by Lauren Kunze
“That won’t be necessary,” Grace said shortly. “Andrews, Robinson? It’s go time.”
She powered up the marble stairs with Callie and Matt trailing closely at her heels. When they reached the third floor, Grace held a finger to her lips. Slowly they crept into the closest room, the white walls lined with paintings by famous American artists from the mid-nineteenth century. Callie paused in front of a work by Winslow Homer, staring at the dark waves tossing a tiny ship at sea.
“Andrews!” Grace hissed, beckoning her. Grace tilted her head in the direction of a neighboring room. As they approached, Callie heard someone speaking.
“Hold still, everyone,” a male voice cried. “And please remember to smise! That’s Tyra talk for smiling with your eyes.”
“Marcus, I thought I told you to hold off on the group picture because we’re still missing one of them,” a clear, high voice called. Callie didn’t need a visual to recognize the speaker: Alexis Thorndike.
“It’s been twenty minutes,” Marcus—a senior who bartended at the Harvard Pub—replied. “Boyfriend’s clearly a no-show.”
“Let me try him again on his cell,” Lexi said.
Following Grace’s lead, Callie stopped just outside the entrance to an enormous room dotted with sculptures fashioned from metal or stone. Inside, an elaborate photo shoot appeared to be taking place. Marcus, overseen by Alexis, stood in front of a camera mounted on a tripod, with bright lights winking on either side. A group of freshmen, including Vanessa, Mimi, and OK, were positioned in awkward poses around several of the sculptures. An upperclassman writer for FM named Tom, who had frequently given Callie positive feedback on her pieces, hovered in the background taking notes.
“Just remember,” Marcus called as Lexi whipped out her cell, “that the camera is only on reserve till noon so—”
“Just give me a minute!” Lexi snapped.
“As you wish, Your Highness,” Marcus said, performing an exaggerated bow.
“Please.” Alexis snorted, hanging up her phone. “The only queen in this room is y—”
“It’s Monday, March seventh, and I’m here in the Fogg Museum at a photo shoot for FM magazine’s infamous issue featuring ‘The Fifteen Hottest Freshmen,’” Grace said loudly, walking into the room. She spoke into the mouthpiece of her iPhone, which ran a voice recording app. Lexi wheeled around. “The day is off to an interesting start,” Grace continued, “with a politically incorrect, possibly homophobic slur from the magazine’s editor and COMP director, third-year Alexis Th—”
“What do you think you’re doing here?” Lexi demanded, marching up to them. “This isn’t Crimson business.”
Grace smiled and clicked Pause on her phone’s voice recorder. “Since you are still affiliated with the paper despite my recent recommendation to the board, everything you do is Crimson business—even though little that you do upholds our standards and fundamental commitment to excellence.”
“Please,” Lexi said, rolling her eyes, “it’s a school paper, not the Wall Street Journal, and you’re a college junior, not Carl Bernstein—even if you do have the same seventies-style man’s haircut.”
“I don’t know which I find more insulting,” Grace mused, pretending to really consider the question, “your trivializing our nation’s oldest continuously published daily university newspaper, which incidentally boasts several alums who are currently staff writers at the WSJ, or the fact that you don’t like my hair.”
“If we are so beneath your standards,” Lexi shot back, struggling to keep her cool, “then I repeat: what are you doing here?”
“Well, if you must know,” said Grace, “we’re doing an opinion piece on your annual popularity contest. I’m quite curious to learn how the rest of the one thousand nine hundred and eighty-five other freshmen at this school feel about not being the quote-unquote ‘hottest.’”
Oof, thought Callie, watching Mimi and Vanessa primp and preen for the photograph. When you put it that way . . . Being one of the one thousand nine hundred and eighty-five of the not-worthy-of-an-article and, conversely, ugliest freshmen on campus really didn’t feel so good.
Lexi exhaled, her lips pressed together in a thin line. “‘The Fifteen Hottest Freshmen’ is, as you are well aware, one of our oldest traditions—”
“Sometimes it’s the oldest traditions that are the most deplorable,” Grace interrupted. “Take, for example, slavery, or the disenfranchisement of women—”
“You did not just compare some silly magazine article to slavery—”
“So you admit that your articles are silly!” Grace retorted, brandishing her iPhone.
Lexi looked murderous. “‘The Freshmen Fifteen’ is—”
“Fourteen,” Matt murmured suddenly.
“What?” Grace and Lexi shouted simultaneously, rounding on him.
“There are only—ah—fourteen people posed for the photo over there,” Matt said, seeming to deeply regret his decision to speak. “Not fifteen.”
Slowly Grace and Lexi turned to look at the fourteen—indeed there were only fourteen, plus Marcus and Tom—frozen faces, riveted as if they’d scored front row seats to a prize fight. Mimi waved cheerily at Callie. Vanessa flipped her hair. OK struggled to maintain his pose, mimicking the statute of a nude warrior with bow and arrow next to him. Tom coughed uncomfortably. Marcus, a delighted gleam in his eye, snapped several pictures of the two female editors, now inches away from each other’s face.
Lexi cleared her throat. “As you can see, I’m afraid that you and your protégées”—she shot a withering death glare at Callie—“are interfering with our shoot, and so I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“And I’m afraid that you don’t have the authority to do that,” Grace said, infusing her voice with Lexi’s signature saccharine quality.
Lexi took a deep breath, but before she could reply, Tom walked over and said, “Actually, it might be to our advantage if they stayed. You’re a freshman, right?” he added, turning to Matt.
“Yes,” said Matt.
“Well, we’re still missing a fifteenth, and it doesn’t look like this Bolton character is going to show so . . .” Tom was still looking at Matt. “Perhaps you could stand in?”
“Him?” Lexi asked.
“Me?” Matt echoed. “As one of the fifteen—no!—I mean—wait—really?”
“Sure, man,” said Tom, clapping him on the shoulder. “You’ll be great.”
Grace scoffed at the just-won-Miss-America expression on Matt’s face. “Never underestimate the power of vanity,” she whispered to Callie, nudging her. “It’s settled, then,” she said so everyone could hear. “Robinson will participate in the shoot—almost as if he was on an undercover assignment,” she added pointedly, “and Andrews and I will observe and then shadow the individual interviews.”
Lexi was shaking her head. “I don’t—”
“We’ll be so quiet you won’t even know we’re here.”
“But—”
“Clock’s a-tickin’, ladies,” Marcus called, the flash on his camera flickering as he snapped several more photos of the standoff. “Shall we get this show on the road?”
Callie glanced at Lexi. The older girl had the same about-to-explode air as a grenade. Callie suppressed a smile, watching Lexi take deep, calming breaths. “Fine,” Lexi whispered when she could finally talk again. “Carry on.”
Matt bounded over to join the group. “And do something about his hair!” she yelled halfheartedly.
Marcus began repositioning his subjects and kept encouraging OK to move to a place of greater prominence. Callie smirked when Vanessa started gesturing frantically from the other side of the room, no doubt insisting that she belonged in the front row and refusing to let OK obscure the brand-new outfit and heels she’d most likely purchased for the occasion. Meanwhile Matt hovered awkwardly in the background, seemingly torn between laughing at and trying to mimic OK’s outlandish poses. . . .
“A
ll right, that’s a wrap!” Marcus finally called twenty minutes later. “Time for the individual shots: How about we start with you, sugar?” he said, pointing to OK. “Now the first thing we want to know is: single or taken? Gay or straight?”
“Actually, I’ll be conducting the interviews, Marcus,” Tom interceded, smiling wryly at Callie, whom Grace had assigned to shadow him while she personally covered Lexi, blocking her every move like a basketball player on the court. Callie smiled back and pulled out a pen and paper from her book bag so she could take notes, thankful that she still had several hours until her Economics 10b lecture started. Grace and Lexi had begun bickering again loudly, and from the looks of it, it would be a while before they left the museum. . . .
The next day after their afternoon classes Callie and Matt were, once again, at the Crimson. “I’m starting to feel like we live here,” Callie moaned, resting her head on the desk.
“Maybe we should buy a potted plant—decorate or something,” Matt offered.
“What I don’t get is why you’re here so much,” Callie said, lifting her head. “Aren’t you supposed to have way less work now that you’ve officially made it onto the paper?”
“I, er,” Matt stammered, glancing toward the office door that read MANAGING EDITOR. “I’m just trying to make a good impression.”
“. . . on Grace?” Callie prompted.
“Well, yes, but the other editors, too!” Matt cried, his face going all ripe tomato.
Callie nodded, deciding not to push it. She was glad Matt, who felt more and more like a brother every day, had finally misplaced his misplaced affection elsewhere. (Teddy was still stuck to the bulletin board.)
“Plus, they were all out of issues of FM this morning at breakfast and I sort of wanted to snag a paper copy,” Matt explained, waving said copy in the air, which featured the results of yesterday’s grueling photo shoot on its cover with The Freshmen Fifteen written beneath in glossy lettering.
Callie grinned. “We should frame it,” she said, grabbing the magazine.
“Stop—”
“No, seriously. You look good!”
Matt stared at his photo for a moment. “I’ve gotten eighteen new friend requests on Facebook since this morning. Do you suppose it’s related?”
“Either way, your stock is through the roof!” she said. And it’s about damn time.
“You think?” he muttered, squinting again at his photo.
“Yes I think,” she said. “And I also think that maybe you’re . . . dare I say . . . enjoying it?”
Matt dropped the magazine, looking guilty. “Well, of course I—well—goes completely against everything we—I mean, me and Grace, or, ah, Grace and I, or yeah, we stand for but . . .” Miserable, he frowned.
“It’s okay to enjoy it,” Callie said, placing a hand over his. “You are one of the coolest freshmen on this campus, and it’s awesome that now everybody else knows it, too!” Matt blushed. Quickly Callie removed her hand. After all, the “we” of “me and Grace, or, ah, Grace and I” only went so far. “I just hope,” she added, slightly reproachful, “that maybe now you’ll have a bit more sympathy for the fun side of being selected to belong to a supposedly ‘exclusive’ or ‘elite’ group on campus.”
Matt narrowed his eyes, but then he grinned like he knew that she had him. “Well, I did draw the line at going to that party your Pudding club put on last night in our ‘honor.’ What was it called? ‘The Fortunate Fifteen’ or ‘Fifteen and Fabulous’—”
“‘The Fabulous Fifteen,’” Callie supplied. She had also missed the party thrown for those featured in the article—a high number of whom were already in the Pudding or were punching this spring—due to the volume of her workload, the fact that it was a Monday night, and the small part of her that felt less than “fabulous” after being excluded from the article.
“Besides,” Matt was saying, “I wasn’t actually selected: I was filling in only because Greg decided at the last minute not to show.”
“What a flake,” Callie exclaimed. “Did you ever find out why he bailed?”
“He said something in the room this morning about ‘wanting to keep a low profile.’”
Callie snorted. “Yeah, because that sounds just like him.”
Matt shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think he might mean it. OK asked if he could borrow his car the other day and Gregory said that it was in the shop but that he might be getting rid of it because he’s decided that for a student to have a car on a contained college campus is, and I quote, ‘excessive.’ Maybe he was lying, though,” Matt added, “as I’m not sure OK knows how to drive or that it would be wise to lend him any car—let alone a Porsche—even if he did.”
Callie leaned back in her chair, staring at the ceiling. “Weird,” she finally said. Maybe Gregory really was undergoing some kind of major personality overhaul, and maybe it had something to do with—well, now, what a coincidence. . . .
“Alessandra! Hi!” Callie called as the girl in question walked into the offices.
“Hey, did you see the issue?” Matt added, sitting up straight and holding the magazine.
“Hi,” said Alessandra shortly, setting her purse down by a computer near the back. “I did, and you look great,” she answered Matt, coming over to where they were sitting. “I’m sorry, but I can’t hang around and chat, though—I’ve got a lot of work to do,” she finished, nodding toward the other end of the room.
“No worries,” said Callie. “We’re, uh, working, too,” she added, pulling up a browser, “. . . and checking a few e-mails,” she added guiltily, coming face-to-face with her in-box. Whoops.
“See you later then,” Alessandra called, walking away to join several other COMPers who were also working quietly in the back of the offices.
“Whoa,” said Callie suddenly after turning back to her e-mail. “Look at this!” she cried in a hushed tone, clicking on a message.
From: Anne Goldberg
To: [The Members of the Hasty Pudding social club]
Subject: Police incident at the club last night
Dear Members,
For those of you who don’t already know, the Harvard University police department broke up a party hosted at the club last night, supposedly due to a noise complaint from one of our neighbors. So far our organization has emerged from this incident with only a warning from the HUPD and has yet to be reprimanded by the university, although disciplinary action has been taken against two underage students (a member and a nonmember) who were found in possession of open containers of alcohol outside the club.
However, in light of these events, the board has elected to suspend all gatherings until Leather & Lace, our annual party scheduled for the week after we initiate new members. Until then there are to be no parties and absolutely no alcohol consumption, even by members who are of age, within the club. Thank you in advance for your understanding.
We are looking into the origins of the complaint as this evening was fairly low-key compared to our other events. I will personally keep you posted on any new developments.
Sincerely,
Anne Goldberg, Secretary
“Wow,” said Matt, who had been reading over her shoulder. “Good thing neither of us went to that party!”
“Yeah, seriously,” said Callie. “I hope nobody we know got in trouble. . . .” Returning to her in-box, she saw another e-mail from Anne, subject heading: Thank you. What the . . .
From: Anne Goldberg
To: Callie Andrews
Subject: Thank you
Callie,
Thank you for your more than generous contribution toward our punch process. However, at the risk of being redundant, I must reiterate that it is ill-advised to leave an envelope full of cash on my desk without, at the very least, notifying me in advance.
Regards,
Anne
What the . . . WHAT?!?
“Huh . . .” said Matt from where he was sitting, staring at his own computer.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing, just reading Grace’s op-ed on the shoot yesterday. . . .”
“Oh, it’s up?” said Callie, opening the Crimson website.
“Yeah, it’s up,” Matt murmured, his eyes still trained on his screen. “It’s up and it’s a little . . . harsh.”
“A little harsh?” Callie repeated incredulously after she had skimmed the article. “It’s poisonous,” she said in a whisper, looking around to make sure that none of the people working in the back were listening. “Poisonous to the point of being . . . unprofessional.”
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far.”
“Look,” Callie said. “I get why she hates the Final Clubs and the Pudding even though it’s co-ed—I mean, I get why you do, too—but what I don’t fully understand is this rage against FM. It just seems so . . . personal.”
“The magazine does tend to praise certain institutions and practices that . . .” Matt glanced down at the issue that was still open on the page declaring him one of Harvard’s hottest freshmen, looking sheepish.
“Even though I have every reason to hate you-know-who,” Callie continued, pointing up to the second-floor offices, “I can still admit that I genuinely enjoy the magazine. Yes, sometimes it’s trashy, but mostly it’s just entertaining, lighthearted, and fun. And you gotta admit that everyone on campus reads her column, whether or not you agree with the advice.”
“Sure,” Matt said. “There’s definitely some value to the lighthearted, entertaining stuff. . . . You know, I really wish they’d given me some more time to come up with my ‘best pick-up line.’ Like, how about the one where you ask if she has a library card, ’cause ‘I wanna check you out’?”
Callie wasn’t listening, staring instead at the screen in front of her. “I wonder . . . hmm.”
“You wonder what?” asked Matt, setting down the issue and watching her pull up a browser.
“I wonder if Lexi and Grace have some sort of weird history that we don’t know about,” she explained, starting to type.