Rites of Spring (Break) il-3

by Diana Peterfreund

  And yet, he said he’d eaten “just as much lobster as the next person.” Either he ate seafood after all or…he was lying.

  The only question was, why?

  18. Sweetness and Light

  I didn’t sleep well that night. Every time a twig snapped in the woods, I was sure it was the vandals, back to finish the job on our cabin. Anytime one of my cabinmates rustled on her bunk, I was positive I was in for another round of bearing witness to their retching. And every time I started to drift back into unconsciousness, a single thought nagged at me: Poe had lied.

  He’d fed me this big lecture about how I wasn’t being fair to him, and all along, he’d been handing out bullshit of his own. He’d lied before, too, whenever it worked in his favor. Keeping secret his pact with Gehry, going all over town to help me find Jenny, without ever once admitting that he wanted to find her to see what she knew about Elysion. He did it so smoothly that I hadn’t caught him in the act until it was way too late.

  But what would he gain by lying about eating lobster? What was the point? It made no sense. If he wanted to prove that all the lobster wasn’t contaminated, he could have pointed out that Malcolm and Myer had eaten it, too, not to mention several other patriarchs.

  There was another rustle from the vicinity of the bushes outside, and I rolled over and pulled my pillow on top of my head. That sounded way too big to be a night bird or a reptile. Were there raccoons on this island, or had Salt taken that “night patrol” suggestion to heart? Maybe it was the people from the other island. If so, I wished they would keep it down. Vandalism was one thing, but the least the intruders could do was let me get a good night’s sleep.

  ***

  At breakfast the next morning, I watched carefully to see if Poe added any bacon to his plate (he didn’t). There was, however, milk in his coffee and he seemed to have no problem downing a pile of scrambled eggs. But all that meant was that he wasn’t a vegan.

  And perhaps that I watched him a tad too much.

  The members of my club were famished, seeing as how they’d all emptied their stomachs the previous evening. The Myers were back at their table, pointedly ignoring the students. They’d even placed their luggage between their table and our own, like a monument to their affronted attitude. Demetria merely rolled her eyes when she saw it. In her opinion, she had informed us that morning, folks get one chance to apologize. Kadie’s had been when she offered us lobster. Demetria’s had been last night, when she tried to explain that they hadn’t thrown it all up on purpose. When Kadie didn’t accept, the gauntlet had been tossed.

  “What did you do,” Jenny asked. “Drill holes in their hull?”

  But Demetria wouldn’t tell us. “Don’t want you implicated in my crimes, chicas,” she said with a wink.

  “Ten bucks, she slipped a snake in Kadie’s toiletry bag,” Clarissa said.

  But if Demetria had left the cabin this morning, I hadn’t seen it. As I said, I was up almost all night.

  All during breakfast, Kadie Myer spoke in whispers to another patriarch’s wife.

  “Talking about us, I assume?” Clarissa muttered into my ear.

  “No,” Jenny said, in a voice almost too low to hear. “Shhh…” She pulled out her Sidekick and started typing away. It took the rest of us a moment to understand she was transcribing:

  K: Thy ddnt evn no whr ther son ws. F he ws evn in house.

  O: No!

  K: Gry ws thr, lukin v ragged + strnge. Lk he ws on drugs.

  O: Lk wife?

  K: Xact. I sed thr ws prob w/food, ws D OK? Wife ddnt luk 4 hm. Sed daren? lk she ddnt no who he ws.

  O: Thrs sumfin rely f* up w/thm.

  K: U sed it! Thn ltl grl went upsters 2 chk, cme bk sed he ws n bed sic.

  O: Wht parnts do?

  K: Lukd releevd.

  “How can you understand them?” Clarissa whispered. “How can you even hear them?”

  Jenny just rolled her eyes and kept typing. They looked relieved that their son was ill? What kind of parents were the Gehrys? Or were they merely relieved that he was in his bed, since apparently, prior to that, they hadn’t the slightest clue. Poor kid. No wonder he’d been vying for attention all week. He certainly wasn’t getting enough at home. “Appointments” with his father, indeed!

  Jenny’s uncanny sense of hearing further revealed that the inside of the cottage was relatively neat, with a few exceptions. The couch in the living room was a mass of bedclothes. “Someone’s not sleeping in their bed,” Kadie mocked, in a voice loud enough for all of us to hear.

  Around this time, I excused myself from the table to get another grapefruit half off the sideboard. I think I’d miss the citrus when I left Florida. My timing sucked, however, and I found myself reaching for the sugar canister at the same time as Poe, who’d come for a coffee refill. His fingers closed around the glass a split second before mine. Our thumbs almost brushed.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  I kept my eyes glued to the sweetener packets. Maybe I should just grab a few Splenda and call it even.

  He held the sugar out to me. “Ladies first.”

  I grabbed blindly at the canister and dumped some on my grapefruit. “Thanks.” I shoved it back at him.

  “You look tired.”

  And now I did turn my face to his, eyes blazing. “That’s a hell of a compliment to give a lady.”

  His brow furrowed. “What’s wrong?”

  But I just clucked my tongue and turned away. Were all men as daft as that?

  I felt his gaze on me all the way back to my seat.

  After yesterday’s debacle, everyone in the club decided to keep it low-key that morning. We packed a cooler of food and drinks and headed out to the closest beach. I floated the idea of returning to the crescent beach because the lagoon was shallow enough for me to splash around in, but since it meant going back on the path, no one wanted to take the chance of seeing (or smelling) the mess they’d made. Nevertheless, I gathered every scrap of courage in my system, and played, knee-deep, in the surf for a full ten minutes.

  One SoBe, two issues of U.S. News & World Report (the most recent grad school guides), and a bag of pretzels later, it was time for lunch. Maybe this was what Spring Break was supposed to be. Forget romantic dramas or society intrigue. All you needed was a beach blanket and some junk food.

  “Wow, you got some sun!” Malcolm said as I passed him on the path back to the main house.

  “Did I?” Someone should hire Malcolm for some sort of skin cancer prevention squad. Dude was obsessed. I examined my arms. Crap. Sunscreen. I pressed my fingers against my skin and lifted them away, watching as the oblong white marks darkened to a decidedly pink tone. Not so bad. It would fade, but not peel. I hadn’t quite hit lobster territory yet.

  Lobster. That reminded me. “Can I talk to you for a minute?” I said to Malcolm as the rest of my club passed me and headed up the steps to the rec room. I waved them away.

  His face fell. “If it’s about what I think it’s about, then no.”

  I grabbed his arm and steered him away from the others. “It’s not, but if it were, I’d have every right to be pissed with you.”

  “And I wouldn’t have the right to be pissed at you?” Malcolm replied in a low voice. “I told you all that stuff in confidence.”

  “And I kept your secret!” I said. Like always. “Tell me how I broke my promise.”

  He ran his hands through his blond hair and looked at me incredulously. “Are you kidding me? You…acted on it. You made your choices based on the private information I gave you.”

  “So?”

  “So, you promised me you wouldn’t do anything.”

  “No,” I corrected. “I promised I wouldn’t humiliate him.”

  He snorted. “Well, you haven’t done that, have you?” He patted his shirt and shorts. “Where in the world did I put that gold star?”

  “What is your problem?” I asked. “Aren’t you the one always encouraging me to hang out w
ith him?”

  “A mistake I won’t be making again, I assure you. I don’t offer my friends up as sacrificial lambs.”

  “Oh, no?” I said. “Isn’t that exactly what you’re known for doing, you and your string of fake girlfriends? You even wanted me to join their ranks.”

  “That was different.”

  “You bet it was!” I crossed my arms. “You used people terribly. I never lied to anyone, and what’s more, I was having fun, too.” Which was more than I could say for Malcolm and his beards.

  “Oh, so because you lay down all your parameters in advance, that makes it okay? Guess George Prescott taught you a lot after all.”

  My mouth dropped open. “How dare you try to take the moral high ground with me? You broke Genevieve’s heart. Willingly. Cavalierly.” I shook my head. “Are you saying the difference is that she wasn’t a Digger, and so wasn’t supposed to have the same courtesy? Is that why you didn’t tap her?” Is that why I was standing here right now?

  Malcolm was silent for a moment, and when he spoke, all the anger was gone from his voice. “I regret so much what I did to Genevieve. I cared about her a lot, and you’re absolutely right. I hurt her, and I shouldn’t have. It was a cruel thing to do and I will never do something like that again.” He scrutinized me. “So you see now—”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not the same.” And it didn’t matter anyway. Poe and I were through.

  He sighed. “Fine. Screw it. You don’t listen to me, he doesn’t listen to me. I’m not a fucking babysitter. What was it you wanted to ask me?”

  “If Jamie’s a vegetarian.”

  He stood there for a second, blinking at me. “Yeah, you clearly care for him so much. You don’t even know something like that?”

  “I thought I did.” And in my defense, he wasn’t exactly the most forthcoming individual on the planet.

  “He is. Why?”

  “Did he eat the lobster last night?”

  Now Malcolm stepped back, eyes wide, face a mask of disbelief. “What the hell is your problem? Let it go already! So you all got food poisoning. What’s the big deal?”

  “Did he?” I pressed.

  “I have no idea! I don’t calorie count other people’s plates.”

  “Try to remember,” I said, urging.

  Malcolm threw his hands in the air. “Probably not. Vegetarians don’t tend to go for things with faces, remember?” At least that was something we had in common. “Why do you ask?”

  I shrugged. “Because he told us all that he had been eating it. Last night when he was busy insisting we were a bunch of paranoid freaks. Curious, don’t you think?”

  And I walked away.

  ***

  I don’t know if Malcolm talked to Poe before lunch, or if the seed I planted had any effect at all on my big sib. But, as I lingered over my grilled-cheese-with-tomato and chocolate milk, I noted the following:

  1) Malcolm and Poe were sitting on opposite sides of the room.

  2) Jenny and Harun were the only knights of D177 who hadn’t made it in for lunch.

  3) Frank and Kadie Myer had not yet left.

  The dining room was packed to the brim, as if no one wanted to miss out on a hot lunch and be relegated to fending for themselves with questionable deli meat for the rest of the afternoon. They’d planned an island-wide barbecue for dinner, and Salt had only recently returned from the mainland, the small boat packed full of ribs, steaks, burgers, and fixings. Even Darren Gehry was present again, having apparently recovered from his bout with food poisoning as well. I watched him finish his third cupcake—iced in Eli blue frosting—and proceed to sweet talk Cook into letting him into the kitchen to lick the bowl. I chuckled when she capitulated. Apparently, she had a soft spot for boys with attitude problems.

  “Change your mind?” I overheard another patriarch ask Frank toward the end of the meal. “I’m so glad to see it!”

  “Nah,” Frank said. “We’re just having a little bit of engine trouble and I want to take a look at it before we sail out. Just in case.”

  Engine trouble? Why in the world would Demetria do something to the Myers that caused them to remain on the island? And even if she had a good reason, it seemed a bit beyond her to dismantle a ship’s engine. When I looked back at Demetria, her grin had vanished, and as I watched, she excused herself from the table. I pursed my lips. Could no one in this organization be trusted anymore?

  (Yes, okay, fine, it’s not like I haven’t kept my own secrets.)

  “Dee, wait up,” I said to her on the porch. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” she said without looking at me.

  I took the steps down to the path. “This is going to sound crazy but…you didn’t sabotage the Myers’ boat, did you?”

  She stopped and looked at me. “Amy, please, like I’d want them here any longer?”

  “That’s what I thought but…we all know you did something.”

  She bit her lip, then leaned her head in close. “Yeah, I did, but you can’t tell anyone.”

  “That’s what my oaths are for,” I said, putting my hand over my heart.

  “Okay, so the idiot left her shampoo in the shower house last night. Her name was right on it in black marker. Some designer product, sixty bucks an ounce. I just refilled the bottle with Nair.”

  I clapped my hand over my mouth to stifle a giggle. “You didn’t!” Maybe I was growing paranoid after all. Why in the world would I suspect my fellow Diggirl of doing something so hard-core as destroying a yacht?

  “Who knows if it will work, but I couldn’t resist getting back at her.” She glanced over her shoulder at the shower house. “But now I’m worried that she forgot to pack it.”

  “Let’s double check!” We took off for the shower house, laughing all the way. This was what a society prank was really like. No nonsense about sabotaging gazillion-dollar boat engines. Just some hair remover in the beauty products. No vast, month-long conspiracies against the girl trying to steal your boyfriend. Simply break into her society’s tomb and wreak havoc.

  We’d just reached the door to the showers when a shout rent the air.

  “Nooooooooo!” We froze, looked around. Where was that coming from?

  “Oh, no! Help! Help! This is a travesty! This is the last straw!” On our left, the door to the tomb burst open and Salt came running out, his face a mask of hysteria, his shouts so loud they were almost hurting my eardrums.

  At the main house, people had moved to the windows or spilled out onto the porch to see what all the fuss was about. Demetria and I trailed Salt up the path, where he’d ground to a halt at the base of the steps, still shouting at the top of his lungs, but so incoherently I couldn’t follow a word he was saying. He held something white in his hands, but was waving it around so fast I couldn’t get a good look.

  “Total destruction…last straw…how could they…abominable…really have to call the police this time…”

  “Salt, Salt,” Malcolm said, hands extended, palms down. “What are you talking about? Did someone break into the tomb?”

  “Yes!” And now he threw whatever he was holding onto the steps, where it struck with a loud crack and shattered. And I saw what they were. Broken bits of china. With little tiny swastikas on them.

  “The whole set is smashed. Destroyed.”

  Oh my God. I looked up at Poe, and he was staring at me, too, his expression utterly unreadable.

  “Eww, what is this, Nazi memorabilia?” Demetria said. “Good riddance, I say!” Guess she hadn’t seen them on the tour after all.

  “Miss!” Salt said, turning on her. “This is the island’s property. It’s a monument to the hard work and sacrifice of one of our own in service to our country.”

  Jenny looked confused. “Hitler?”

  Harun patted her on the shoulder. “I think he means a Digger in the army during World War II.”

  “That’s not the point!” Malcolm said. “Someone broke into the tomb. That’s the point.”r />
  Poe nodded, but he hadn’t taken his eyes off me. “Was anything else destroyed, Salt? The cabinet? The furniture? The paintings?”

  “No,” the caretaker reported. “Just the china.”

  Poe’s lips compressed to a thin line. “Call a meeting. I want every member of the Trust in the tomb in ten minutes.”

  “Of the Trust?” Demetria said. “What about the rest of us? Don’t we all have a right to know who is on the island and why?”

  Poe dragged his gaze away from me. “I think we’ve put on enough of a spectacle for the barbarians in the group. Everyone, go back to lunch. I’ll take care of this.”

  Okay, what were the chances? Poe and I had been joking about smashing that china all week. He hadn’t done it, had he? In some bizarre attempt to get my attention?

  “Take care of what?” George scoffed. “Nothing was stolen, nothing was ruined that shouldn’t have been, if you ask me. Change the locks and call it a day. Why does everything have to be such a big deal?”

  Poe whirled on him. “Because someone has been systematically infiltrating both this island and the tomb back home. I want to know who it is, I want to know why, and I want it stopped, now.”

  “Why do you think it’s the same people?” I asked, baffled. Clearly, Dragon’s Head was responsible for the break-in at Eli, whereas the likely culprits here were the conspiracy theorists on the other island. I mean, if it hadn’t been Poe himself.

  And now he looked back at me. “I don’t,” he said simply, then announced at large, “Ten minutes,” and walked past us all to the tomb, belying all of my suspicions. If he’d smashed the china, why would he need to see it for himself? Unless he was trying to cover those tracks and pretending to be more upset than he was. Salt hurried behind him, along with some other Diggers and patriarchs, all eager to see the extent of the damage. The barbarians and the rest of the knights clustered, whispering furiously to one another. George rolled his eyes and sat down on one of the rocking chairs, which seemed to me to be the most sensible reaction I’d seen so far. Like he’d said, what was the big deal? So a couple of really macabre bits of Digger booty got wrecked. So what?