Tap & Gown

by Diana Peterfreund

  No wonder she hadn’t answered any of my calls. She’d been stuck in here all morning. I went to her immediately.

  “Are you okay?”

  She shrugged without looking at me. I supposed I deserved that. After all, I’d promised that Rose & Grave would protect her from Blake, yet she’d hardly stepped foot in our tomb before he’d launched his most grievous attack on her yet. Was Becky P blind? Here was this young woman, obviously traumatized, sitting alone while her dean—the Eli faculty charged with protecting her—palled around with the likes of Blake Varnham and his support crew.

  “Please take a seat, Miss Haskel,” said Becky P. I looked around the room. Dean De La Roche had already resumed his seat near the other men, and there was an open chair next to him. I picked it up and moved it over to Michelle, then plopped down. Josh, failing to hide his amusement, took a seat on her other side. We were Diggers, even if Michelle hadn’t been initiated yet. We stuck together.

  Becky P didn’t miss the nuance. She sat down behind her desk and folded her hands in front of her.

  “It is well documented that I have zero tolerance for the abominable tradition of campus hazing,” she said. “It makes no difference to me who the perpetrators of this crime are: sporting teams, fraternities, or even the oldest secret society on campus. It is naive of the secret societies to believe that because they operate outside the aegis of the Hellenic Society, Singing Group Council, or any other governing body, they are also exempt from the rules of this university and of the State of Connecticut. Do I make myself clear?”

  Josh spoke up. “I understand the hazing statutes of the State of Connecticut, ma’am. I am curious to see how they apply in this case.”

  “This young man was stabbed in the back when he failed to comply with your bizarre initiation rites.”

  “We weren’t initiating him!” I said. “We didn’t tap him. He broke into the tomb on his own.”

  “We didn’t stab him, either,” Josh clarified. “He fell on that knife—a knife, I might add, that he was using to threaten Michelle. It was an accident, brought on by his own outrageous behavior.”

  The man next to Blake turned and glared at us. “I see you three have your story all worked out. This is precisely what I’m talking about. These people don’t operate within the law.”

  “That’s rich,” Michelle mumbled.

  Becky P pursed her lips. “This is a conundrum. Miss Whitmore claims that Miss Haskel and her fellow society members were inducting her into their organization when the incident occurred. Mr. Varnham says that he was the inductee—”

  “Of course he was the inductee,” sputtered the man at his side. “Who is Rose & Grave more likely to tap? The straight-A student, the prep school graduate, the pillar of his residential college and his department of studies, the Eli legacy? Or some girl whose grades are so mediocre and whose mental state is so fragile that she had to drop out of school?”

  Michelle’s harsh little intake of breath was the only indication that the words stung.

  “Excuse me,” I said, cocking a thumb at the man next to Blake. “Who is this guy?”

  “This guy,” he hissed at me, “is Walter Varnham the Third.”

  “Blake’s father,” Michelle added, entirely unnecessarily.

  “Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it?” I said. Josh stifled a groan.

  “Miss Haskel, have you any idea the severity of this situation?” Becky P asked. “Your actions last night could have caused the death of an Eli student. Please do not be so flippant.”

  “I’m not being flippant, Dean Pasternak,” I said. “But I can guarantee you that we did not tap Blake Varnham. We find him hateful and unworthy of membership in Rose & Grave.”

  “They say that now,” said Mr. Varnham, “because they’re in trouble. These societies are a blight upon our Ivy League schools. Everyone knows how much research they do on their members. They dig up any dirt they can so they can keep them under their thumbs. No doubt they found out about Blake’s unfortunate situation with that girl and now they’re trying to use it in some bizarre, childish revenge scheme to sabotage my son’s future!”

  “I take it you weren’t tapped, Walter,” I said drily.

  Josh jumped in to save me from myself. “As you may already be gathering, Amy is a bit of a renegade, and her choice of tap—Michelle—reflects those tastes. I’d be happy to provide you with documentation and witnesses proving that we invited Michelle to join our organization and not Blake.”

  “Of course he would!” said Mr. Varnham. “All the members of Rose & Grave are going to tell you precisely the same thing so they can keep their asses covered.”

  “Documentation can also be obtained from any number of other societies on campus,” Josh added, “with whom we shared our tap lists.”

  “More collusion, no doubt,” Mr. Varnham said. “An increased amount of scrutiny would be a disaster to any of these organizations. They protect their own. Why don’t you look at real sources. Speak to Dean Ryan here. He can tell you about that girl’s history of trying to spread lies about my son.”

  Michelle looked like she’d had enough. “Would you kindly,” she said at last, “stop referring to me as that girl?”

  “Dean Ryan?” Becky P asked.

  The Strathmore College dean sitting next to Blake shrugged. “Since the moment Miss Whitmore has returned to campus, she has repeatedly approached me about some incident she claims happened last year. However, there are no records in the files of the previous Strathmore dean, she can provide no evidence or witnesses, and from what I know of Blake after working together with him so closely on the Strathmore College Council, I simply cannot give credence to any of these stories.”

  Michelle dropped her head against the back of the chair. “Ugh, what’s the point?”

  “That’s pretty appalling,” I said. “A student comes to you for help not once, but several times, and you rebuff her? Is it just you, or are all deans so incompetent?” I turned to Dean De La Roche. “What would you do if I kept coming back to you, over and over, saying that my ex-boyfriend was threatening me? Would I need to have actual bruises before you took action?”

  Dean De La Roche was silent.

  I gaped at both of them, then turned to the Dean of Student Affairs. “Good system you’ve got here, Becky.”

  “There are countless cases of lovers’ quarrels on this campus,” said Dean De La Roche. “Every semester, we get complaints about someone’s ex stalking them or threatening them or behaving erratically. You Eli students are intense and passionate, and sometimes this spills over from your studies into your personal lives. But yes, we take real threats very seriously.”

  “No you don’t,” said Michelle. “You cover your own asses just the same as you claim Rose & Grave is doing. You don’t want the scandal, so you pretend it isn’t happening.”

  “Shelly,” Blake said, speaking for the first time. His voice was hoarse, and thick with false innocence. “I don’t know why you don’t just drop it. We broke up. It was over a year ago. I got over it. I don’t know why you can’t do the same.”

  “Perhaps,” Michelle said, “it would help if you stopped breaking and entering places like my apartment or society tomb and trying to force me to give you blow jobs.”

  Even my mouth dropped open. Becky P looked ready to explode.

  Blake just shook his head at her, his eyes wide. “You really are a nutcase.” He turned to Becky P. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here. What if—” his expression turned to one of revelation “—what if they are telling the truth that they wanted to tap Michelle? What if I was some sort of initiation rite for her benefit? Destroy her enemy or something. Do societies do things like that?”

  We destroyed enemies, sure. But not with knives. And Blake knew it.

  “What if I only thought I was being initiated, and they were planning to hurt me all along?” He threw in a coughing fit for good measure. I wanted to deck him, stitches or no.
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  But Becky P’s face remained thoughtful. “I think we’ve brought this situation as far as we can with this preliminary meeting,” she said. “I’m going to need to see the documentation of the tap lists, and I’m going to need to speak privately to each of the society members, as well as Mr. Varnham and Miss Whitmore. I would also like to hear from Mr. Prescott, whenever he can be bothered to answer his phone.”

  “George Prescott broke an arm and a collarbone last night,” I said to the dean. “He’s on a lot of pain medication and it’s possible—”

  “I was stabbed in the back last night,” said Blake. “And I’m here, trying to make sure the truth is heard. All you people try to do is conceal it.”

  Also true. Hoisted by our own petards. How about that? Blake and Darren could laugh about this in hell.

  “Enough,” said Becky P. “This is more than we can resolve today. I am calling a meeting of the Executive Committee for a formal hearing.”

  “Dean Pasternak—” Josh began, beginning to look far more frightened than I’d ever seen him.

  “This is an unusual case. Final exams are almost upon us, almost every student involved is on the cusp of graduation—”

  Oh my God. She couldn’t be considering expelling us. Suspending us? We had to take our finals. We had to graduate! I had to be able to turn in my thesis!

  “But pass this along to your cronies, Mr. Silver and Miss Haskel. Until this matter is resolved, every person in Rose & Grave is on probation.”

  The fun thing about being on probation is—No, wait. There’s no fun thing. The week passed in agony and anticipation. I completed and turned in a thesis I wasn’t sure would be graded, I attended classes I might not receive credit for, I studied for exams I didn’t know if I’d be able to take, and I booked a flight to England for a colloquium whose invitation might be rescinded any moment.

  Oh, and I talked to lawyers. Lots of them. Who knew that so many Diggers went on to pass the bar? All the law-and-order folks were incredibly optimistic. Blake’s story stood not a ghost of a chance; there were too many witnesses that claimed the exact opposite—so what if they were all members of the same secret society? So what if the societies that may have had access to our shared tap lists were part of the same corrupt culture? So what if there wasn’t any evidence at all that Michelle had been subject to a history of abuse at Blake’s hands? The truth would rule the day.

  I sure hoped so. My parents already had their flights and their hotel room for Commencement Weekend. How could I call them up and tell them that I might get expelled, weeks before graduation, for hazing someone as part of an initiation ceremony for a secret society they didn’t even know I was in?

  The administration had temporarily closed the tomb on High Street, “pending investigation.” Since we couldn’t get inside, we were forced to suspend the rest of the initiation, as no one really wanted to induct new members into our order in Clarissa’s apartment. Nikolos suggested we sneak in the back way, through the barrel-vaulted basement room that emptied out into the Eli Sculpture Garden, but we voted against the measure, since being discovered breaking into our tomb after the administration had forbidden it would hardly help our precarious positions.

  Naturally, our closed tomb was cause of much speculation on campus, in the media, and most of all, on the Internet (where such things usually popped up). What had happened to the beleaguered society of Rose & Grave now? What unspeakable line had we crossed during this year’s initiation? Was there something to all those rumors of sacrificing virgins? Had we killed someone?

  There was even a story about the tomb’s closure in the Eli Daily News—though we’d all been hoping that Topher could squash anything like that before it went to press.

  “On the contrary,” Topher had written in his brand-new phimalarico account, “keeping our name in the news at this juncture only further emphasizes the mystique surrounding our order. Besides, five inches on page 7 is nothing. It would have caused more attention if I’d killed it.”

  I had to admit it: My tap had a point. Maybe he wasn’t a complete screwup. Also, he’d been trying so hard to make up for his part in the fiasco.

  But the most interesting article in the paper that day was an op-ed on a most unexpected topic.

  ACKNOWLEDGING THE PROBLEM IS

  ADMINISTRATION’S FIRST STEP

  By Kalani Leto-Taube,

  Editor-in-Chief

  When a student comes to Eli, she and her parents are putting their faith in the university to keep her safe. Is there a dedicated campus police force? Are there emergency phones dotted about the campus? What is the school’s policy on drugs, weapons, violence, and hazing? What preventative measures have been taken by the university? Are there dedicated hate speech and tolerance workshops as well as rape, suicide, or general crisis hotlines? If the unthinkable happens, can a student turn to the university for help?

  It is in this capacity that the administration is failing the students of Eli. While the university celebrates decreased crime and improved campus safety initiatives, representatives at the Eli Women’s Center as well as the GLBT co-op are reporting increasing number of students who are falling through the cracks of these stopgaps. They may be getting advice on the crisis hotlines, but the university itself is turning a blind eye to situations that are occurring in their very buildings.

  According to the recent, mandatory annual reports from school special interest groups, there is a growing trend among university administrators to encourage students to take non-official measures to remedy their problems. While occasionally such strategies work to reduce rancor and resolve issues amiably, in other cases, all they do is keep the problem under wraps. After all, if you never file a report about the man beating you up, then the university can retain its plausible deniability when it comes to statistics on campus domestic abuse.

  Perhaps the university administrators believe that cooking the books will help avoid a scandal—no, we have no problems with racism, with violence against women, homosexuals, minorities. But what happens when an even bigger scandal comes along and it’s revealed that the university could have stopped it, yet chose instead to bury its head in the sand?

  Here’s another question, readers of the Daily. What were the chances that Kalani spontaneously chose to write about this issue, today of all days?

  In the absence of the usual tomb socializing, the new club had opted for a far more pedestrian format of getting-to-know-you: the group lunch. So it was in Commons that Demetria, Clarissa, and I found them, commandeering one of the large tables near the back, where they could chat freely without fear of being overheard.

  But when we arrived, they seemed to be discussing only barbarian matters: internships, classes, coming exams. Michelle was calmly explaining to Clarissa’s tap, Meredith Van Zandt, how the pork supply is actually comprised of psychopathic pigs driven crazy by awful farm conditions.

  “You’re eating the equivalent of a porcine Norman Bates,” she said. Meredith eyed her BLT warily.

  Beside her, Demetria’s tap, Tamar, laughed and took another spoonful of lentil soup.

  “Tamar,” Demetria said, and slid in at the end of the row. “How’s things down at the Women’s Center?”

  The junior shrugged and bowed her shaved head over her bowl. “The usual.”

  “Really?” Demetria asked. “Then what is this nonsense about mandatory annual reports?”

  “It’s the complete truth,” she said. “Every year we have to reapply for our student organization fund grant, and as part of the process, we have to explain what we do. Ergo, mandatory annual report.”

  “It’s not a grant study, Tamar,” said Demetria. “It’s a questionnaire.”

  “In which I specifically stated that we had been receiving reports of students urged by their deans not to press formal charges against other students harassing them or in cases of what I’ll charitably term ‘domestic disputes.’” She returned to her soup.

  “And when did you re
ceive these reports?” Demetria asked.

  Tamar consulted her watch. “Um … Friday?”

  “Initiation Night?” I said.

  “Huh.” Tamar pretended surprise. “How odd.”

  Michelle giggled. At the other end of the table, Topher watched the exchange and said nothing.

  “Reports, the article said,” I pointed out. “Plural.”

  Meredith raised her hand. “When I told my dean about the scary, desperate e-mails I was getting from Andrew, she said that he just regretted the way he treated me, sleeping with my best friend and all, and wanted a chance to reconcile. She said he’d give up eventually if I just ignored him.”

  “But that is what he wanted,” Clarissa said. “And he did give up.”

  Meredith smiled. “Yes, but the outcome isn’t important. The point is, the dean told me to ignore it.”

  “It counts,” said Tamar.

  Topher was still watching us from his end of the table.

  “Hey,” I called. “Managing editor. Get over here.” As he dutifully trotted over, I considered the fact that he would have had to review Kalani’s article. Perhaps he’d even suggested it. “What do you know about this?”

  “I know it’s an ongoing issue on the campus that deserves a little extra newsprint,” he replied simply. “Anything else?”

  Now every tap at the table was looking at us. The other two seniors and I exchanged glances.

  “You know, guys,” I began, “if you have any plans up your sleeve, it may behoove you to run it by us first.”

  “Why?” Michelle asked. “Aren’t you busy with exams and theses and maybe being expelled? Don’t you have enough on your plate?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “That was the excuse you used for not turning in your problem set this week, isn’t it?” she went on.