Shadow Guy #2 spoke up. “What are your ambitions, Ms. Haskel?”
I kinda wanted to write the Great American Novel. But not even Quill & Ink would find that a satisfactory answer. Not goal-oriented enough. Not feasible. There aren’t enough Nobel Prizes in Literature to go around. Plus, I wasn’t sure I had any Great American Ideas. So, once again, with the fallback plan. “To be a media magnate.” There, that should hold them.
“You’re lying.” Shadow-Who-Smiles was no longer showing me his pearly whites.
“What makes you say that?” I folded my hands in my lap. And why did they care? I’d have bet each and every one of these people had a frustrated novelist buried deep inside.
Shadow-Who-Smiles (though he wasn’t right now) picked up another piece of paper and began to read aloud. It was the first page of my unfinished novel—the one that no one but Lydia and I knew about. The one that existed only on my laptop’s hard drive, back in my room.
“Hey!” I shouted, and he stopped. “Where did you get that? Did you hack my computer or something?”
Everything got really quiet. I thought I could hear the atomic clock whirring away. Who were these people?
“We have everything you’ve ever done, Ms. Haskel,” Shadow Guy #2 said. He lifted a manila envelope from the table in front of him. “This is your FBI file.”
My mouth dropped open. I have an FBI file? Why would I have an FBI file? I’d never done a summer internship at the White House or the Pentagon. My dad is an accountant, not a politician. I didn’t need security clearance. And even if I did, how the heck did these people get their hands on it?
There was only one answer. They were playing me. I shook my head, leaned back in my chair, and laughed. “Right, my FBI file. The Federal Bureau of I-Don’t-Think-So. Look, I’m glad I’ve given you guys a good laugh, but since you aren’t the Men in Black, can we please get back to the interview now?”
There was a long pause, then all the lights on the tables blinked again. This time, most of them blinked once, except for the one in front of Shadow-Who-Smiles.
“I think,” said Shadow Guy #2, “that the interview is over.”
“No!” said Shadow-Who-Smiles.
“She’s not what we’re looking for.”
“I don’t agree.”
Hold the phone. I sat forward. “Guys, I’m not quite clear what’s going on here. Where’s Glenda?”
Shadow Guy #2 tilted his head until I got a glimpse of pale cheekbone. “Glenda?”
“Yeah, Glenda. Glenda Foster, the old Lit Mag editor? The girl who is sponsoring me for this society? The girl who is too taken with Russian literature to show up this afternoon?”
Again with the silence, though this one was punctuated with a few snickers. Finally, Shadow-Who-Smiles (and he was definitely doing it again!) spoke up. “Glenda Foster is not a member of this organization.”
Holy shitzu.
Who were these people?!?
Okay, to be fair, there was still one little corner in my mind that was shouting that Glenda had been lying to me all year, and that she wasn’t a member of Quill & Ink after all. But it was a pretty minuscule corner, the one where all of my most paranoid tendencies live. The rest of my head was busy spinning. I’d been taking this process rather lightly because, hey, it was Quill & Ink. Not a big deal, and I was a sure bet anyway.
But they obviously weren’t Quill & Ink. I was out of my depth, for one of the first times in my life. And I didn’t have a clue what I was supposed to do.
“I think we’re done here,” Shadow Guy #2 said.
“No, we’re not,” insisted Shadow-Who-Smiles.
Shadow Guy #2 turned around and I caught a glimpse of perfectly shaved neck. “She’s not what we want. We have to be serious about this.”
“I can be serious!” I leaned forward and smacked my hand down on Shadow Guy #2’s notes. I saw his mouth drop open. Oops. “Sorry,” I said, sitting back and folding my hands demurely. “I was a little—confused.”
“Clearly.”
“Can I ask who you people are?”
This time, they all laughed, before Shadow Guy #2 said, “No.”
“So you get a list of my middle-school study-hall proctors and I get squat?”
“That’s why we call it a secret society.” Shadow-Who-Smiles cleared his throat.
“Fair enough.”
Shadow-Who-Smiles flicked his light on and off a few times, and all the members began shuffling the papers on their desks. I wondered what the signal meant.
Okey-doke. I figured I’d humiliated myself enough for one afternoon. I rose from my seat. “Am I free to go?”
“One moment, Ms. Haskel.” Shadow-Who-Smiles put his hand out, and I was surprised that I could see it. Apparently, my eyes were adjusting to the dark. “Tell us. What do you have to offer this organization?”
I bit my tongue to keep from snapping back with, And what organization is that? Okay, so they weren’t Quill & Ink. Someone else was courting me, and I’d royally screwed up any chance I might have had to impress—whoever. The real question was, did I care? After all, this wasn’t my thing. Lydia was the one who wanted to get into a secret society—any prestigious secret society. I just wanted to be in Quill & Ink, so I could keep tabs on which literary agents were hiring assistants and whether or not Cosmopolitan needed interns.
And finally, the absurdity of the whole situation hit me. All the juniors who, like me, had spent an hour in a darkened classroom, answering vague questions about their ambitions and accomplishments for a bunch of shadowy strangers—they hadn’t the foggiest clue to whom they were spilling their guts. Lydia, for all her secretive, superior smugness, didn’t know if she was being courted by Dragon’s Head or punk’d by a bunch of rowdy frat boys. And neither did I.
What did I have to offer this mysterious, unidentified organization? Aside from the finger, which I lifted, to little effect in the darkness.
I straightened my skirt, stuck out my chin, and laughed. “You already know what I have to offer. Straight As in the major, except for that little snafu with Ethiopian Immigrant Narrative; the editorship of the Lit Magazine; participation and leadership in any number of other small campus publications; and thirty pages of a badly written novel. I don’t do drugs, I’ve never been arrested, and from what I hear, I’m not too shabby in bed. Not that any of you people will ever have the opportunity to discover that firsthand.” (Though, to be honest, I’d have no way of knowing, now would I?)
Then I turned on my heel and marched out. And as I exited into the hall, head held high, I thought I caught the flicker of a dozen tiny booklights.
2. Tap Night
The fun part about humiliating yourself in front of a cadre of shadowy figures is that you get to spend the next two days wondering if everyone you pass on campus saw you at your worst. I was in line at the dining hall last night and I swear I saw this trustafarian girl sniggering behind her bulgur-wheat pilaf. I spent the next two hours (WAP forgotten!) trying to figure out which secret society was most likely to tap vegan Environmental Science majors who wear designer dreadlocks and hundred-dollar hemp necklaces—well, other than joke organizations like Joint & Bong.
Cute name, huh? That’s how things go at Eli University. Everyone copies everyone else. Rose & Grave set the trend back in the 1800s, and now anyone with a yen to start a social club has followed their illustrious lead: Book & Key, Sword & Mace, Quill & Ink. There are a few holdouts among the major societies—Dragon’s Head, Serpent, St. Linus Hall—but nothing gives a proposed clandestine organization the Eli air like an ampersand. Lydia and I used to joke that they were in practice for joining law firms—they’re all Blank & Blank as well, right?
That was before Lydia lost her sense of humor when it came to all things secret society. Seriously. I tried to talk to her about my interview that night at dinner, and she responded like my mom whenever I brought up sex. Which is to say, not at all.
The conversation went like this:
Lydia: (fork paused halfway to her mouth) Are you supposed to talk about that?
Me: Why not? I haven’t taken any vows of silence. I don’t even know who they were. Why, did yours tell you not to talk about it?
Lydia:…
Me: They did? Did they tell you who they were?
Lydia:…
Me: They did! Wow, I must have screwed up worse than I thought.
Lydia: (glancing around furtively) Amy, I really, really don’t think we’re supposed to talk about this.
Me: I can talk about anything I want. They’re a bunch of strangers, and they were really rude to me, to boot.
Lydia: Amy! You’re going to ruin your chances.
Me: I don’t think I have any chances. And please. They didn’t bug the tables or anything.
Lydia: Rose & Grave would.
Me: Rose & Grave doesn’t tap women. Just future Presidents.
Lydia: (standing and lifting her tray) I’m not going to keep talking about this here.
Me: (following) Fine, let’s do it in the suite.
But Lydia didn’t go back to the suite. She went to the gym to swim laps, which, considering my long-standing aversion to deep water (my cousin threw me off a dock when I was a kid—don’t like to talk about it), was a downright slap in the face. And as if the Chlorine Defense wasn’t enough, whenever I saw her at all over the following two days, she rushed off before I had a chance to bring up the subject again.
Not that I was sitting around. With commencement just around the corner, I was super-busy with the literary magazine’s commencement issue. Since I wasn’t going to be tapped by Quill & Ink—or any other secret society—I couldn’t afford any more missteps. This was my penultimate issue, and it needed to kick ass.
So, to be blunt, the theme of “Ambition” was not going to cut it.
“Been there, done that,” I informed my second-in-command, managing editor Brandon Weare. “At Eli, Ambition is the new black.”
“What a lovely pull quote for your intro page,” Brandon said, putting the finishing touches on his fifth paper airplane.
“If we pick a good enough theme, I won’t need to jazz it up with taglines.”
“Ah, but then, what sort of Cosmo girl would you be? It seems to be all about the cutesy tagline there. It’s certainly not about actual content.” He launched the plane, and I watched it swoop and dive directly into the smudgy linoleum floor of the magazine office. A nose-heavy dart.
“You read Cosmo?”
“Female sex tips?” He toed the plane. “You betcha.”
Brandon was an expert in the art of “Aerogami,” and since we’d started working together in October, I learned that his chosen designs possessed a direct correlation with his opinion of the manuscript from which he drew his construction materials. Woe betide the writer whose submission merited a four-fold stinger…but if he sailed a square-nosed glider (Ken Blackburn’s Guinness World Record design, I’d learned) past my nose, I should drop everything and read the story.
I’m pretty sure this was not how things worked at Horton.
Not that Brandon would care. He was one of those true geniuses that dotted the campus population, the kind that could compose concertos on breaks from discovering the cure for cancer. His raison d’être was applied math, but he spared enough time to fit in his knack for writing appallingly good short stories, and to compete with me for magazine editorships (I’d only just barely beat him out for this one). No scrambling for internships or resume stuffers for Brandon. He just went around being quietly brilliant, unapologetically dorky, and universally well liked.
And he had a point about the theme’s potential. Ninety percent of the graduating class already had ambition oozing from their pores. The other ten had daddies that would pound it into them by the time they were thirty. The theme possessed a broad scope, as well as the possibility of incorporating some sort of existentialist statement about the futility of desire, the impossibility of purpose, all the stuff that made future Master’s-in-Creative-Writing-from-Iowa candidates hot.
(Iowa, if you didn’t know, is the place to go to graduate school to learn how to be a novelist. Don’t ask me why. Must be the chemicals in the corn.)
The problem was, I was having enough troubles with ambition myself. Sure, my resume and GPA were in order, but if my snafu of a society interview proved anything, it was that all that accomplishment needed to add up to a plan, or it didn’t count. Did I really want to spend the next month reading achingly bitter or brilliantly acerbic or sensationally snarky stories that would tell me to settle for a life of comfortable mediocrity or risk getting squashed into the pavement by the bigger rats in the race? Would that somehow prod me into picking an attainable yet still suitably lofty path, or would it simply convince me it wasn’t worth trying?
“Okay,” I said slowly, gauging his reaction, “but are we going to present said Ambition in a positive or negative light?”
Brandon, damn him, threw back his head and laughed. “Touched a nerve, Ames?”
Sometimes I suspected Genius-boy over there could read my mind. I shrugged, retrieved the airplane from where it had slid beneath my chair, and lobbed it back at him. “Fine. Ambition it is. It sounds like a Calvin Klein perfume, but let’s run with it.” I shuffled the papers on my desk, and started rearranging the thumbtacks in the side of the worn canvas cubicle according to rainbow color order.
He smoothed out the creases of the plane and studied me carefully. “What’s up with you tonight? You’re not in your usual take-over-the-world mode.” Brandon was cute, in a kind of sidekick-on-a-WB-show way. He was only an inch or two taller than me, and had plain brown hair that was overgrown into an unruly shag, light olive skin, and big, soulful puppy-dog eyes with just the slightest tilt at the corners to hint at his Asian-American (“twenty-five percent and counting!”) heritage.
Yeah, it was the eyes that got me, every time.
I shrugged again. “I don’t know. End of year stress. Seven hundred pages of War and Peace to read before exams.”
“Ah, The Russian Novel.” Brandon nodded in sympathy. “Two hundred and thirty-two cubic inches of sheer torture. I hear just lifting the class texts put some guy in traction.” He winked. “Don’t worry. In two weeks, you’ll be in Quill & Ink, and they’ve got to have an in with Lit exams. You’ll rock it.”
I bit my lip. “I’m…not getting tapped by Quill & Ink.”
“What?” He pointed at the EDITOR-IN-CHIEF sign on my desk, at me, at the writing on the door that read ELI LITERARY MAGAZINE, a look of mock incredulity on his face. “How is that possible?”
Finally, someone to talk to about this! Lydia was doing her best Tommy! impression and Glenda Foster was MIA (probably out interviewing the real Quill & Ink taps). “I don’t know! But I went to my interview, and it was all this crap about FBI files and my third-grade teacher and—other stuff—and then they told me they weren’t Quill….”
“Maybe they were lying?”
“Either way, they couldn’t stop talking about how I wasn’t right for them. They were being pretty mean, so I told them off, gave them the finger—not that they could see it, the way the room was all dark—and walked out.”
“Wow.” Brandon grinned, and those puppy-dog eyes of his began to take on a very particular gleam. One that I knew well, after working in such close quarters with him on the magazine since October. One that I’d been curiously susceptible to ever since he’d plied me with flowers and Godiva on February 14th. “I think,” he said, in a tone that betrayed how little of his interest truly lay in the subject of my society interview, “that we should continue this conversation over dinner. How about Thai? We’ve got half a dozen choices on Chapel Street alone.” New Haven is replete with houses of curry.
I gave him a hairy eyeball. Brandon never asked for dates, he sprung them on you like a bear trap. You see, Brandon Weare wanted me to be his girlfriend. Frie
nds-with-benefits wasn’t cutting it for him anymore (though there’d been no complaints while he was receiving those benefits, let me tell you!).
Oh, yeah. I’d slept with Brandon. Six times, to be precise. Maybe I should back it up a bit:
AMY HASKEL’S HIT LIST
1) Jacob Allbrecker. 12th Grade. Prom Night. I dated Jacob for four months my senior year in high school, and he broke up with me two weeks before prom because I wouldn’t go all the way. But since we’d already bought the tickets, and I’d made my hair appointment, we went to prom together anyway, where despite my earlier protests, I ended up losing my virginity in Colleen Morrison’s little sister’s bedroom at the after-party. Glamorous, huh? Jacob and I slept together twice more before graduation and then he started Duke in the summer session. I hooked up with him on Thanksgiving Break freshman year, but we didn’t get past second base because I was already in heavy lust with
2) Galen Twilo. Freshman Year. Reading Week, first semester. Omigod, this guy was gorgeous! And an artist, the kind that a scant two years later I’d laugh at for thinking he was deep with all his black sweaters and cigarettes and dog-eared copies of Naked Lunch (which isn’t half as sexy as it sounds). I spent all of Reading Week (the week without classes just before exams, when we’re supposed to study but really just party) in his bed, where I learned all kinds of nifty facts about the male anatomy and everything I needed to rock my Twentieth Century American Poetry final. When I came back after Winter Break, though, he pretended he didn’t know me.
3) Alan Albertson. Summer-Fall-Winter. Sophomore Year. We met at a summer job at the Eli University Press, and he was two years older than me. We spent the whole summer together avoiding beach trips and pool parties (I don’t swim, c.f. unfortunate dockside incident, and he burns like a crab in the sun). It was love. And then he got a Fulbright and went to London (where there aren’t any UV rays) and broke my heart, which put me on a dark path that led directly to
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