.
2) Must be convenient for Malcolm that Calvin College and the Rose & Grave tomb are right next door to each other.
3) I wonder if the Diggers have the Russian Novel final on file.
I swiped my keycard at the entrance to Calvin College, and opened the heavy gate. A few steps later and I was in their small, sunny courtyard, empty but for one guy in a green polo shirt booking it toward one of the far entryways.
“Malcolm!” I shouted, and he stopped in his tracks. I ran to meet him. “You’re a Digger,” I said when I arrived, panting slightly.
He grabbed my arm and maneuvered me to one of the stone benches positioned farther away from the windows. “And you,” he hissed in my ear in a much lower tone than I’d been using, “are not exactly discreet.”
I rolled my eyes as we sat. “How discreet is that pin of yours?”
He snorted. “It took you about ninety seconds to notice it, and I practically had to jab you in the eye with the pointy end.”
“Thanks for restraining yourself.”
“Think nothing of it.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “Now I want an explanation.”
He narrowed his eyes. “For what?”
“For what!” I looked around the courtyard. Still empty. But I lowered my voice anyway. “For last night, of course.”
“You seemed to understand the process at the time.”
“Yeah, but then you just left me there. In the bathroom.”
“Of course. We had to get to eleven other people, you know, Amy. We were busy.”
I digested that point while he glanced around. “Look, this isn’t the time to talk. Everything you need to know is in the—” He stopped and looked down at my hands, empty but for WAP. “Where are the books I gave you?”
“In the library, I suppose.”
“WHAT!” Now it was Malcolm’s turn to get loud. He jumped up from the bench and threw his hands in the air. “You just left them there?”
I blinked at him. “They were library books. And I already have a copy of Poetics back in my suite.”
“There was—urgh!” He spiked his hands in his hair. “There was something in the Aristotle. For you. From us.”
“Oh.”
“Oh?” He paced back and forth in front of me. “Oh?!? That’s all you have to say?”
“What am I supposed to say? Did you honestly think that after that little act of yours I’d be more interested in hunting you down or settling back for a little bit of Dead White Guy’s take on literary criticism?”
“Well, I didn’t think you’d just leave them there!” He plopped back down on the bench and put his head in his hands. “I told them we shouldn’t get creative. I said, ‘What’s wrong with the Post Office?’ But did anyone listen to me? No. And now look.”
I patted him on the shoulder, because it seemed like the only appropriate response, but inside I was already plotting my course back to the reading room.
Malcolm whipped up and caught me by the shoulders. He stared at me intently. “Listen, you can’t let anyone else see the letter I put inside those books. It could ruin everything. You have to get back to the library and get them back. Now. Understand?”
I nodded, a bit taken aback, and put my hands on his chest to push him away. And, naturally, that’s when the door to the nearest entryway opened and Brandon Weare walked out.
“Hey, Haskel,” he said in a voice that was anything but casual. “What’s up?”
Malcolm dropped his hands and stepped back and I tried to think of the least awkward way to respond.
Option One:
“Whoa, Malcolm, be careful on those uneven flagstones, you don’t want to trip!”
Option Two:
“Hey, Brandon. Malcolm here was acting out this scene I missed on The OC last week.”
Option Three:
“Hi, Brandon. Malcolm and I can’t talk right now. We have to go back to the library before anyone finds the top-secret Rose & Grave correspondence Agent Double-Oh-Cabot here left in a book I had no intention of checking out.”
But Malcolm took over, going from Bobcat-Goldthwait-freaked-out to James-Dean-cool in a flash. “Hey, man, how’s it going?” He held out his hand and slapped Brandon five before my friend-with-bennies could figure out what was going on. “I’ve been meaning to congratulate you on that last intramural badminton game. Have you thought about being team captain next year? I think Calvin is going to make a real play for the Tibbs Cup.”
Brandon played badminton? Live and learn. Of course, considering the guy’s obsession with paper airplanes, the aerodynamically designed shuttle used in badminton fit perfectly.
“Thanks,” Brandon said, and stood a little taller. “I have been thi
nking about it.”
Unbelievable. I looked at Malcolm with new appreciation. Brandon was completely distracted. “Are you doing anything right now?” Malcolm was asking him. “We can go talk to the Calvin Tibbs Coordinator about it.”
“Well, I wanted to chat with Amy….” Brandon cast me a quick glance, but before he could break out his Amy-smile, Malcolm stepped in.
“Oh, she’s headed off to the library.” Malcolm clapped Brandon on the shoulder and made some kind of complicated eyebrow gesture in my direction. “Let’s go,” he went on, guiding my Brandon away.
I stood there, alone in the Calvin courtyard, and began to question the veracity of Brandon’s ongoing Hopelessly-Devoted-to-You act. The man had just ditched me for intramural badminton.
On the upside, I was definitely on my way to becoming a member of Rose & Grave. So, boy, did I need to reclaim those books!
I hurried back to the library, crossing my fingers that the shelving assistants hadn’t made their rounds in the reading room yet.
But my luck didn’t hold out. I got to the table where I’d been sitting, and it was completely cleared. No society tomes, no volumes of literary criticism, no missive from Rose & Grave.
Crap. The next freshman who had to read Poetics was sure in for a surprise. And I’d already screwed up my first objective as a member of a secret society—actually getting initiated. (Though, seriously, I don’t think I’m entirely to blame for this snafu. How was I to know? It’s not like there’s a “So You Wanna Be in a Secret Society” brochure.) Okay, Amy, think. They wouldn’t have had time to reshelve them yet, so they were probably sitting on one of the book carts behind the circulation desk. I could just go up to the people at the desk and tell them I needed it back.
So there I was, standing in line, practically hopping with impatience and straining my eyes to see past the counter to the book carts, hoping that I’d recognize at least one of the volumes. The petite girl working the computer had a nose ring and two green stripes in her hair, and when I told her I needed my Aristotle back, she just stared at me and blinked. “According to the system,” she said, pulling the info up on the screen, “there are 215 copies of the collected writings of Aristotle in the Dwight Stacks alone.”
“I know, but I need the one I was just looking at.”
“And another 167 in the rest of the Eli University library system.”
“Right,” I said, pointing behind her. “But I need the one on that little cart back there.”
She looked over her shoulder, then back at me. “You want me to go digging through the cart to find a particular book, another copy of which you can easily retrieve from the shelves in 382 different forms?”
Nice math, bitch. I was still carrying the one. But my momma always told me you catch more flies with honey.
“Pretty please.” I leaned forward. “I left some rather sensitive health information in there, accidentally.” I gestured vaguely at my lower regions and whispered, “Test results.”
She retrieved the cart forthwith and started rummaging through the books. Unfortunately, Poetics was not among them, nor were any of the other books I’d had with me earlier.
“Sorry,” she said, then reached into her pocket and pulled out a card. She slid it across the counter, then laid her hand softly over mine. “You know, I volunteer at the Eli Women’s Center. If you need to talk about anything, we have a twenty-four-hour Crisis Help Line.”
I did my best to look somber. “Thank you,” I said, taking the card and stuffing it in my pocket. Okay, now what was I supposed to do?
“Hey! Psst, Amy. Amy Haskel.”
I turned in the direction of the voice and saw Clarissa Cuthbert seated in a leather armchair in a little reading alcove. Her Louis Vuitton bag was on her lap, a pile of library books sat on the table beside her, and between two of her French manicured fingers, she dangled a white envelope with a black border and a black wax seal.
“Looking for this?”
4. Semper Paratus
And let me tell you why.
Remember Galen Twilo, numero dos on my Hit List? Well, soon after our Reading Week love-in, about two weeks into the second semester, when it was just penetrating my lust-addled brain that I would never again be treated to a post-coital discussion about existentialism and the incontrovertible nothingness of being (I know, strange thing to think right after an orgasm) in the arms of Mr. Twilo, I had a rather unfortunate encounter.
There’s a sort of restaurant/club in New Haven called Tory’s that caters to the very, very old-school factions of the student body. To eat there, you have to be a member, and the dress code is incredibly strict. They serve stuff like Welsh rarebit, and campus organizations who have Tory’s members on their roster like to go and have what we call “Tory’s Nights,” where we sing songs and drink toasts out of giant silver trophy cups at the long tables in the restaurant’s private banquet rooms, though we never actually eat anything. Clarissa Cuthbert is amongst the very oldest of the old school, and her father, some hotshot Wall Street guy, is the type of person who pays the steep post-graduate membership fee to Tory’s just so he can eat toast points whenever he visits his daughter at his old alma mater.
I didn’t know any of this then. I knew of Clarissa—she was beautiful in that “Bergdorf blonde” way, dressed like she was in a fashion show for every class, and had a dorm room on campus (as all freshmen are required to) as well as a swank penthouse on the corner of Chapel and College Streets, the town’s ritziest student-friendly address. She held champagne-tasting parties. At eighteen.
I was still getting used to keggers.
My first Tory’s Night with the Lit Mag had been going on for about an hour and a half when the almost-empty trophy cup was passed to me. “Finish it,” Glenda Foster, then a sophomore, had whispered to me, and the whole table lifted their voices in song. Now, the rules of the Tory’s Cup Game are a little bit complicated (especially considering it’s a drinking game), but here’s a short list.
TORY’S NIGHT RULES
1) The Tory’s Cup can never touch the table.
2) The players pass the cup to the left, making a half turn every time, and everyone takes a sip.
3) When it gets down to a low enough level of mixed alcoholic beverage (identified only by color—i.e., a Red Tory’s Cup, a Gold Tory’s Cup, a Green Tory’s Cup), the person holding it is obliged to chug the rest, wipe the inside of the cup out on her hair and/or clothes, and rest it, upside down, on a napkin. If there’s any ring of moisture imprinted on the napkin, she has to pay for the next cup. (Tory’s Cups are prohibitively expensive, hence the not ordering food at Tory’s Nights. We can’t blow our budget on cucumber sandwiches.)
4) All this is done while the other people at the table sing “the Tory’s Song,” which is an incomprehensible mix of letters, hand-clapping, and general drunken revelry, into which they insert the unlucky drinker’s name. Students aren’t ever taught the Tory’s Song, we just pick it up through osmosis as soon as we get on campus.
These cups probably hold more than a gallon, so even when they look nearly empty, there’s still a highly deceptive amount of liquor, juice, and other people’s backwash swishing around on the bottom of the polished-silver bowl. And I had to drink it—without drowning. For a second I thought I’d have as much luck trying to swim in it. But I rallied, and chugged, and did my best to dry the rim and interior off on my hair and clothing. The price of a Green Cup is about sixty bucks, which was my freshman-year spending money for a month, so I had to win the game.
And I did, but I paid the price. Woozy, sticky, and already regretting my future dry-cleaning bill, I excused myself right afterward to go to the restroom. I wobbled down the stairs into the main dining hall and practically tripped over a table containing Clarissa Cuthbert, her father, a few people I didn’t recognize, and Galen Twilo, dressed unaccountably in khaki dress pants, a shirt and tie, and a blue blazer with gold buttons on the cuffs.
They looked up from th
eir watercress salads at my sticky, green-stained outfit, and Galen’s eyes (I will never forget this) showed absolutely no recognition. For a moment there, I thought maybe I was seeing things and it wasn’t Galen after all. Galen wore black pants with chains hanging off them and Clash concert T-shirts he found at thrift stores in the Village. Not blue blazers with gold buttons and—I looked down at his feet—brown loafers with little leather tassels.
Just then, that pint and a half of Tory’s Cup in my stomach got the better of me and I rushed to the toilet. I was still in the stall, trying to erase the image of violent green alcoholic vomit from my mind, when the door to the ladies’ room opened and in walked Clarissa and one of her friends. (I peeped through the crack in the stall door.)
“—he says they went out a few times,” Clarissa was saying as she popped open a Chanel compact and brushed bronzer on her nose. “But he never thought she’d just show up here.”
“Following him around like a devoted puppy, huh?” The other girl made a clucking sound with her tongue. “And what was that stuff in her hair?”
Clarissa shrugged. “You know how Galen likes slumming.”
WHAT I LEARNED THAT NIGHT
1) There’s a restroom near the private banquet halls that Tory’s prefers its student Tory’s Night guests to use so as not to disturb the people in the main dining hall with their sticky outfits.
2) Mr. Rebel-Without-a-Cause Twilo was actually a trust-fund baby from Manhattan who’d grown up on the Upper East Side and attended the same twee private school as Clarissa.
3) Never finish a Green Tory’s Cup.
And I never did like Clarissa Cuthbert after that. Slumming!
So here I was, two and a half years later, watching Clarissa fondle my letter from Rose & Grave with a smug little smile plastered on her (probably plastic surgery—enhanced) face.
I swallowed. “Why, thanks,” bitch “Clarissa!” I said in what I hoped was a tone of sincere gaiety, but probably came across as forced brittleness. “I was so wondering” why you’d steal my books “what I’d done with that” secret society letter “birthday party invitation.”
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