Tap & Gown (35 page)

Blake opened his mouth and coughed up blood. I bit my lip.

As Michelle joined Topher by Blake’s side, Topher said, “Shelly, what did you do?”

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“Nothing!” she cried. “He threatened me. Like
always.”

There was a knock on the door. A knock. On the door of the Rose & Grave tomb. “Police,” came the voice from the other side. For a moment, everyone froze.

Demetria strode toward the tomb doors and flung them wide.

Four hours later, I sat with a rather loopy George in his hospital room. He’d broken his collarbone and his arm in two places, and a bruise the size and shape of a Labrador retriever was blooming over the right half of his body. I was also plotting to kill whoever saw fit to give him painkillers.

“The doctor says I won’t be able to walk tomorrow,” he said, a dreamy smile crossing his features.

“You know what that means, don’t you, Amy?”

I sighed. “Sponge baths?”

“Sponge baths!” He pumped his uninjured arm in the air. “Ow.”

The joke was funnier the first two times. “I do not envy Devon.”

“Devon.” George furrowed his brow. “I should probably call and tell her what happened to me, huh?”

“Why?” I picked up his cup of half-melted ice chips and took a sip.

“She’s my girlfriend.”

I dropped the cup. “Your
what?”

George’s mouth snapped shut. “Oh, fuck.”

“George,” I said. “Did you just use the G-word?
And
the F-word?”

He remained mute.

“George—”

“Don’t, Amy. Please, I can’t take this from you.”

“Take what?” I asked. “The ridicule I’m going to heap on you once you come down off whatever crazy-ass drugs they’ve got you on?” I laughed. “That must be some really excellent shit, George Harrison Prescott. Girlfriend. Ha!”

He didn’t respond.

I blinked in disbelief. “You’re serious. You’re with her.”

He nodded.

“Why?” I blurted.

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He thought about this for a minute. “Why are you with Jamie?”

Past tense
, I almost said. “But you don’t believe in relationships.”

“Please, Amy. Don’t start in with any ‘why wasn’t it me’ stuff.” George laid his head back against the pillow. “I can’t take that tonight.”

“‘Why wasn’t it me?’” I repeated, baffled. “Did you forget the part where I ditched you last fall?”

He seemed to think about that for a moment. Those drugs must have him foggy after all. “Besides,” he said at last, “it’s so early. I have no idea where it’s going.”

“Welcome to a committed relationship,” I said.

“And when I graduate …” He tried to shrug, then grimaced in pain. “Did I tell you?”

“That you’re going to graduate? I figured.”

“No, did I tell you what I’m doing?” he slurred.

I shook my head and tucked in the edge of his blanket. “No.”

“Teach for America.”

I blinked at him. He was high as a kite. First a girlfriend, then bailing on Wall Street to be a teacher?

Yeah, we’d laugh about this tomorrow.

“My mom will be … proud,” he murmured.

Hmm. Maybe he was serious.

“Amy?” George asked. His eyes were drifting closed.

“Yeah?”

“Don’t tell anyone.” His mouth went slack.

I smiled in spite of myself. “Don’t worry, George,” I said, and brushed the hair off his brow. “Your reputation’s safe with me.”

As George fell asleep, I stifled a yawn, then caught sight of my blood-spattered sleeve and frowned.

What a mess. Back at the tomb, the authorities had rushed the profusely bleeding Blake into an ambulance and left the rest of us standing in puddles of blood, answering questions for almost an hour while the pain in George’s arm grew progressively worse. Finally, the police let Jenny take him to the hospital.

Michelle had spent the whole time huddled in a corner, her hands clasped before her, eyes as wide as if Blake’s body remained on the hall floor.

I knew exactly how she felt. I’d knelt in front of her then. “What happened?”

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She’d squeezed her eyes shut. “I thought—you told me the initiation would scare me. So when there was a guy who talked like Blake—who put me in a room and talked like Blake—I thought that was part of the game. You guys know so many other things about me. Why couldn’t you know this?”

I caught my breath. “What kind of sick bastards do you think we are? My God, Michelle—”

“He’s what scares me,” she said. “Being trapped in a room with him is my idea of hell, not flaming tombs or winged monsters. Blake.”

“How did you realize what was going on?” I asked softly.

She’d ducked her head even farther into her chest. “He, um, wanted me to do something.” Something sexual, from her tone. “And at first, I couldn’t tell—I thought maybe this was just supposed to scare me more.”

Sure, why not? Jamie had tried to scare me in a similar way.

“Then I realized that this guy—this society guy, I thought—was dead serious. You know the stories you hear about Rose & Grave … they make you think all kinds of horrible things are happening inside.” She looked up. “But then I thought about you and Jamie … I’ve only known you for a little while, but I trust you. I can’t imagine you being a part of anything sick like that. I started to get a very bad feeling. Not fun scared or even scared scared. Just—”

“I know.” There was a special brand of terror reserved for people who found themselves alone and in the power of someone who wished only to hurt them. I’d felt it on the island. Michelle had been feeling it at regular intervals ever since her friends and her dean had turned their backs on her.

“So I pulled off his hood. I had to know, for sure. And when I saw it was Blake, I tried to run. I thought—Amy, I thought he was there
on purpose
.” She started crying anew. I tried to put my arms around her, but whatever comfort existed in my hug did not seem to transfer to Michelle.

Demetria and Jenny waited for me in the hall outside George’s hospital room. “Blake’s out of surgery,”

Demetria reported to me. “The way he hit the knife—it didn’t go straight in, just sliced his back wide open. He had sixty-five stitches.”

I pressed my fist against my mouth. “I don’t understand. He was coughing up blood. I thought for sure—”

Demetria snorted. “Turns out he bit his lip pretty hard when he landed. That blood was from his mouth.”

“The main problem was the blood loss,” said Jenny. “But they gave him a transfusion, so he’s doing better now.”

“I’ve been at the police station with Michelle,” Demetria went on, “so she could file the battery charges.

Hale came with us: One of the lawyer patriarchs said we should try to get Blake on burglary, too. When George gets out tomorrow, he needs to speak to the Prescott dean and to the police. We should expect Blake to file charges against him.”

“But George was trying to save Michelle,” I said.

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Demetria shrugged. “And Blake ended up stabbed in the back. I’m not saying they’ll stick, but George should be prepared.”

Actually, we all should have been ready.

The hammer fell the following morning. The phone rang at 10A.M .—only five short hours from the moment I’d passed out in bed—calling me into the Prescott College dean’s office. When I arrived, the dean’s dour secretary gave me a once-over.

“Where’s George Prescott?” she asked.

“In—in the hospital,” I stuttered. “He had an accident last night.”

The secretary harrumphed, then picked up her phone to let the dean know I’d arrived.

Dean Oliver De La Roche beckoned to me from the door of his office. “Amy, come in.”

I entered, already formulating theories about what was happening:
1)
Having been informed of last night’s debacle, the dean required a standard debriefing.

2)
He wanted to know exactly what was going on with George’s arm.

3)
I’d won some kind of award.

“I’ll be quick about this,” Dean De La Roche said.

He was a young man, a junior professor in the Music department. He lived with his partner, a budding violinist, in the dean’s apartment in Prescott and was known mostly for the fact that he liked to serve sushi at finals parties. College deans, for the most part, were judged by the student body on the basis of how hard it was to worm “dean’s excuses”—extensions and excused absences—out of them. De La Roche was middle of the pack where dean’s excuses were concerned.

“There’s an emergency disciplinary hearing scheduled for noon at the office of the Dean of Student Affairs, and since I’m to be acting as your advocate, I need to know your side of the story before I go.”

“What?” I said, confused. “You mean George, right?”

“Yes, I’ll be advocating for both of you. You’re the only Prescott students involved.”

I held out my hand, palm up. “Wait, why do I need an advocate? I was only a witness to what happened.”

Dean De La Roche consulted his notes. “You appear here on the list of Rose & Grave members.”

“I—” I reflexively reached down to cover the pin in my belt loop.

“It’s okay, Amy. I have an official list right here.” He held it up. A photocopy, but our official society roster. “It says you’ve been a member since spring of last year and that your society code name is Bugaboo. Is that correct?”

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I can’t tell you that
. “Yes.”

“And you participated in the initiation ceremony at the Rose & Grave tomb on High Street last night?

You were inducting new members?”

I have to leave the room. I’m not allowed to talk about this
. “Yes.”

“And you are aware, I hope, that hazing is expressly prohibited in the Eli Undergraduate Regulations for General Conduct and Discipline?”

“Hazing?
” I spluttered. “We didn’t haze anyone! Everyone participating in the initiation knew exactly what they were doing …”

“According to the Connecticut hazing laws, implied or even explicit consent is not a defense against accusations of hazing, Amy.”

I had no idea what the Connecticut hazing laws were. I had no idea how to respond. I had no idea what part of the initiation could be considered hazing. Was it the part where we carried them around? The part where we made them drink the 312 out of the skull? The part where we shut them up in coffins? Oh, God. All of it. I bet it was all of it.

But
everyone
did this—everyone had, for years. The whole campus knew what society initiations were like. If the university had turned a blind eye for this long, what was making them persecute us now? Was it that they couldn’t ignore the existence of Initiation Night when the words appeared in a police report?

“I don’t understand,” I said. “I thought you called me in here to talk about what happened with George and Blake Varnham.”

“Precisely,” said the dean. “Amy, don’t you know? On top of the assault charges, Blake Varnham is prosecuting your entire society for hazing him during his Rose & Grave initiation.”

“Wait,” I repeated. “
His
initiation?”

“The hearing will determine whether or not the Eli Executive Committee must convene to have you all expelled.”