Tap & Gown (22 page)

And yet, I ran through the motions, and listened as Lucky ran through hers, repeating for the assembled club the same facts and figures she’d informed me of two days ago, with this addition: “Also, I’ve reviewed the appointment calendar of the Strathmore College dean for the last two years. Michelle Whitmore had over a dozen appointments at the end of her first junior semester and the start of her second, aborted, junior semester.”

“That’s in keeping with the fact that she dropped out, isn’t it?” asked Lil’ Demon.

“Yes,” said Lucky. “But what’s curious is that the dean had a habit of making notes in her calendar program from most of her meetings. ‘Granted student extension of term paper for History 320.’

‘Discussed counseling to deal with student’s growing substance abuse problem.’ ‘Provided excused absences for student’s extended medical leave.’ ‘Joint meeting with student and school provost to go over ramifications of disciplinary hearing due to assault of T.A.’ Stuff like that.”

“What was Michelle meeting her for?” I asked.

“That’s the thing,” said Lucky. “It didn’t say. There are no notes from any of Michelle’s meetings.

Whatever they discussed, the dean did not want a written record of it.”

1*Or, the confessor feels the need to add, if they were a legacy, the child of the head of the CIA and/or President, and a sure shot for future President themselves.

2*The confessor admits to a strategic omission of the role Darren Gehry may or may not have played in the fiasco. She may be all for openness, but not when it comes to certain cans of worms.

The classroom had been converted into a cave. The windows were covered with blackout curtains, the tables and chairs were shrouded in dark sheets. Before each of our places lay a clipboard with paper for notes and a small booklight to illuminate the pages but not our faces. The knights sat scattered about the room in no discernable order or pattern, a method that was supposed to confuse and disorient the interviewee as well as assist in keeping our identities secret. It was a lot harder to figure out who we were when you couldn’t pin down our positions in the black-hole space. We each wore black turtlenecks.

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From the chair at the front of the room, you couldn’t see more than our jawlines.

Mine has never been my best feature.

I remembered this room. I remembered these black drapes, these booklights. A year ago, I’d been the one in the hot seat while the members of Rose & Grave interrogated me about my grades, my ambitions, and my kindergarten teachers. I’d gotten offended, flipped them off as a group, and stormed out.

They’d tapped me anyway. Possibly, I now realized, because my show of sass had at least broken up the monotony of the process. We were ten interviews in, and not a single potential tap had told us anything we didn’t already know. A bad grade freshman year? Explained away by a breakup, a death in the family, a bout of mono, or the fact that when they signed up for the class, they hadn’t realized how it was way over their heads.

And that was when they weren’t indulging us in a round of interview-speak. Their greatest flaws were always “perfectionism,” their failures were all minor snafus they transformed into great life lessons about learning to take charge and be leaders when other people didn’t cut the mustard. This was the first time I’d heard this pap from the other side of the table, and it made me wonder how any of us—trained as we were in these same turn-your-negatives-into-positives interview techniques—had gotten jobs. Did we all sound so disingenuous and bigheaded? Employers couldn’t possibly buy our brand of bullshit any more than I believed these potential taps when they told me that the four words that best described them were

“leadership,” “loyalty,” “intelligence,” and “trustworthiness.”

Especially when one of the potentials was Topher Cox.

L
OWLIGHTS FROM THE
R
OSE &
G
RAVE

I
NTERVIEW OF
T
OPHER
C
OX

1)
“My hero? I guess that would be my grandfather, Lionel Drake. He’s such a great guy. Always been so supportive of me and my family. Anyone he thinks of as part of his team, really.” (Hint frickin’ hint.)
2)
“I’ve pretty much had the same group of friends my whole life. We came up through prep school together, me and Sam and Blake and Alan. We’d do anything for one another—have done pretty much everything. Well, no gay shit.” (Quoth Kevin: “That’s a relief.”)
3)
“One of the things I think I bring to the table is a strong sense of the significance of financial solvency.

Now, nobody wants to admit it, but money? It’s important. And I’ve got it.” (Well, at least he had no illusions about why we were tapping him.)

All in all, he did pretty well. No new drawbacks were discovered, and his pros had begun to take prominence over his personality flaws in the eyes of the majority of the club.

“Sellouts,” Demetria had grumbled.

I didn’t disagree, but I also wasn’t protesting the choice. The patriarchs got Topher; I (hopefully) got Michelle. Others before me, like Jamie, had tapped according to the best needs of the society, and they didn’t even get the consolation prize of a bonus tap. The benefit an iconoclast like Michelle might bring to the group would end up being far more influential than Topher’s same old boys’ network attitude, or even his influx of cash. Sometimes, you needed to compromise. Right?

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“One day,” Demetria had said, when I pointed this out, “you’ll look back on how much you’ve compromised and you won’t even recognize yourself. That’s what Rose & Grave has taught me.”

We worried that she wasn’t presenting the most positive portrait of the society to her potential taps.

Michelle was our next subject. We’d found a free spot in her schedule and allowed for the extended time it would take for her to arrive at the interview from her off-campus apartment up near the science buildings. Kevin, who had the best voice modulation in the club, was in charge of making the phone calls.

In keeping with society tradition, all the potentials were given surprise invitations to an interview. They only had a few minutes to properly attire themselves and hoof it to our location. I crossed my fingers under the table as he dialed her number. With Michelle, everything was riding on the interview.

“Hello?” Michelle’s voice sounded tinny in the cell phone speaker.

“Michelle Anastasia Whitmore?” Kevin’s voice rumbled out like God from a burning bush.

“Um, yeah?”

“Your presence is required at 750 College Street, room 400, at three-fifteen in the afternoon.”

There was a short pause, one that we were all used to by now. Up next would come the inevitable
Who
is this?

Except that’s not what happened. Instead, Michelle gave a strange little laugh and said, “Yeah. Nice try, jerk.”

The line went dead. Kevin tried calling back three times. On the first and second attempt, the call went to voice mail. On the third, Michelle picked up again.

“Listen,” she hissed before Kevin had a chance to go into his routine. “Call me again and I’ll block this number like I blocked the last three, got it?”

The last three? The knights shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Was Michelle, like Kalani, being courted by another society? By Dragon’s Head, perhaps?

“This is not without precedent,” Josh said, in the odd, formal tone he’d adopted with me ever since I’d dropped the bombshell in our suite. “There have been, upon occasion, practical jokes played on students. People pretend to be calling about a society interview and the hapless junior shows up to find it’s all a scam. That must be what’s going on here. She thinks we’re joking.”

Demetria snorted. “This is why just telling them is better. No surprises.”

“So what do we do?” I asked.

“Traditionally,” said Clarissa, “that’s it. They had their opportunity. We call, they get their butts over here. If they don’t, they’re off the list.”

Yeah. I knew that. I just didn’t want to have it confirmed. All that time spent convincing the others to give Michelle a chance, to see what reason she had for bombing her classes and dropping out of school.

All my hopes that I could get a tap I’d be proud to call mine—all gone.

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“Okay, guys,” said Josh, checking the readout from the digital clock on the desk. “That’s it for the afternoon. We’ll reconvene tomorrow afternoon for the remainder of the interviews—barring any more unforeseen circumstances—and hopefully, that will be it. Then Tap Night this weekend. Let’s make sure to leave one by one. Don’t want anyone to see us.”

As everyone left their seats to chat, mill around, or run to the bathroom, I made sure my path to the door caused me to pass by Kevin’s desk. I glanced down at the paperwork as I strolled by. Michelle’s address. Michelle’s phone number.

In the sunlit hallway, I reflected on how fragile the veneer of society secrecy really was. For all the trouble we underwent to ensure that our identities were really unknown in that room, it required total cooperation on the part of the people we interviewed. They had to be willing to play along. How easy would it be for them to flip on the lights? How easy would it be to just sit here and wait for us in the hallway until we left the classroom?

Societies like mine remained “secret” not through our efforts, but because everyone on campus accepted the eccentricity and indulged us. They spread the stories of awesome power and unlimited influence, and kept their eyes politely averted when we shuffled into the tomb on Thursday and Sunday evenings, a bunch of ordinary students with overdue term papers, tangled love lives, and buttloads of student loans.

Eli students bought into the legends without question—I’d done it myself—though our curriculum taught us to question everything else. Societies were a campus tradition, as much as intramural sports or singing groups, Saturday nights spent drinking from silver trophy cups at Tory’s or Sunday afternoons in the stadium singing silly songs that made fun of Harvard. Even the campus satire newspapers and tabloids who claimed to want to “expose” us were only adding to the sense of mystique. The existence of the societies as a unique part of the Eli experience was indoctrinated into every student from freshman year, and by the time they were juniors, many of them wanted to take part or at least get a glimpse into our rarified world.

In a way, the society was a natural next step. All those competitive, ambitious high school students, pressing their face up to the college admissions glass and wondering what went on at these “reach schools,” what was so different about Eli or Princeton that it was worth the huge price tag, what made it so special compared to Home State U.? Those same students, the ones who made it, were now looking at the giant, imposing tombs on campus and wondering the exact same things. What was so special about a society, and were they special enough to gain admittance?

Back home in Ohio, people thought it was a big deal that I was at Eli. Dropping the “E-bomb” into conversations became a dicey prospect. There were so many folks who assumed that I was a stuck-up snob whenever they heard I went to an Ivy League school, as if my ambition and achievements were somehow designed to insult theirs, as if my matriculation to an elite school made me an elitist.

Perhaps that was the real reason societies had gone underground and classified their membership roster.

Not because it enhanced our own experience within the society, but because it protected us from prejudice outside of it.

I’d joked with Jamie that my mother wouldn’t be a fan of Rose & Grave. Maybe there were enough people like her for whom the ill will would actually act as a liability.

Maybe that’s how Michelle felt.

The other knights were surely gone by now. I pulled out my cell phone and dialed the number I’d
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swiped from Kevin.

“Hello?” Michelle said, sounding more suspicious than ever.

“Michelle, it’s Amy Haskel,” I said in as bright a tone as I could muster.

“Oh, hi, Amy,” she said. “I was a little worried after last weekend—wait, how did you get this number?”

“Um …” Stole it from Jenny’s research. She, in turn, had hacked it from the Registrar’s Office. “I looked it up in the Student Directory?”

“I’m unlisted.” The suspicion was back, full force. “Where did you find it?”

“To be honest, I can’t remember,” I lied. “I wrote it down this morning and I’ve only just had the chance to contact you. Anyway—”

“I really need to know,” she interrupted. “Can you do me a huge favor? When you get home tonight, look in your browser history to see where you got it. I’m supposed to be unlisted and I’ve been getting these strange calls—”

“Yeah?” I said. “About those—”

“Look, Amy, I’ve got to go deal with this. Please let me know what you find out, okay?”

I pressed on. “I need to talk to you about—”

“I know. And I promise we will. Lunch after class tomorrow? Great. Gotta run.”

And then she hung up. Again.

There’s nothing better for curing frustration than finding a new source, so I went home to incorporate my advisor’s most recent set of notes into my thesis. Miraculously Professor Burak had actually seemed impressed by my draft. At least, that was my opinion judging from the tone of his rather intense notes.