Brandon’s shoulders dropped. “I’ll wait,” he said resolutely.
I rushed out of the suite and into the floor bathroom, trying not to hyperventilate. A quick trip into the stall (you do remember the four and a half 312s, right?) and then I checked out my reflection in the mirror above the sink. My mouth was stained a deep purple; it looked like I’d been sucking on pickled beets. My lips were swollen, too, and my cheeks were flushed, still (or maybe again). How could Brandon have missed these signs? I balanced my hands on the porcelain and took several deep, shuddering breaths, until my treacherous heart slowed down to normal measures.
He said he loved me.
I splashed cold water on my face and ran a comb through my hair. I brushed my teeth, concentrating on my stained red gums and scrubbing the hell out of my tongue. Thinking back on it, I should have been a little more self-aware about my actions.
I was getting rid of George.
For Brandon’s benefit.
Because Brandon had cared about me for months. Because it had been Brandon who’d sent me funny e-mails, and cards on my birthday, Brandon who had held me the last time I’d cried, Brandon who’d always been there to offer advice, who’d been the one to convince me, however obliquely, to join Rose & Grave in the first place. George was a Johnny-come-lately. I did love Brandon. Maybe not yet in a way that Shakespeare would have endorsed, but definitely in a way that probably had its own special name in ancient Greek. Phileventuallyoksis or something.
After all, that Roxanne chick went for Cyrano once he finally approached her himself, right? (Or was that just in the Steve Martin version? My literary education is notoriously deficient in Balzac—if it even was Balzac.[4] It’s because the Balzac and Dickens seminar was full last semester, further proving my theory that students will study anything if it has a cool enough title.) Try someone else. Jane Austen. Marianne Dashwood and—well, Colonel Brandon. Now, if that’s not a hint, I don’t know what is.
I rushed back into my suite, hoping Brandon hadn’t misinterpreted my prolonged absence. While I’d been gone, he’d managed to stuff the entire bouquet of roses into a crackled-finish plastic dining-hall glass and had wedged the whole top-heavy shebang between two of Lydia’s thick poli-sci textbooks. Now he was back on the couch, fingering the strap on my messenger bag. I froze.
“Nice pin.”
“Brandon—”
He stood, his hand out as if to stop me. “Don’t leave the room. I’ll never mention it again. Tabled forever, if that’s what will make you happy.”
But the thing was, I actually wanted him to ask me about it. I wanted to tell him what was going on, and see if he could parse it any better than the rest of us had. Brandon fixed things. He’d always fixed things for me.
Who wouldn’t love a guy like him?
“Should I go?” he asked.
“No.”
He blinked, as if surprised. “Really?”
I nodded. “I can’t—I can’t say what you want me to. I won’t say that…yet. But I want to be with you. For real.”
It was as if Brandon had been strapped to a frame that collapsed at my words. He took two steps forward and enfolded me in his arms. His brown eyes had never seemed so bright, his Amy-smile, the one I knew he reserved just for me, had never seemed so unreserved.
I ran my hands through his hair and cupped his face in my hands. His skin was golden beneath my fingertips. He’d gotten a tan this weekend. Probably out somewhere, playing badminton while I fooled around with boys in black robes. Boys who, as it turned out, never wanted me around in the first place.
Whereas Brandon always had.
I kissed him, and his mouth felt warm and familiar against mine. His breath was not tinged with pomegranate and honey, and our bodies lined up perfectly with no need for me to tilt my chin to meet him. Yet, I sighed, and he smiled, and I took his hand and led him into my bedroom, thankful to whatever it was that had made me hesitate outside with George, and only mildly curious whether a girl who would hook up with two boys in the same night was a totally irredeemable slut or just a person who had managed to come to her senses before she completely screwed up her life.
In retrospect, I probably should have pondered this last part a bit more.
***
I woke up super-early on Monday morning (okay, more like 9 A.M. — but I am a college student) to the phone ringing. As I have already mentioned, my mother has a freaky sixth sense of when her daughter has engaged in illicit sexual activity, even from five states away. She was probably calling to see if she could discern any post-coital qualities to my voice, or perhaps detect the rustlings of a boy in the background, shimmying into his boxer briefs.
I stumbled over a cascade of paper airplanes (don’t ask, really) and, hopping into a robe, ran out the door to answer the phone.
“Hello?” Hello, Mom. No, of course you didn’t wake me. Don’t you know? I often engage in Monday morning orgies. In fact, as you called, I was just enjoying an especially thorough rogering from two men named Paolo and Butch. (That would throw her for a loop.)
“Amy?” The voice at the other end of the line was not maternal, yet it did sound worried. “It’s Malcolm.”
“Oh.” Couch. Plop. “Call to apologize?”
Silence. “Right. Yesterday. No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t, because I, for one, do not agree with—well, I can’t really talk about that right now.”
“Figures.” I wondered when Brandon’s first class was.
“That’s actually not why I’m calling. I need to see you, ASAP. Do you have any classes this morning?”
“Don’t you already know that, with your awesome Digger mind tricks? Oh, wait, I forgot, there are no mind tricks. No special powers, no secret shadow government, no ‘we’ll cut out your tongue if you talk’—it’s all a big smoke screen designed to make your dicks look bigg—”
“Amy, I need to see you right away. It’s important. Barbarian matters.”
Barbarian? I stole another look into my bedroom, where Brandon, still dead to the world (lucky guy), was making my lumpy duvet look even lumpier. Did Malcolm know about that? And how? Maybe it wasn’t all a trick. I looked around the room. Nah. That whole bugging thing was just another one of the conspiracy theories.
And yet…“What is it?” I asked.
“Not on the phone.” Oh, right, and I’m not supposed to buy into the bugging thing when he says stuff like that? “Can you meet me in half an hour?” He named a campus coffee shop.
“Well, I kind of have some work—” Like a kilo of WAP.
“It’s an emergency.”
I grunted. “Fine. You’re buying the mochas.”
Having agreed to the rendezvous, I rushed off to the shower for a quick eradication of last night and then back to my room to dry off and dress in a manner that wouldn’t disturb my—my boyfriend. The pristine term fairly crackled in my head.
I ran a comb through freshly shampooed hair and glanced over at Brandon, who lay twisted in my sheets. Blue morning light from the small window above my bed cast a pale glow over his golden skin, and his hair stood up in all directions. Even in sleep, he was smiling.
I twisted my hair into an impromptu updo, leaned over the bed, and deposited a light kiss on his cheek. “I’ll be back soon,” I whispered to his sleeping form.
First, I had to get some things straight with Malcolm.
***
A very weary Malcolm looked as if he’d been waiting at the coffee shop for a while, but the paper cup of mocha he slid at me the second I arrived was still scorching hot. I softened slightly. He still owed me an explanation for what had gone down at the meeting yesterday, but at least he was picking up the tab.
“Right on time,” he said. “Promptness is much admired by Diggers.”
“So I was told at my interview.” I slugged back a draught of the coffee. “But let’s get a couple things straight here, Lancelot.” He flinched at the name, but I ignored him. “The ladies of D177 are not going
to roll over to some outdated Neanderthal ideas of a ‘woman’s role.’ So if that was your plan, you can drop it right now.”
“That was never my plan,” Malcolm stated. “Though I apparently can’t speak for all my brothers.”
Frickin’ Poe.
“In fact,” he went on, “I want to apologize for the way the meeting went yesterday. If it’s any consolation, most of the seniors went and found the taps at the bar last night. We heard about the New York scheme and we’re willing to do whatever it takes to help.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it.” After all, when the girls had stormed out yesterday, Malcolm hadn’t moved a muscle. And I wanted to know why.
“You would have seen it last night. But I think you’d already left.” He tilted his head and looked at me curiously. “With…George?”
Oh, yeah. That reminded me. “And another thing, I will date whoever I want to, and sleep with them, too, and there’s not a thing you society people can say about it.”
Malcolm stared at me with his mouth open. “Excuse me?”
“Come on, Malcolm. ‘Barbarian matters’? Please.”
He laughed out loud then, the creases between his eyes momentarily fading. “Yes, Amy, you can sleep with whomever you want. But that’s not why I called you this morning. I don’t care what you and George do, and none of the other Diggers do, either.”
“I did not sleep with George!” I cried, indignant. No, I turned him down, and really, how many women can say that? “I slept with…someone else.”
Malcolm blinked. “Um, okaaaay. Whatever. I don’t have time for a rundown of your obviously very busy social life.”
Hey! It wasn’t all that busy!
“And honestly, I don’t really care. Save it for your C.B.”
Those Connubial Bliss reports he’d told me about after the initiation, where we spill the history of our sex lives. “Right. As if we’re ever going to see the inside of that tomb again.”
“I think you will. The taps I talked to last night seemed pretty determined.” He shook his head. “But I digress. Amy, I need your help. It’s an emergency.”
“The ‘barbarian matters’ of which you spoke?”
“Exactly.” He took a deep breath. “Remember that girl you saw on the stairs yesterday?”
“The one from the EDN? Genevieve Grady? Yeah.” After all, we both ran in the same English Lit circles. I think I even had a lecture or two with her freshman year.
“Well, she’s my ex-girlfriend.”
Does not compute. Though it explained her hostility. “How long ago was this?”
“Would it surprise you if I said six weeks?”
“Recalling our conversation in your bed not two days ago, yes.”
He took a sip of his drink, as if for fortification. “Are you familiar with the term ‘beard’?”
I furrowed my brow. “Not the facial hair?”
“No. The fake lover.”
“Not really.” But then it hit me. “So you were dating Genevieve in order to throw off—”
“My dad, other suspicious individuals, anyone who might rat me out.” He toyed with the corrugated cardboard ring on his cup. “Anyway, Genevieve didn’t really get it, though after a while, she kind of figured out the score when I didn’t…” He gestured weakly. “The problem is, she sort of fell for me. I liked her a lot, she was a really great girl. But not like that. I couldn’t give her what she wanted.”
But he hadn’t bothered to tell her beforehand! Even I hadn’t been that cruel to Brandon. At least he’d known where I stood all these months. “And she resents that? Gotta tell you, buddy, so far I’m on her side.”
“Just wait.” He looked down at the table, as if bracing himself for the next part of his story. “When we broke up, it was…really bad. I wanted to stay friends. I wanted it to be what it has always been, but she was…vicious. She said the most awful things to me, and we didn’t speak for weeks. You have to understand, I had thought very highly of her. But not after the way she treated me when we broke up.”
My sympathy meter hovered in the negatives. “Well, yeah, but she was the victim here. You made it out as if you wanted to be her boyfriend, but you were just using her.”
“I’m not saying it wasn’t wrong,” Malcolm replied. “I know I shouldn’t have done it. At least, not without her understanding what was really going on.”
“Did you tell her that?”
Malcolm shrugged. “Do you think it made her feel better?”
He had me there. If she had truly been in love with him, hearing that he’d thought she’d be cool with using her wouldn’t have mollified her in the slightest. But what was the point? “So what does this have to do with me?”
He took a deep breath. “Actually, Amy, it has everything to do with you.”
“You lost me,” I said, shaking my head.
“I really cared about Genevieve. She was so smart, so talented, so accomplished. The editor of the Eli Daily News. Pretty. Well connected, going places. She’d be the type of girl my father would be proud to see me dating.”
I circled my hand in the air. “Yeah? And?”
“A model woman.” He looked at me meaningfully.
Where had I heard that phrase recently? Someone had said it to me, like a command, almost. Like an expectation to live up to…
Oh. My. God. He was not telling me this. I might not be the genius that Jennifer Santos or Joshua Silver was, but this Digger tap was not a complete fool. And she’d just figured out the score.
Malcolm, like a runaway train speeding toward a cliff, went on. “But after we broke up, she was so wretched and mean-spirited, I just couldn’t bring myself to—”
“Tap her.”
He let out the breath. “Yeah.”
“So,” I said, pushing forward to the excruciating finish, “you tapped me instead.”
“Yeah.”
I spilled my mocha right then. The hot liquid splattered all over the table, soaking our napkins, drowning his weird combo bagel, staining the sleeve of his stylish denim jacket, and making a glorious little puddle in my lap.
“Fuck.” Malcolm grabbed a handful of napkins and started tossing them around to mop up the worst of the spill. I took another handful to dab at my lap.
“Amy, are you all right?”
When I looked up, it was through a veil of hot tears.
“Oh, I’m fine,” I hissed at him. “Everything makes sense now.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve been asking myself why the hell Rose & Grave would ever be interested in a person like me. Now I know. They weren’t.”
“That’s not completely accurate, Amy.”
And now he was channeling Poe! “I know what I’m talking about! At least in this, I know I do. I was sitting there, wondering why all the other taps seemed to already understand so much about the Diggers and know each other so well. It’s not like Clarissa and Demetria run in the same social circles. You had a grooming period, didn’t you?” Poe had even said as much to me yesterday, but it had been tough to hang on to every detail in his sexist diatribe. “They all knew, unlike me, exactly who was coming for them on Tap Night.”
He nodded, still not looking at me.
“That’s why Clarissa was so surprised to see me with that letter in the library! That’s why they all rushed me in the Grand Library after I was initiated.”
Again, a pitiful little nod.
“See?” I tapped my temple with my free hand. “Not so clueless as I seem! And you—I thought you were my champion! You stood up for me back at the interview, you watched over me during the initiation. You were just trying to ensure that I made the cut.”
“Well, yeah, but that’s a standard thing for big sibs to do.”
“But it was more important for me than for the others. I was a last-minute substitute. All those other taps were known quantities. You had to make sure I worked out.”
“Amy, that doesn’t really matter now.”
>
“Clearly, it does. Because I can tell that I’m different from the others. And they can tell, too. The rest of the taps look at me and ask themselves what I’m doing here. I know they do.”
“I think you’re being paranoid.”
I gave him a look. Get in line. The other Digger taps looked at me as if I were about to fit us all for aluminum sombreros.
He quickly backtracked. “Okay, if they were acting weird at first, it’s just because they were expecting Genevieve. But you were the one who, as you said yesterday, got tapped, got initiated. You’re the member now. You’re their fellow.”
I twirled my finger in the air. “Whoopee. A year spent knowing I’m not really good enough to be there. At least it explains the real reason behind the society name you picked out for me. Bugaboo. Pretentious-speak for pain in the ass. Is that what your expectation was? That I’d constantly be trailing behind the others?”
“Good job with the dictionary.” He rolled his eyes. (Excuse me? Now he doesn’t even have faith in my standing vocabulary. I don’t look everything up.)
“You didn’t want me.”
“Now, that’s not true. You may not have been my original choice—note that I’m not saying first—but we wouldn’t have tapped you at all if we didn’t think you belonged. We only have fifteen slots.”
I was…wait-listed. At Rose & Grave. I’ve never been wait-listed. I even got into Eli through Early Decision. Amy Haskel is not wait-list material.
“Now, where have I heard you say that before?” I asked facetiously. “Oh, that’s right, when you were talking about how much everyone wanted women in the group. Well, we disproved that little theory yesterday, didn’t we? How many of your brothers will I have to survey before I get to the truth about this one?” Probably only one: Poe.
“Enough!” Malcolm banged his hands down on the sticky, mochafied table. “You know, this is exactly why we burn the records of our delibs. People’s feelings get hurt. I want you, and they want you, and what happened before doesn’t matter. You’re in; she’s not. I never would have told you at all if I’d known you’d take it so poorly.”
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